Jonathan Barazzutti

Summary

This article takes diversity and equity as moral values seriously, examining their real-world implications with particular emphasis on culture. Diversity, or the property of cultural variability, politically speaking, often requires social or geographical separation between groups to be preserved. Conversely, equity, or the property of equal outcomes between groups, politically speaking, often requires social or geographical integration between groups to be achieved. As a result, the two concepts are inevitably in tension, leading to inconsistencies in the policy prescriptions advocated by DEI supporters. I argue that a proper set of prescriptions regarding race and group identity requires us to move away from dogmatic support for these values and towards a careful balancing of multiple goals simultaneously.

Introduction

Over the past decade, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has become an increasingly common term invoked within post-secondary institutions.

DEI refers to efforts to increase minority representation, hence upholding the three principles of “diversity”, “equity”, and “inclusion”. There are problems with the discourse the term creates, such as how, in practice, it values areas where diversity doesn’t matter or can have costs, while ignoring or undermining diversity in areas where it is valuable, such as viewpoint diversity. Furthermore, it is based on the erroneous premise that disparities in outcome imply the presence of discrimination – a premise which must be demonstrated, not merely asserted.

This article will not address those issues in detail. Instead, in this article, I want to argue that DEI is conceptually incoherent. More specifically, there is an intrinsic tension between the concepts of “diversity” and “equity”, which results in both being mutually exclusive in many cases.

Understanding the Concepts

For clarity, I want to use precise definitions of diversity and equity. Equity, generally speaking, refers to equality of outcome between groups. While it is the case that many organizations will use more vague definitions of equity, such as the promotion of “fairness”, operationally speaking, equity is measured according to equality of outcome between groups. Outcomes are typically defined in broad terms, such as economic or health outcomes. For example, if all racial or ethnic groups in a society have the same average income and wealth, that society could be said to have achieved economic racial equity.

Diversity is a bit more disputed in its definition. In popular usage, diversity often refers to the presence of racial minorities. A group that is all black is thus sometimes said to be diverse. This is a misunderstanding of what diversity means in a technical sense. Technically speaking, diversity is better understood as a measure of how distinct individuals are from one another within a population. The more distinct the individuals are on a particular measure, the more diverse the group is on that measure.

In the case of an all-black group, while its members may display distinctiveness along several dimensions, it would not, racially speaking, be considered any more diverse than an all-white group. A group that was 50 percent black and 50 percent white under this technical definition of diversity would be more diverse than an all-black group and an all-white group.

Diversity and equity can, in theory, be analyzed across a near-infinite number of characteristics – a fact that has led many DEI advocates to continually add more and more characteristics to their lists of marginalized groups. However, in popular discourse, diversity typically involves race first and foremost, with gender and other categories also being commonly discussed. I could make the case that even utilizing these dimensions, a society cannot be both diverse and equitable. A society cannot have, for example, racial diversity and also equality of outcome (equity). However, I want to go deeper into the logic of these ideas.

DEI programs often premise themselves not merely on the notion that they are undoing some alleged historical oppression, but also that they increase the number of perspectives, oftentimes alluding to cultural differences that exist between ethnic groups. Under this view, people from different ethnic groups tend to have distinct cultural experiences and viewpoints, which enable them to contribute positively to innovation and other aspects of the workplace.

Thus, while DEI policy is heavily motivated by beliefs about the systemic disadvantage of certain groups, its deliberate attempts to foster diversity are also premised on the idea that ethnic groups tend to have beneficial cultural differences.

For the context of this article, I will be looking at diversity and equity along this dimension – the cultural dimension. This is because it gets to the root of how the framework aims to improve the quality of workplaces and other spaces. Using the previous definitions, a culturally diverse group is one in which individuals belong to multiple distinct cultures. That group is said to have achieved equity if, along health and/or socioeconomic lines, there is equality of outcome between cultural groups.

Culture does not necessarily need to be tied to race or ethnicity. However, I will use racial differences in cultural values as an empirical example of how cultural diversity often implies inequity.

