You don’t need to validate the “lack of diversity” grift

You will never win



Years ago, in graduate school, I worked at my university’s tutoring center. We would have monthly staff meetings that consisted mostly of the same 3-4 concerns being repeated over and over as well as long periods of very awkward silence. Some tutors, desperate to fabricate concerns so as to break up the eerie quiet, would grasp at straws: should we ban peanuts? Is it possible that our screensavers might trigger someone’s epileptic fit? That sort of stuff.

Once, a tutor (straight, female) said she was disgusted by the lack of diversity of our staff. She named a few particular types of people who weren’t included in our ranks and said we faced a moral imperative to recruit such persons. Another tutor raised her hand to respond. She was a gay, south Asian international student: well-meaning, but not hip to this particular grift. She mistakenly believed the first student actually cared about the perceptions of minority students. In response to the call for greater inclusion, she pointed out that our staff was actually more diverse than the overall student body of the university, which in itself was significantly more diverse than the population of the state and town that housed the university. Doesn’t that mean we’re already doing a good job of being inclusive?

This induced 30 straight minutes of tears and caterwauling, including several assertions that the gay immigrant woman needed to educate herself as to the plight of minority students. The session culminated in the drafting of an incredibly vague diversity statement, and nothing more. Effectively, the international student was right–nothing really needed to be changed, and any change along these lines would require a pretty radical re-imagining of the shape and purpose of the center. But the point wasn’t to take action and change things. The discussion was meant only to establish the righteousness of the woman who started it.

I bring this up in the context of criticism of a single photo of a single panel from the recent Climate Change Town Hall that was chaired by Bernie Sanders. Within this still frame, only white people appear. This, we are told, must therefore mean that the town hall was hostile to minorities.

Taking a look at the full roster of participants, we see that the town hall was objectively quite diverse–more diverse than the general US population, and significantly more diverse than our leadership class. But that doesn’t matter. The people who voice this concern are not attempting to actually increase diversity. They are attempting, explicitly, to avert attention away from the ostensible goals of the project. That’s it. They are making noise for the sake of making noise.

Accusations of a lack of diversity can be applied literally any circumstance. If the panel were 100% black, it would be accused to segregation or tokenization. If not a single white person were present, there still would be no way to incorporate every other imaginable identity group, which would in turn be used as proof of hatred and hostility toward the excluded groups. Even if something like literally perfect representation did take place, accusations would still be made regarding speaking time, leadership roles, prioritization of the issues discussed, scheduling, and the exclusion of specific individuals. In the case of the climate change town hall, the wreckers managed to publish a piece complaining that not enough minorities specifically from Vermont were present.

I don’t know how much of this is plainly obvious, and I certainly don’t want to come across as condescending… but, obviously, climate change is not an issue that affects only Vermont. In a global sense, or even just a national sense, Vermonters were favorably represented at this town hall, to a disproportionate degree. By any material metric, these concerns are objectively unfounded. But, again, that doesn’t matter. That’s not their goal.

The goal of the town hall was to discuss how we may avert civilizational collapse, which peer-reviewed science journals are now suggesting may occur within 20 years. That’s not what’s being discussed in mainstream and liberal circles, however. What’s being discussed is a phantasmal lack of diversity, obviously bad-faith allegations from the grifters who control public discourse. This is a problem. You must question your complicity in this problem. You–literally you, the person reading this–are in mortal danger, and you face no moral or tactical imperative to give credence to bad faith allegations. You can no longer afford to pretend these people aren’t full of shit. Your life literally depends on you disengaging from this con.