DEI; diversity, equity, inclusion.

That sounds nice and responsible.

No wonder all big companies now require employees to get training in.

Because we understand that racial and systemic bias have many causes, sources and ways of showing up within each of us.

Even if that's true, do you know what American companies now do to address it?

Some make ritual apologies for America's past.

We want to acknowledge that the land where the Microsoft campus is situated was traditionally occupied by the Sammamish

By proclaiming guilt, companies try to signal that now they're virtuous.

The Snohomish, the Tulalip.

It's nice to apologize.

Yes, but what is it really doing?

Erec Smith was a diversity officer at Drew University.

Now he teaches at York College.

Why'd you stop being a diversity officer?

I just thought it was a useless thing.

There's a better way to go about doing this.

Diversity and inclusion.

Useless or not, companies continue to pay big money for trainings.

There's a whole industry now designed to cater to companies looking for a quick way to check that box.

In the US in 2020, DEI was a $3.4 billion industry.

Every big company.

They feel like they have to. They have to say something. They have to signal to the world that they're doing something.

Is it effective?

No.

In fact, it seems to be doing worse. It seems to be making people less likely to interact with people who are unlike them,

you know, because it's like a minefield now.

Less likely to interact?

After a training where you hear things about microaggressions, if you ask somebody what they do for a living, somehow that's racist, right?

If you learn that, then why would you take a chance?

I better not talk to Erec because I might say something wrong.

Precisely.

So now inclusion means I'm going to silence myself and not talk to the black people.

All white people are racist.

Some trainings are just divisive and dumb.

I believe that white people are born into not being human.

This is extreme, I take it?

It is extreme, but it's becoming more of the norm.

These slides were shown at a Coca Cola diversity training.

The thesis of this training was "try to be less white."

They're talking about arrogance and things like that.

That is by no means a white thing.

But the point is to demonize the other side as much as possible.

And absurdly, diversity trainings don't even do what they're supposed to do.

This Harvard professor analyzed studies of them.

Sadly enough, I did not find one single study which has found that diversity training, in fact, leads to more diversity.

In fact, the Harvard Business Review reports 5 years after diversity training, the share of black women managers actually decreased.

It is not about data. It's about a power grab.

A power grab that starts in schools.

Melt the steel bars of racism and white language supremacy.

This "expert" tells teachers: it's racist to teach traditional English.

If you use a single standard to grade your students' languaging, you engage in racism.

You actively promote white language supremacy, which is the handmaiden to white bias in the world.

Smith was in the audience.

I heard that and thought it was a bit misguided.

So Smith wrote a long and thoughtful response, saying it's a disservice to minority kids not to teach standard English.

For that, he was attacked.

We are professors in communication.

I thought we could communicate.

I was so wrong.

Instead of a discussion, people called you racist.

"Do you enjoy using Western modes of argument to invalidate people of color"

"Check your privilege."

What they saw in me was a bigger threat than anything they've seen before.

A black person saying it's okay to teach black students standardized English.

An academic named Eve complained about the harm Smith consistently perpetuates.

Other academics joined in to coddle Eve.

"Eve spent tremendous labor physically, intellectually and emotionally to write his response and it most probably took him extra time to recover from that labor."

It's like they're victims everywhere!

Yes. That's the point.

You have to perpetuate the victimhood.

That's part of the narrative.

This just isn't even logical discussion.

Has academia gone insane?

Yes, that's a short answer.

Yes, it has gone insane.

I was surprised that that the leader of that academic conference agreed to talk to me.

You engage in racism.

He has since grown a beard.

If you use a single standard to grade your students languaging, you engage in racism.

Standardized English tends to exclude many groups of people.

My parents came here from Germany.

They made me learn standardized English.

Were they being oppressive?

Where would I be if they hadn't?

There are absolutely benefits to a standardized English but that same world creates those same benefits through certain kinds of biases.

And they can be bad for many folks who simply are not going to be able to meet that standard.

I'm simply saying that I don't think everyone needs to be held to it.

If they're not held to it, how can they succeed?

Yeah, I think that they do. I think that they can.

He was much more measured than he'd been lecturing his fellow professors.

I think you're toning it down for my audience here because you in your conference speech were all about this is an oppressive country and white racism, white dominance.

I tried to be rhetorical and I tried to use the moment to make a statement.

In other words, he played to the crowd.

Your students who do not embody enough of the white habits of language that make up your standards, stand at your classroom doors and die for your comfort.

That anger is the norm with DEI advocates.

At Stanford Law School, a judge who'd been invited to speak was stopped by angry students and Stanford's dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Absolute disenfranchisement of their rights...

The diversity dean lectured this federal judge for six minutes.

Is it worth the pain that this causes and division that this causes –

do you have something so incredible and important to say about Twitter and guns and Covid that that is worth this impact on the division of these people?

At least the law school president later apologized, saying this violates "Stanford's commitment to free speech."

Good.

I'm glad some sensible people push back against nonsense like this.

And when it comes to DEI, this education reformer, Chris Rufo, proposes an alternative.

"EMC" -- equality, merit and colorblindness.

I like equality and merit and colorblindness.

Merit is a good thing.

But demanding it, we're told, hurts minorities.

Our students of color struggle and fail, even when we are there to help them.

So some colleges drop admissions tests.

High schools eliminate honors classes.

What is that going to do to an entire group of people?

Nothing good.

I mean, if you wanted to hold down a group of people without them knowing it, this "woke" thing is a good strategy.

The gap between black and white students is widening. Minority and underserved students falling further behind.

What's the better way?

Talking.

People don't say what they feel because they don't wanna get cancelled, they don't wanna get called racist.

People are censoring and we have to stop doing that.

Eric Smith is right.

Stop censoring.

Instead… let's debate.

And in a future video, I'll have a longer debate with Asao Inoue, the advocate for not asking kids to learn standard English.