Why Cultural Diversity Generally Implies Inequity

In practice, what does cultural diversity mean? I discuss what culture means and its implications in depth in my article on cultural relativism, but I will briefly outline my understanding of culture here. Cultural diversity implies diversity in values, beliefs, practices, and more. These aspects of culture can have a significant impact on an individual’s life. An individual who has one set of cultural values will, all else equal, almost certainly have a different life trajectory than they would if they adopted a different set of cultural values.

For example, cultures differ significantly in terms of the strength of family ties. Kinship intensity, measured by cousin marriage preference, polygynous marriage norms, co-residence of extended families, lineage organization, and community organization, has been found to differ significantly across societies worldwide. In general, kinship intensity tends to be highest in the Middle East and Africa, and the lowest in Europe and the Americas.

Research from several economists shows that even after controlling for a range of demographic and cultural variables, societies with stronger kinship ties tend to have lower levels of economic development, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. In other words, the cultural value of stronger kinship ties tends to lead to lower economic development.

What happens when individuals who belong to a culture with stronger kinship ties, and individuals who belong to a culture with weaker kinship ties, are part of the same society? Put differently, what happens when a society becomes culturally diverse in terms of kinship? We would expect inequality to arise between the two cultural groups, with the culture with stronger kinship ties having a lower average income relative to the culture with weaker kinship ties.

Note that this inequality is not the product of discrimination or oppression, or of a system which is designed to hold down a particular group of people. Rather, it is an emergent, organic consequence of divergent preferences acting within a society.

Here is a more specific example of cultural differences leading to disparate outcomes related to kinship ties. Cultures differ in how they treat and honor their dead, and in some countries, this can be extremely elaborate. For example, in Ghana, people often spend extremely large fortunes to bury their dead. There, a mid-level funeral costs about $5,000 USD, while a “befitting” one can cost $15,000–$20,000 USD. This is in a country with a median income of about $1,500 per year. This indicates that Ghanaians will commonly spend several years’ worth of their average income on a funeral for a single person.

People who spend significant portions of their income, and not to mention time and effort, on funerals will be expected to have differing outcomes compared to people who spend less time, money, and effort. And this will lead to inequalities between groups that engage in these differing practices, even in the absence of systemic oppression or discrimination.

Both of these differences naturally imply that cultural groups would have differing economic outcomes, simply due to culture. Even if all racial groups were hypothetically brought to an identical socioeconomic status, in the presence of cultural diversity, there would naturally be divergences in socioeconomic status over time, entirely due to different cultural values, practices, and beliefs. Having cultural diversity thus generally leads to inequity.

An important clarification: none of this is to say that two groups with identical cultures would necessarily have identical outcomes. Two groups can have identical cultures and, even in the absence of discrimination, still have disparate outcomes. Cultural similarity is often a necessary condition for identical outcomes, but it is not a sufficient one. Thus, diversity in terms of race or ethnicity can still lead to inequity even in the absence of cultural differences or discrimination.

The Paradox of Diversity Discourse

I hold that this incompatibility between cultural diversity and equity, and the refusal of many to recognize it, is indirectly responsible for many of the failures within contemporary discourse on race. There is no coherent view on whether policies that address race should prioritize diversity or equity. In the absence of this coherence, “progress” on race, however defined, becomes impossible.

Policies and practices that encourage cultural diversity, in intent or effect, tend to preserve ethnic boundaries to one degree or another. A simple example of a practice can be seen with ethnic-exclusive organizations at universities. Universities commonly have student-run ethnic affinity clubs for a wide range of groups, which allow students to meet others with similar ethnic or cultural backgrounds. These organizations can provide support to many students and create a buffer between them and the pressures to conform to others’ norms at the university.

On a political level, this can mean various forms of legalized separation. Often, this is done for cultural preservation. Because there are geographical, social, and cultural separations between groups, fewer opportunities for interracial interaction and differences that lead to behavioral disparities naturally result in inequalities between separated groups. These inequalities often arise in private practices, as in the case of ethnic-exclusive university clubs, and in political reforms such as legalized separation. Pro-diversity policies, thus, in many cases, create inequity.

