DEI = Didn't Earn It

Always on the lookout for high concepts, I was happy to stumble on the new version of DEI. In place of the diversity, equity and inclusion mantra, we now have the concept of Didn’t Earn It. DEI.

John Tierney has recounted the history of said concept in the City Journal. Not a minute too soon. The nation’s institutions have been inundated with diversity hires, diversity bureaucrats, students who cannot pass their courses and managers who cannot do their jobs.

The Supreme Court has thrown some serious shade on the concept, but it seems to have a life of its own. People who have credentials they did not earn and who are given jobs they cannot do are taking over-- incompetence uber alles.

Of course, it entails discrimination against certain groups, like white males.

Consider the case of Chris Smith, at Ally Financial, in Detroit. The story comes to us from the Daily Mail:

Smith, a former Marine and Army intelligence officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and has two decades of experience in security, applied for three roles in Ally's newly-created 'threat division' unit in 2023.

He was offered and accepted the lowest-paying role as a security analyst, on about $75,000 a year.

Ally hired Rachel Stuckey, a white woman who had worked for the previous four years at Walmart, as team manager.

Stuckey also had a year of experience in counterterrorism work in Israel.

Smith says Stuckey was hired 'because of her sex' so the bank could meet DEI targets.

Ally also hired a less-qualified black woman and a black man in senior analyst roles above Smith, despite his greater experience, it is claimed.

Once he started working in the Charlotte office in September 2023, Smith says he faced further discrimination.

He was not properly credited for his work, he says.

His teammates were sent on training courses, could work from home, and got parking spots near the office, but Smith did not.

He was also mistreated by Ally director Bruce Bellamy, who was 'fixated on DEI,' court papers claim.

As you might guess, Smith is suing. 

Tierney opens his essay, thusly:

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” It’s a textbook example of doublespeak, the term inspired by Orwell’s 1984 dystopia in which the Newspeak language enables citizens to engage in “doublethink”—simultaneously holding two contradictory beliefs. 

The words in DEI sound like admirable goals, but the officials mouthing them are working to do just the opposite, as Florida governor Ron DeSantis observed when he banned DEI initiatives at public universities. What DEI really stands for, DeSantis said, is “Discrimination, Exclusion and Indoctrination.”

The Desantis phrase is perhaps not high enough concept; it did not catch on. 

One that did is: Didn’t earn it:

That formulation hasn’t caught on, but another one has: “Didn’t Earn It.” It went viral this spring after Ian Miles Cheong, a conservative journalist, and Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, tweeted it to their 2 million followers on X. Adams, … tweeted another forecast: “Whoever came up with ‘Didn’t Earn It’ as the description of DEI might have saved the world. Normally, the clever alternative names people use to mock the other side’s policy are nothing but grin-worthy. This one could collapse the whole racist system. It’s that strong.”

Tierney explains  the fate of “Didn’t Earn It:”

Sure enough, “Didn’t Earn It” has become an Internet meme, a buzz phrase on social media, and a conservative talking point on cable television, radio, and podcasts. It appears in posts linking to Kamala Harris, the plagiarism accusations against DEI officers at Harvard and MIT, the 50 percent failure rate on tests of medical students at UCLA, and the sentencing of a DEI executive for stealing $5 million during her work at Facebook and Nike.

Dare we mention that the concept of earning what you have is a tenet of what we call the Protestant work ethic. When you work you earn what you have. It beats receiving charity. 

One might also add that nepotism, especially of the aristocratic variety, was one target of the work ethic:

There’s nothing racist about expecting people to earn what they get, which is why the phrase is so powerful. It appeals to Americans’ basic sense of fairness. The civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s succeeded because they demanded equal treatment for everyone. The idea of reverse discrimination was widely unpopular even among those who had just endured decades of Jim Crow: in a 1969 poll, most blacks were opposed to preferential treatment in hiring or college admissions. They realized it would unfairly stigmatize all blacks, including those who would have been hired or admitted purely on their merits. 

Of course, diversity quotas and other forms of preferential treatment makes it appear that anyone who belonged to a 

supposedly oppressed group did not earn their way, was not hired on the basis of merit.

In classical terms, it has been called a poisoned gift.

Of course, DEI has become an excuse for giving preference to women and minorities. As noted above, it is radically unfair to white male applicants:

DEI executives like to say that they’re defending women against  “systemic sexism,” but hundreds of studies in the past two decades have shown that female applicants for jobs in academia and other industries are now favored over similarly qualified males. However widespread racism and sexism were in the past, Americans have now experienced a half century of programs and policies promoting reverse discrimination. They’re sick of pretending that it’s not happening.

Today, the problem lies in the DEI bureaucracy that has metastasized throughout the academic and the business worlds:

DEI policies gave college presidents and corporate executives a chance to brag about their commitment to diversity and to appoint more minorities to jobs with impressive titles and salaries, but at great cost to everyone else. 

And yet, when students who had  been admitted to fulfill racial quotas are tested according to objective standards, they are far more likely to fail. 

The students admitted because of racial preferences were more likely to languish academically or drop out because they weren’t as well-prepared as their classmates.

And this fragments college campuses. Some groups are presumed to have been admitted by different standards and different criteria. They are assumed not to belong, even if they would have been admitted according to objective criteria: 

DEI executives deepened racial tensions in the workplace and on campus by creating segregated “affinity groups” and inventing grievances. Yale University never had a problem with racist Halloween costumes until its administrators’ issued a warning against this nonexistent problem. The warning prompted a needless furor that divided the campus and stained the university’s reputation—but it was a boon to the bureaucrats, who were rewarded by Yale’s cowering president with an additional $50 million to promote “diversity” and “inclusivity.”

Dare we say that DEI is not going to disappear over night. And, dare we add, that it is going to damage productivity and Balkanize the nation.

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