The DEI Argument is Stupid. But Here's How to Win It.

It's not a debate, because there's no debate, and you shouldn’t let anyone draw you into debating it, but if they do, here’s some ammunition for you.

When I became editor-in-chief of Popular Science, I was the youngest person to hold that position in its 157-year history. This was a source of enormous pride for me. My predecessors edited and published Charles Darwin, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan. Now the reins were in my hands. Clearly I deserved my place in this lineage, and clearly the people above me had recognized my shining brilliance at long last.

Then I attended my first social function with the heads of other publications—some awards shindig—and in the glare of the uplights, sinking into deep hotel carpet, I looked around and realized we were all the youngest editors-in-chief in the histories of our respective publications. Okay, I thought to myself, peering in confusion at everyone across my drink, are all of us the most brilliant people for these jobs? What's going on here?

Then it hit me. The reason we'd been handed these jobs before the age of 40 wasn't because we were the smartest. It was because the magazine industry was in a nose dive, as social media destroyed our value proposition. We weren’t just the youngest editors-in-chief in history. We were the least expensive.

Processing that experience helped me form a turn of phrase I've used a lot since then: "Clearly seeing my role in the narrative."

I try not to deploy this phrase on other people when they fail to see themselves clearly, because it’s a hard thing to do, and our modern minds aren’t built to do it. But secretly it's my make-or-break in other people. When a boss passes a directive down from a superior and pretends it's their own idea, and a good one, rather than a capricious order? Thumbs down. The entire Am I the Asshole subreddit? Deeply triggering. An administration that won by only 230,000 votes across three states calling its election a "mandate?" Rage.

But my deepest loathing right now is reserved for anyone kicking around racist propaganda in the form of being “anti-woke” or “anti-DEI.” Because when it comes to losing one’s place in the story of America, that shit is entirely off the rails.

I think for many of the political figures dealing in this rhetoric it's just a posture; a casual, unconsidered prejudice deployed for expedience. Of course, just the fact that it has political expedience lights my fuse. But once someone feels emboldened by that expedience to go ahead and criticize the United States' single greatest theoretical strength — the sheer engine of invention formed by offering equal opportunity to the widest possible swath of people — that’s when the flame reaches my dynamite, because they obviously can't be trusted to sense or report anything about themselves accurately.

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So how do you push back on this? Well, I want to share with you something I’ve been reading and re-reading lately, because while arguing with delusional people on this topic can seem impossible, this particular piece of writing has been my solution. My Dad, the novelist and historian Andrew Ward, wrote it. He spent his career thinking about lots of things, but primarily colonialism and slavery, and while I take pride in my ability to see things clearly, he has the clearest possible eye for racial injustice:

Whites: 140
Blacks: 3
10 Seconds to Go

A lot of people, most of them white, call affirmative action ''reverse discrimination'' and wonder why black people shouldn't be satisfied with a simple repudiation of discrimination of any kind. With its ruling striking down minority set-asides in city construction contracts, the Supreme Court seems to have decided that affirmative action programs in general violate white people's right to equal protection.

But in case a majority of their honors might still have an open mind on the subject, I offer a little metaphor in affirmative action's defense. It comes in the form of a football metaphor because I have a feeling that the conservative majority on the Rehnquist Court might appreciate a football metaphor. So here goes:

The White Team and the Black Team are playing the last football game of the season. The White Team owns the stadium, owns the referees and has been allowed to field nine times as many players. For almost four quarters, the White Team has cheated on every play and, as a consequence, the score is White Team 140, Black Team 3. Only 10 seconds remain in the game, but as the White quarterback huddles with his team before the final play, a light suddenly shines from his eyes.

''So how about it, boys?'' he asks his men. ''What do you say from here on we play fair?''

The crazy part is that this simple, razor-sharp metaphor is more than 30 years old. It’s an Op-Ed from the February 7, 1989 edition of the New York Times.

Today, of course, two years after the end of affirmative action, the Rehnquist court my Dad was critiquing looks like a bastion of enlightened progressive policy, even though we know now that they were beginning to roll back the hard-fought victories of the Civil Rights movement. He was writing at a time when major corporations, ad agencies, the health care system, and academia were making no public effort to diversify, but at the very least the law was trying to compensate for what was clearly centuries of systematic discrimination. It looked like we were on the right path.

