DEI in ASU School's annual review
Racial discrimination policies
We are the middle of a national conversation about DEI racial discrimination policies used at universities. The Supreme Court has ruled that universities cannot discriminate based on race. I keep you updated on my School’s annual review process because of how it has been used to push DEI and decolonizing narratives. This year, my annual review asked us to explain how we advanced ASU’s Charter. That makes sense since we are ASU employees. ASU’s Charter has three main values: Access, Excellence, and Impact. I think these are great values for a state university.
And yet, my school still manages to slip in a DEI material. Let’s look at how. On the annual review, right after we are asked how we advanced ASU’s Charter, we are told what this means to those in charge at my school. They switched out the ASU Charter values for their own DEI requirements. We are asked: how did you address topics like Justice, Equity, and Inclusion? There’s the DEI. They didn’t remove it.
Justice, Equity, and Inclusion are great words. That’s why they picked them. But what do they mean in this context? In other posts, I have shared DEI training videos used at ASU to help explain this.
“Justice” means when you blame the current generation for things done in the past and call it “whiteness.” The people you are charging with “whiteness” could be completely innocent, but that doesn’t matter. They are part of the “whiteness” system, and so they are guilty. That’s their “justice,” but it is the opposite of real justice. In real justice, the guilty are held responsible for their own behavior, and the innocent are not treated as if they were guilty simply because of race. This is usually a very important point for social justice warriors in evaluating the criminal justice system, except when it comes to “whiteness.” What is it called when you don’t practice what you preach?
“Equity” means you divide people based on skin color and judge them on outcomes. It relies on the same “whiteness” assessment. If outcomes are not the same, then this must be due to “whiteness.” The only solution is to have unequal standards and to take from the “whiteness” group. Their “equity” is when you don’t treat people equally. Once again, what they call equity is actually inequity.
“Inclusion” means hearing from many different voices and perspectives. And that sounds great, right? Defined that way, it is just multiculturalism. But what they mean is hearing from multiple voices except “whiteness.” That’s a voice that won’t be heard. Why? Because, according to them, it was heard too much in the past. And so they will punish the current “whiteness” group for what they believe happened in the past. Inclusion then becomes “not inclusion” based on their “not justice” and “not equity.”
It is a world of opposites. But the opposite concepts don’t sound good. So they have to mask them with the terms that are good terms. And I’m asked to evaluate myself in my annual review based on their ideas of Justice, Equity, and Inclusion. Let’s have real justice, real equity, and real inclusion.
We celebrated MLK this week. He taught us to love our neighbor and not judge based on skin color but based on character. How can they honor him and also teach these things above?
https://lawliberty.org/an-honest-diversity-statement/