What is particularly interesting is that there are both instances of “pro-diversity” policies, which are viewed as perfectly acceptable, and policies that are viewed as extremely immoral. The current reservation system in Canada, through creating a separate homeland for indigenous people where they have exclusive access to land, is ultimately a pro-diversity policy in a sense. It allows for the preservation of a unique way of life and culture among indigenous peoples. The United States goes further in allowing independence, with First Nations groups effectively having a monopoly on access to casinos. These policies legally preserve distinctions geographically between groups, and ultimately constitute a form of racial segregation.

Under this conception of diversity, in which legal separations are made between people to preserve distinctions in culture and other areas, many other policies have been, and would be, viewed as appalling. For example, Jim Crow segregation, South African apartheid, and the policy proposals of white nationalists are all examples of pro-diversity policies. They do a similar thing in philosophy – even if certain particulars vary from regime to regime and from proposal to proposal – which is to create a separate homeland or separate spaces for different groups of people to preserve a way of life and a people’s culture.

I should note here that I am not in favor of government-backed segregation based on race or white nationalism. The point is to suggest that advocates of DEI do not have a consistent understanding of the term in the policies they advocate for. I view the policies here as all being unequal in justifiability. However, my reasoning for that has nothing to do with whether they are “pro-diversity”; rather, it concerns other considerations, some of which I will detail later.

A common inconsistency in contemporary discourse is the support for certain forms of ethnic nationalism/separatism and the opposition to others. Specifically, many people who support DEI policies or are adjacent in their politics to such ideas will support or be fine with certain racial segregation movements when they are advanced by minority groups, such as the indigenous reservation system, while opposing others, such as white nationalist proposals to create an ethnostate exclusively for white people. This double standard is often justified on the notion that a particular group is oppressed or, in some cases, colonized. As such, they should have special rights to try and protect an identity which they feel is under threat through them being unfairly treated, or forcibly displaced or assimilated.

There are two problems with this line of argumentation, even assuming the argument is factually sound in all the forms it takes. Firstly, the question that arises in this argument is what, from a consequentialist perspective, these groups are trying to achieve by creating separate systems. This effort generally revolves around preserving culture and a group’s way of life. If this is the case, it implies that cultural preservation is itself morally significant and warrants consideration.

However, if cultural preservation is a morally significant value, it also opens the door for other ideologies to promote policies based on it. While white people in many majority white countries may not experience their culture being undermined to the same degree as occurred in, for instance, North American colonization, the mere presence of immigration from external cultures can lead to an erosion of the culture and way of life of a population. Thus, if cultural preservation is valuable in itself, then there would be no reason to hold anti-immigration sentiments amongst white people based on cultural preservation as intrinsically immoral. Rather, it would merely be a difference in how much one weighs the value of cultural preservation.

Perhaps this argument is more significant or meaningful for non-white forms of nationalism simply because their culture has presently been significantly more undermined by historical events such as colonialism. However, the cultural preservation argument cannot be invoked to argue for why non-white ethnic nationalism is perfectly justifiable while white nationalism is not simply less justifiable, but evil.

The second issue is a practical and logical one. In terms of outcomes, both a white nationalist and separatist movement and a non-white nationalist and separatist movement would be identical, as they would both lead to race-based geographical separation between the two groups. If it were merely a question of popular opinion of a particular group, then ethnic nationalism, even white nationalism, would be morally neutral and merely dependent upon how popular separatism is amongst the particular group in question. If many non-white people in a country engage in ethnic nationalism and want to separate, and the popularity of the move amongst the non-white population justifies attempts at separation, then, if anything, a world in which there was some white nationalism versus a world where there was none would be preferable, as that would help to accelerate the end outcome.

