After Diversity

What happens when a word wears out?

It is a term, more than any other, that has defined our discourse for the past generation: diversity. Champion and critic alike agree on its ubiquity, as well as its plurality of meanings: diversity is invoked as a reality as well as an aspiration, a pragmatic tactic as well as a strategic target. It occupies the commanding heights in our institutional life, routinely incorporated into mission statements, policy manuals, hiring guidelines, and the lexicon of official culture. To be sure, diversity is also met with opposition—some of it vocal and crude, some of it silent. (Most of it, actually; skeptics generally avoid challenging conventional wisdom as a matter of politesse or self-protection.)

Nominally speaking, diversity is a neutral word connoting variety. But the rise in its usage occurred against a backdrop of racial and gender awareness, and there’s a general understanding that its deployment is part of a larger effort to advance social justice in the name of those who have been traditionally excluded from privileges and considerations in everyday national life. To a significant degree, this has happened. Moreover, like many terms that have entered common currency, the connotations of diversity have widened. Few of us, for example, really think of race in black-and-white terms anymore. “Homosexuality”—a term that has become somewhat dowdy—has gradually been replaced by “queer,” which recognizes varieties and nuances of sex and gender diversity.

This is to be expected in the life of a social concept, a standard part of its evolution as it adjusts to dynamic realities. But it also points toward decay in its coherence and utility in the face of historical change. It appears that process is now underway.

For many years, the most common way to challenge the efficacy of diversity implicitly acknowledged its power: you of course admit you’re all for it, but then go on to question whether what we’re talking about is real diversity. Conservatives, for example, are fond of invoking intellectual diversity as more authentic than that which is measured by racial statistics. Or asserting that real racism is assuming students of color can’t compete academically. Female opponents of self-chosen gender identities (sometimes designated Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists by their critics) will usually defend their bona fides as advocates for equality and on that basis protest the “erasure” of “cis-gendered” women—terminology that comes straight from the diversity lexicon, but deployed against what are considered its excesses.

Meanwhile, there are also growing tensions within diversity ideology that complicates some of its internal logic. The successes of the Civil Rights movement in the late-twentieth century and growing numbers of mixed-race people have resulted in greater degrees of racial integration in our national life, which is to say individuals whose identities don’t necessarily correlate with those of contemporary identity politics. We see this, for example, in the increasing minority of Latinos who vote—or run for office as—Republicans, or in the diverging cultural values and economic outcomes between African American men and African American women. We’re often told we’re approaching an inflection point where we will be a minority-majority society. But such assertions are premised on biological measures that mimic the metrics of earlier generations of racists.

Biology poses other problems as well. By this point, it is generally accepted that gender is a social construct, that human behavior is heavily conditioned on the behavior of parents and the sometimes coercive power of the state. (There may come a day when army draftees—men are still the only ones who have to register, a fact no one seems in a hurry to change—refuse to report for duty by saying, “my body, my choice.”) But genes, hormones, and organs are stubborn things, and it does not necessarily follow that allowing for the existence and accommodation of anomalies means it is practical or possible to ban sex as a consideration in public life altogether.

In the face of such realities, some Americans are willing to countenance ostracism of a kind they had previously avoided. When words like “racism” and “misogyny” get used more often and applied more widely, they begin to lose their sting. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or Social Emotional Learning (SEL) programs are met with increasingly well-organized resistance in the form of alternatives that unapologetically reject DEI and SEL premises. The fact that such resistance may be misguided, even illustrating diversity advocates’ concerns, nevertheless suggests that some tactics deployed to advance it may be backfiring in terms of actual utility.

Yet in an important sense, such arguments may soon be beside the point. If history is any guide, the day is coming when “diversity” reaches a state of other generation-defining terms like “New Light” (it’s unlikely you even know what this once fiercely contested term even means), or “abolitionism,” or “communism” that simply lose their valence as a result of changed circumstances or new priorities. Though few Americans are currently paying attention to it—they rarely do when intellectual movements are hatching—this is a time of iconoclastic ferment in the work of figures like Patrick Daneen, Sohrab Ahmari, Carole Hooven, and Louise Perry, whose politics have moved beyond the polemics of the progressive left as well as the bankrupt policies of Trumpism specifically and conservatism generally. Their welfare state neo-natalism, to cite one example, simply does not fit into traditional categories of left and right as we currently understand them.

It is impossible to predict where this might all lead. As a matter of Hegelian dialectics, one might think “diversity” would give way to “unity”: a renewed emphasis on what we have in common rather than an insistence on celebrating differences. For some, this may seem like a frightening prospect, and indeed many of the most wicked outcomes in human history have come from it. But all concepts, diversity included, have inherent virtues and vices, and we may find it existentially necessary to affirm common bonds in the face of a genuine threat. Perhaps more likely, another concept will come to the fore. A term like “integrity,” for example, has resonant connotations that the environmentalist, the political reformer, and the wellness guru might all find worthy to elevate and embrace. (Don’t count organized religion out, by the way. Religious revivals are like hurricanes: infrequent, recurring, unstoppable. And sources of renewal. Neither the death of slavery nor the birth of the civil rights movement could have happened without religion—as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. or Minister Malcolm X would readily attest.)

A Chinese friend may tell us we live in interesting times. But as a Filipina actor in a hip-hop musical written by a Puerto Rican once sang in a great American production, “How lucky we are to be alive right now.” Diversity? Yeah, sure. Whatever.