Let’s Understand DEI

What are the Democrats afraid of?

Yesterday, the Legislative Audit Committee ordered up something we’ve been asking for here at YSDA for a long time: a comprehensive audit of diversity, equity and inclusion programs in Wisconsin state government. Our point is that Speaker Robin Vos’ broadside attacks on DEI lack enough specific evidence. We don’t know enough about how DEI is practiced. Who does what where, would be a good place to start.

The central question I have is about the underlying philosophy of these programs. If they are rooted in writers like Ibram X. Kendi, Robin D’Angelo and Nikole Hannah-Jones that’s a big problem. Those writers view the world in a quasi-Marxist oppressor-victim way. They see the United States as founded in racism and irretrievably racist. They recognize no progress at all. Far from wanting a color blind society, they want one where race is at the center of everything. So, to the extent DEI is practiced with that view as its foundation, Vos is right. Those programs should be amended or ended.

But, on the other hand, diversity is a good thing and every part of state government should be welcoming to anybody who wants to work hard. To the extent that there is any discrimination in state government — and nobody has shown that there is — that should be corrected.

And, as we’ve noted before, the Legislative Audit Bureau is the perfect agency to look into this. This nonpartisan agency has long been widely respected. Nobody — including the LAB — knows what they’ll find when their work is done in about a year. It’s entirely possible that they’ll find that Vos’ concerns have been overblown.

But Democrats are talking as if this will be carried out by the Republican caucus staff. Do they really think the LAB won’t do an honest and thorough job? I don’t think so. I think they’re worried about what that honest and thorough job might reveal.

It’s a measure of how DEI has become something akin to a religion in the Democratic Party that, instead of embracing a chance to see DEI vindicated, they’re attacking the audit. All four Democrats on the committee that oversees audits voted against it and Gov. Tony Evers’ office blasted it as a “weaponization” of the audit process. Evers himself has said that it doesn’t matter what the audit finds. He won’t change anything. In other words, he already believes DEI is right and no amount of data will convince him otherwise. That, folks, is religious zeal.

“I see this as nothing more than trying to drag up a boogeyman to try to get people to think a specific way,” said Sen. Tim Carpenter, a Democratic member of the audit committee. But the whole point of the criticism of DEI is that it tries to get people to think in a very specific way. That’s the cause for the legitimate concern. If Carpenter were confident that the audit will disprove that concern then why wouldn’t he be for it?

On this one Republicans have the high ground. “I don’t accept the premise of DEI,” said audit committee co-chair Sen. Eric Wimberger, R-Green Bay. “I have not given up on a colorblind society. I choose to see others as peers who happen to have inconsequential physical traits and not as an intersectional mix of immutable characteristics for social management.”

Now that’s a religion I can believe in. Amen.

And on another matter… The Madison City Council did the right thing last night by voting down a resolution calling on the UW to sanction the pro-Palestinian camp-in on Library Mall. The vote was 8-8 and the issue never should have come up before a body that has no authority over the question anyway, but at least they ended up in the right place.