From any consequentialist perspective, there would be no consistent reason to regard white nationalism as intrinsically immoral while regarding non-white nationalism as moral. The inconsistency in the selective support for what are, in a sense, all pro-diversity policies is quite clear. But there is another value being left out of the conversation – one that can perhaps shed light on this selective support: equity.

The Paradox of Equity Discourse

As stated previously, equity is the principle of equal outcomes between groups along a particular dimension, typically socioeconomic status or health. Pro-equity policies aim to integrate different groups of people, as integration allows for greater sharing and exchange of resources among people of different groups, as well as homogenization of values and cultures, which are often necessary to achieve equal outcomes between groups.

There is a wide range of policies which can be conceived of as “pro-equity”, and this can include anti-discrimination legislation which prohibits employment discrimination based on race or ethnicity, as well as programs that attempt to integrate newcomers socioeconomically into the society they are immigrating to. As previously demonstrated, cultural similarity between two groups is often a necessary condition for equity between them, though not sufficient. Thus, policies that maximally aim to achieve equity under this conception would have to seek to create cultural similarity between the two groups.

And once again, it is clear that there is no consistent backing for “pro-equity” policies among advocates of DEI, and that the notion of equity can go too far, just as with the notion of diversity. Case in point is policies that attempt to assimilate one group into another involuntarily. For example, the residential school system was established with the deliberate intent to make indigenous peoples culturally indistinguishable from ethnic Europeans. As it was infamously said, the system intended to “kill the Indian” and “save the man”.

The system had disastrous outcomes, in part because it was, in effect, a type of radical “pro-equity” policy. It attempted to assimilate indigenous people into Canadian culture, removing the geographic, social, and cultural boundaries between indigenous and non-indigenous people in the country. However, despite the policy in effect attempting to create the preconditions under which equality of outcome between groups can be achieved, the policy led to violations of the cultural autonomy and sovereignty of indigenous people, leading to disastrous results.

As with the policies discussed in the previous section on diversity, I should mention here that I do not support the residential school system. The point of bringing up the system and its theoretical justifications is to show that advocates of DEI are not fully committed to advancing equality of outcome in everything that would be required to do so, which would include intense social engineering, and that the reasons why policies of forced assimilation are bad have nothing to do with them being insufficiently “pro-equity”.

DEI Revisited

If extreme attempts to maximize diversity are often viewed as unjust by advocates of DEI, as are extreme attempts to maximize equity, how are we supposed to reconcile these issues?

In chapter 6 of his book “Cooperation and Social Justice,” University of Toronto philosophy professor Joseph Heath argues that in many cases, the reason why a particular set of policies is not implemented is not due to lack of political will, but due to conflict between multiple values. When multiple goals are present within the domain of a particular policy, conflicts among them can produce a compromise that is unsatisfactory to most people.

In many economic outcomes, such as the racial wealth gap, racial gaps have either remained unchanged over the past half-century or grown in magnitude, despite significant social changes over that period. Part of the reason there has been so little progress on racial justice is the desire to uphold two mutually exclusive values – diversity and equity – simultaneously. To a degree, this leads to a standstill in achieving desired outcomes on race, which has generated increased resentment, particularly with the rise of social media and online forms of activism. Ever greater dollars are being invested into programs intended to uphold DEI, despite them effectively functioning as a patchwork of contradictory policies.

For example, ethnically exclusive spaces are upheld, allowing people to freely practice their own culture among others like them. This decreases cultural integration with the rest of society, potentially raising inequalities between groups, but at the benefit of allowing individuals to have a stronger identification with their own racial or ethnic group. At the same time, some policies will actively engage in discriminatory hiring in favor of ethnic minorities, which attempt to equalize outcomes and will generally involve some form of cultural assimilation into spaces that were historically not widely inhabited by minorities. There is no clear understanding about whether ethnic groups want to maintain their own distinct identity, as pro-diversity policies would promote, or achieve equal outcomes with other groups, as pro-equity policies would promote. Thus, there is a paradox between diversity and equity.