My Dad got on that path because he happened to spend a portion of his childhood in India, where, he says, he saw clearly that white people like himself were more or less irrelevant to the culture, the politics, the future. That set him up for the shock of returning to the United States right when Martin Luther King, Jr., was regularly appearing on the nightly news, and, astounded that white people were so clearly forgetting their place in the narrative, he spent a chunk of his teens and twenties photographing Civil Rights demonstrations. He taught me to be conscious of my family’s place in the history of systemic discrimination and oppression, but also made it clear that while reckoning with the past can be emotionally painful, my pain is beside the point. Speaking honestly about that place and that history is the very least we can do, because it’s the first step in fighting for something better. I thought coming to grips with all of this was a simple fact of becoming an adult.

That’s why it’s so galling to listen to people in power — especially white people in power — adopt a tone of personal resentment at the idea that they should have to reckon with that same past. They seem to believe that they can’t afford the magnanimity of seeing beyond their own circumstances, and that if any sympathy is owed to anyone, it’s owed to them. Blind rage.

I’m especially upset by it because it so clearly ignores the many good examples of nations compensating for the past, and being rewarded with a better future. In Rwanda, 30 percent of parliamentary seats are reserved for female candidates. The effect? Since 1997 the country has seen not just greater political gender representation, but a general improvement in the autonomy and economic success of female Rwandans as a whole.

India, where my Dad learned to see his place clearly, was subjugated in part by the British Empire’s devilishly brilliant amplification of its caste system. Colonial policy officially mandated that lower-caste Indians couldn’t attend school or hold certain jobs, much less offices, for instance. After independence in 1947, India instituted a broad swath of policies that aim to correct for that history. Today, roughly half of elected positions and university admissions are out-and-out reserved for those from historically marginalized groups. It’s done a huge amount of good: the quotas are directly linked to life-changing improvements in the lives of people who happen to have been born into the poorest portion of the world’s most socially fragmented society.

But of course, Rwanda and India aren’t going to win you this argument, nor will telling white people that they don’t understand their own place in the story. Just keep coming back to my Dad’s idea: after a game has been rigged for so long, it’s just another form of cheating to suddenly call it fair.

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PostScript: How the Money People See It

Speaking of losing one’s place in the narrative, I keep coming back to this manifesto from the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. He’s a seminal figure in Silicon Valley, and he once supported Democratic candidates, but now that they blame tech companies for misinformation and polarization, he’s actively advising the Trump administration.

(I read his manifesto two ways. It’s instructive. First, as a sort of constitution. What would the nation be like if it were run according to these ideas? Second, I read it in light of how the Trump administration is running things. Because the tech-meritocracy, let-everyone-be-rich idea doesn’t exactly square with the racist rhetoric and agency purges and power grabs currently underway.)

I bring Andreessen up because he’s the kind of tech thinker I’ve covered for years, and his perspective is a cousin of the stuff I’m describing above. I consider it the result of only ever hanging out in certain dorm rooms and board rooms. He seems to believe people advance mostly (perhaps only) on merit, and that the rest is noise. In his manifesto he decries regulators and naysayers who might hem in technological advancement, because, among its other endless positive attributes, he writes, technology is inherently fair.

We believe technology is universalist. Technology doesn’t care about your ethnicity, race, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, political views, height, weight, hair or lack thereof. Technology is built by a virtual United Nations of talent from all over the world. Anyone with a positive attitude and a cheap laptop can contribute. Technology is the ultimate open society.

Here’s the thing: Technology itself may not care what we look like, but the people who fund it and make money off it do. As early as 1997 I wrote profiles of black and brown founders who couldn’t convince VCs like Andreessen’s firm to give them even the smallest amount of funding. And even in 2023, Black founders, despite being part of a racial group that comprises 13% of the nation, received less than 1% of the $136 billion that went into new tech companies, according to an analysis by TechCrunch. Tech isn’t just tech. It’s tech money. And the game’s not fair just because you want it to be.