Best news of 2024: The collapse of diversity, equity, inclusion

DEI is a bad idea whose time came with a vengeance several years ago, but now its continued ascendancy is in doubt.Perhaps the most important event this year outside of the presidential election is the intellectual collapse of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion, which is poisonous hokum that is finally being exposed as such. DEI has been one of the most morally perverse and damaging fads in recent American history. We’ve been spending an estimated $8 billion a year telling Americans in training sessions, workshops and educational material that they are, depending on their race or gender, victims or oppressors, and that the country is shot through with white supremacy.The DEI mindset is dominant in human resources departments and on college campuses. Common sense say that this racialist hectoring — often administered by people who brook no dissent — must be unhealthy, and, sure enough, evidence is beginning to pile up. Research has suggested that DEI can create negative feelings or make people afraid to speak their minds.Now comes a compelling new study from an outfit called the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University Social Perception Lab.

It found that DEI amplified “perceptions of prejudicial hostility where none was present, and punitive responses to the imaginary prejudice.”In other words, if its goal is to create illiberal racial paranoiacs, DEI is succeeding brilliantly. In one experiment, the study’s architects gave one group of students an anodyne essay about US corn production to read while another got an essay drawn from the work of DEI superstars Ibram X.Kendi and Robin DiAngelo.Then, the students were asked to evaluate a simple, racially neutral scenario involving a college applicant getting rejected by an East Coast university. The students who had read the DEI material were more likely to believe that the hypothetical admissions officer in the scenario was more discriminatory, more unfair and more harmful...