Resolving the Paradox

How should this be resolved? Ultimately, given that it is often difficult or impossible to simultaneously achieve diversity and equity, DEI should not be treated as a dogmatic value. However, I don’t think that diversity and equity are completely valueless.

Diversity, or the maintenance of group differences and identities, can be valuable because it allows people to maintain a sense of group identity. Group identity, whether based on family, religion, gender, or even race or ethnicity, can benefit people’s psychological well-being. For example, a large body of research suggests that in-group bias is positively associated with self-esteem across multiple measures. Furthermore, the diversity of ideas and values that cultural diversity brings to the table can be beneficial for innovation.

Equity, or the reduction of group inequality, can also be valuable in certain contexts. As I discuss in my article on whether inequality matters, if inequality translates into legitimate hardship for people, it can harbor resentment and inhibit individuals’ well-being.

However, both values do conflict with one another to a degree. I don’t claim to have the only answer on how the two values should be integrated or weighed into a broad “racial policy”, but I have a set of points and principles that I think would be valuable to society. This will inevitably involve some balancing of trade-offs, but I think I have struck a reasonable balance that also takes into account other important values.

I think that policies which attempt to ethnically separate entire groups from one another through the use of state force are unjustified. They contribute to racial inequality and also lead to a stifling of economic growth. Research consistently shows that a relatively open immigration policy is associated with greater economic growth and higher per capita income. While rising ethnic diversity associated with immigration can come at the cost of social cohesion, the effects are generally small.

There can be compatibility challenges related to culture, norms, and language that should be managed through services that attempt to integrate immigrants economically and socially. These types of voluntary services can not only be beneficial for immigrants but also useful for the integration of historically segregated groups in Canadian society. Consistent with the view that state-enforced ethnic separation is generally unjustified, I believe that, in the long run, some level of voluntary integration between indigenous and non-indigenous societies would be beneficial to the prosperity of both. The same integration services for immigrants could prove useful there as well.

Still, I also recognize that group identity can be valuable to many people, and policies should allow people to privately self-organize into communities as they wish. I think that legislation preventing racial discrimination in the economic realm, such as in employment, is justified, and I also believe that DEI programs that discriminate against people based on race should be largely or entirely scrapped. However, I agree with the view expounded upon by political scientist Richard Hanania that while immigration restrictions are generally bad, it is fine to allow people to sort themselves into private and small-scale communities organically. Similarly, ethnic-exclusive organizations at universities and elsewhere are completely fine. These allow the benefits of multiracial societies to be realized while minimizing potential costs, as people are still free to associate with whom they choose. In short, I believe in a private-public distinction regarding race, where the state generally takes a hands-off approach to racial and ethnic matters and allows people to associate freely as they wish.

Furthermore, I support certain types of social welfare programs that distribute income based on need. While not race-based in policy, they would in effect redistribute income in part based on race, given the fact that racial groups, on average, have different rates of poverty. This would be “equity” in effect to a degree, even though it does not explicitly provide goods or services based on race.

I have often argued against DEI programs because I think that they misunderstand the effects of ethnic diversity, undermine human talent, fail to recognize the importance of diversity in certain domains, and are based on an erroneous assumption that disparities necessarily mean discrimination. However, this doesn’t mean that concepts such as diversity and equity, when taken seriously, have no merit whatsoever. In the right amounts and in the right contexts, they potentially can have merit. But to have this serious examination of the ideas, or what the ideas may imply, we need to abandon the notion of DEI, which treats them as not being mutually exclusive when, in many cases, they are, and treats them as things which should be maximized, when doing so is neither possible nor desirable.

Personally, I love multiracial societies, with all of the benefits and challenges they can present. Ignoring the interpersonal elements I enjoy about them, multiracial societies, when managed properly, can be among the most successful. And to ensure their success, there needs to be an explicit weighing of multiple values when formulating social policy with regard to race and group identity, including values beyond diversity and equity.
It is only when we reduce the sacralized elements of contemporary discourse on race, as exemplified by concepts such as DEI, that we can begin to build more prosperous societies for all.