DEI Debate: Addressing Policy Misconceptions

In the past five years, the growing political focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has created a stark divide in America. On the Amherst campus, no opinion on DEI has caused as much uproar as Jeb Allen ’27’s recent article, where he argues, among other claims, that “DEI policies are largely performative measures of progress that also reinforce harmful stereotypes.” While I agree with some of his points, I feel that Allen seems to purposefully misrepresent DEI in order to compare it to an idealized form of meritocracy. Not only does Allen fail to justify why a strict meritocracy is at all valuable, his characterization of DEI, like most conservatives in the American zeitgeist, follows a long line of purposeful strawmanning of diversification policies in the name of an insincere belief in equality. Opposition to affirmative action, opposition to voting rights expansion, and President Donald Trump’s recent attacks on DEI have all followed a similar pattern. While I will be unable to address all of his points, I want to take the chance to respond to some of them. To clarify the definitions, according to 3rd Millennium Classrooms, DEI “is a term used to describe policies and programs designed to help individuals marginalized for some part of their identity, including age, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disability, religion, and culture.”

Allen makes the point that DEI is not enough to right the wrongs of America’s past. This is fair, since these policies are more responsive rather than proactive. After all, DEI fails to address the many issues facing Black youth, including the school-to-prison pipeline and political and economic disenfranchisement within the system of mass incarceration, as well as other issues facing minorities. But it is still better to install these policies than to completely abandon these issues, even if DEI isn’t a perfect solution. Although Allen argues that we should engage in systematic changes such as education reform and increasing the number of scholarships available to students from underfunded neighborhoods, enacting systemic changes without DEI policies would only worsen inequality because of how long systemic reforms take to go into effect.

Now, to Allen’s points on racial diversity within professional roles. He argues that the medical field should be the one field entirely based on merit, even though it’s among the fields most impacted by diversification policies. He gives statistics on white, Black, Hispanic, and Asian acceptance rates into medical school. However, it’s worth pointing out that Allen misrepresents these statistics. For instance, he states that Black applicants had a higher acceptance rate (81.2%) than white applications (30.6%) for MCAT scores of 27-29 with a GPA of 3.4-3.59. While this would create the illusion that there were more “unqualified” people being accepted into medical school, Allen fails to mention that there were more white people who applied (7,336 applicants) than Black people (372 applicants). Further, the acceptances for white people (2,244) far exceeded that of Black people (302).

This brings me to another point of Allen’s, where he writes: “I’m not sure how many Americans would truly rather have a doctor who looks like them.” In the case of doctors, it is not an either-or case of whether or not I want merit or diversity in saving my life, but instead a matter of “and.” Patient racial and gender accordance has been linked to improved satisfaction and patient outcomes. As a Black man, it does comfort me to know that there is a Black doctor there. I don’t question whether or not they were DEI hires because I know that they still passed the qualifications to become a doctor. Further, when it comes to addressing racial biases within the medical field that persist to this day, representation, which provides different perspectives, is imperative to combat the many racial falsehoods that are believed by important people in health care — such in the case of Robert Kennedy Jr., Trump’s health secretary, when he said that Black people have stronger immune system than white people. Moreover, there is significant mishandling of diseases that primarily affect minority populations within the medical field: sickle cell patients are majority Black and often aren’t listened to by doctors in regards to the amount of painkillers needed to ease their pain. Despite Allen’s argument that diversity would endanger lives, merit alone will not be enough to counteract the racism that threatens the lives of Black and Hispanic patients.

However, it is also worth examining Allen’s endorsement of a strict meritocracy. Returning to Allen’s claim that systemic reforms are better suited to addressing inequity than lowered admission standards, the fact that one must implement these long-term programs in order to level the playing field demonstrates that “merit” isn’t a good standard for measuring someone’s potential. According to Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow,”(2010) neoconservatives were able to effectively argue that poverty and crime were directly linked to Black culture rather than class position. This decision ultimately pitted white and Black Americans  against each other and implanted a widespread belief  that the pitfalls of Blackness within American life were the result of their lack of drive to dig themselves out of their conditions. This explains the current attacks on DEI by conservatives as their conversation on it often centers around race. Allen’s argument that DEI takes in “unqualified individuals” is downstream of those made by  people who believe that Black people lack drive and are lazy. It is thus assumed that any time they are in a position of power, it was given to them rather than earned. In a sense, then, attacks on DEI were a manufactured attempt — and success — at perpetuating underlying hatred for Black people by describing them as scourges within different spheres of society.

To drive home the point that a strict meritocracy is of no value, there is a growing body of research that shows that meritocracies make people selfish, less self-critical, and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways. For instance, a 2013 study demonstrated that those who performed worse in a preliminary resource-earning task were often more generous in their offers than their competitors who performed better. Those who performed better felt a sense of entitlement to the resources they believed they’d earned and were thus less likely to support the redistribution of prizes. Meritocracy isn’t just unrealistic; it makes you a bad person.

It is also worth pointing out that a lot of these arguments against DEI are bred out of fear of increasing POC success within political, economic, and cultural spheres. This tendency is clear in “great replacement theory,” which holds that pro-diversity and pro-immigration movements represent a plot to replace the political and cultural power of white people living in Western countries. The rhetoric often focuses on an “invasion” that must be stopped before it conquers white America. In a sense, white people are feeling, or close to feeling, what it is like to be othered. These attacks on DEI can then be read as a response to this fear in the name of self-preservation. It should also be noted that this theory can find its roots in racism and fascism — an ideology focused on a central cross-class nation of people that represents the “true” sovereign power of the nation. This should be worrying, as we are currently seeing a growth in a white identity that has united white within an in-group while everyone else is the out-group. While I am not suggesting that this is what Allen is attempting to get across, it is nonetheless alarming that his arguments are downstream from these philosophies.

DEI, as Allen has stated, is an imperfect, if not inadequate, way to fix America’s past wrongs. However, maybe we should change the fix to amend. DEI alone is not sufficient to address the deeply intertwined oppression that lies within the DNA of American democracy. However, DEI is an important and necessary step in the right direction.