Where Social Justice Activists Persuade Me—and Where They Don’t

“What follows are examples of topics where SJ/DEI activists have persuaded me, where they haven’t, and where they have led me to fresh, if heterodox, insights.”

So I did what they told me to do. I listened. I read the greatest hits of the Social Justice/Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (SJ/DEI) canon. I attended the trainings. I took the implicit bias tests and unpacked my invisible backpack. And I did it all with an open mind. It’s not easy at first. The casual vitriol directed at straight white guys can be breathtaking. Once you recover from the initial blows, you can’t help but be struck by how histrionic, tendentious, and cultish so much of it is. It’s hard to take a lot of it seriously, harder still to sit and nod solemnly and pretend to take it seriously in a roomful of people pretending to take it seriously.

If, like me, you tick all the wrong boxes—White, male, heterosexual, “binary,” and (more or less) in synch with the genitals you were born with—it’s tempting to reject it all outright. It takes real generosity of spirit to dispassionately filter out the lunacies while listening for the valid points, the stuff you really should work to change about yourself, your workplace, or American society. But you should try, because SJ/DEI activists do make valid points. While it’s unfortunate that those points come wrapped in ritualized grievance and buried under thick layers of bad social science and therapeutic nonsense, those points merit honest reckonings.

Allow me to model an open-minded yet discriminating approach. What follows are examples of topics where SJ/DEI activists have persuaded me, where they haven’t, and where they have led me to fresh, if heterodox, insights. While each topic merits an essay in its own right, I merely offer thumbnail explanations to give the gist. I’ve had to be selective, focusing on topics you’re likely to have encountered in the media or in mandated diversity training. Consider it a sampler. Not everyone will agree on the specific judgment calls; every reader will have to make those for himself. But I will have succeeded if my research and reflections help you regain your composure and maintain a critical, yet sympathetic perspective.

What SJ/DEI Gets Right

People probably do have implicit biases. I’ve taken the infamous Implicit Associations Tests, the ones that purport to surface your hidden racism, sexism, Islamophobia, and other -isms and -phobias. I come out bias-free on all of them—including ones where I already know I have a bias. That’s because the IATs are essentially hand-eye coordination games, and they’re easy ones to master. Give them a try. They’re fun. It’s little wonder, however, that they have been thoroughly debunked as a reliable detector of bias or as a valid predictor of how people with alleged biases will behave toward others.