Graphic : Michael Harriot ( The Root; photo via iStock )

Every so often a new phrase emerges that encapsulates the cunning Caucasian ability to keep power and dominance within their clutches by painting themselves as the oppressed class. Whether it is “reverse racism,” “Make America great again” or “separate but equal,” coining catchphrases as a means of maintaining white supremacy has been one of our national pastimes since disparate nations of men traversed the Atlantic and coalesced by renaming themselves “white people.”




Now there’s a new one.

As people discover right-wing extremists teaching in schools, working at businesses and serving in various levels of government, the phrase “diversity of thought” has become the new slogan for white people who are upset because their undercover “alt-right” leanings are being eschewed by people who use their heads for something more than racks for “MAGA” hats.


On Tuesday The Root published a piece about Marshall DeRosa, a Florida Atlantic University professor who spends his spare time teaching his unique brand of revisionist constitutional history to hate groups and explaining why the Civil War is the result of “black supremacy.”

As soon as DeRosa’s past became public, his supporters began throwing around the phrase “diversity of thought.” Although the term isn’t new, it has recently resurfaced in the discussion around institutions of higher learning and companies that get rid of workers with racist tendencies.

People used it when students at the University of California, Berkeley, opposed a speech from pseudointellectual Ben Shapiro, who has portrayed Native Americans as cannibals and savages and believes that transgender people are afflicted with a mental illness. It accompanies the “free speech” argument every time college students oppose having Richard Spencer or Ann Coulter visit their school.


When Google fired James Damore for circulating an anti-diversity memo, the company was accused of silencing libertarian ideas and promoting a liberal agenda. Damore’s memo said—please don’t laugh at the ironic tone-deafness of this—that Google should “stop alienating conservatives” because:

Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently... In highly progressive environments, conservatives are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility... Alienating conservatives is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness.


Thought diversity is now the de facto pushback for white people whenever anyone dares to mention including more women and people of color.


You have to give it to white people. Their penchant for playing the victim while simultaneously castigating any minority who points out racism, sexism or homophobia is nothing if not bold. The caucasity lies in their immediate dismissal of any object that might pose a threat to the continued primacy of whiteness.


“Diversity of thought” is white supremacy.

Your local neo-Confederate college professor might not burn a cross on your lawn, but proponents of thought diversity will use the phrase to ensure that white people get to keep white-peopleing by painting mistruths, hate and outright lies as alternative facts. While intellectual inclusion is important—especially in academia—the concept of thought diversity is a farce predicated on the false notion that there are two sides to every issue.


If an elementary school discovered that a kindergarten teacher was teaching students that 2 plus 2 equals 22, no one would call it an “alternative perspective.” They would kick the instructor out of the classroom. An astrophysics department would never hire a professor who thinks the Earth is flat. No hospital would employ a physician who believes that diabetes is a mental illness.

Slavery was mentioned by every state that issued a Declaration of Causes for why they seceded from the union. The Constitution of the Confederate States prohibited the individual states from outlawing slavery. Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, said that the Confederate Constitution “put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.”


Professors who teach contrived versions of history by saying that the Civil War was about states’ rights and not slavery or white supremacy are not diverse thinkers. They are either liars or uneducated on the facts, either off which renders them unqualified to serve as a teacher of the subject.

The same goes for anyone who, like Shapiro, claims that homosexuality is a mental illness. When Coulter talks about the scourge of illegal immigration or the Mexican crime wave, she is either intentionally misleading people or doesn’t know that fewer immigrants are crossing the Mexican border than ever before—legally and illegally. Richard Spencer isn’t offering an intellectual viewpoint by going to college campuses and saying that black people are genetically inferior; he’s peddling the same kind of pseudoscience as flat-earthers.


When Damore said that Google should “stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races” because it is “unfair and divisive,” his premise conveniently leaves out the fact that Google’s workforce is 2 percent black, 4 percent Hispanic and 31 percent female.

Like most conservatives and libertarians (who are essentially conservatives with beards), diversity of thought is the only kind of diversity for which Damore and his ilk are willing to advocate. They don’t really want any kind of diversity. They want dominion.


Thought diversity is just white supremacy in a flannel shirt.

It is a pseudo-cerebral catchphrase for maintaining the same white power structure that has always existed. Mediocre white men run the world, and the only way they can keep doing so is to concoct a fictional alternate universe where they are the oppressed class.


In their contrived version of reality, they’re discriminated against—not because they are unqualified propagandists who either misunderstand or misconstrue the facts, but because they are victims of the liberal agenda. They don’t view their racism, sexism and homophobia as wrong because they “diversify thought” by playing the role of an intellectual devil’s advocate.

At least they’re honest about who they work for.