UNC's Educator Training Program Shows Why It's Time to Eliminate the DEI Bureaucracy
Via Unsplash
The mass DEI experiment has gone on long enough. Send it back to the hallways of the social sciences department where it belongs.
"If you identify as white, this module might elicit strong emotions such as anger, denial, shame, guilt, and embarrassment . . . It is important to get used to the uncomfortable feeling, to sit with it, and then to harness it in positive ways that allow you to begin to dismantle it."
So reads the opening section of a training module published on the Project READY section of UNC's website. Project READY is a collaboration between UNC's School of Information and Library Science and Wake County Public Schools, among others. The initiative describes itself as "a free online professional development program" targeting teachers and school librarians.
The lengthy training curriculum is steeped in the racialized worldview that dominates the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy. To DEI adherents, it seems that the entire world and everyone in it is to be viewed through one lens: race.
Here are but a few passages from the curriculum, which authors see fit to deploy as training materials for North Carolina educators:
"It’s never too early to begin talking about race with children in the library. . .[here is] a set of resources that can help librarians engage even their youngest users in discussions about race."
"While it can be difficult to talk about race and racialized incidents in conservative communities, it is precisely in these communities that these conversations need to occur..."
"In addition to the historical use of color-blindness as a rhetorical tool to prop up white supremacist ideals, aiming for color-blindness is also problematic because it ignores both the persistent racial discrimination and inequities faced by people of color and the value of their ethnic and racial cultures and identities. . .In addition to the issues discussed above, the term 'color-blind' when used to talk about race can also be considered a form of ableist language – language that devalues or is prejudiced against people with disabilities."
"'Treating everyone equally' is often used as a justification for perpetuating these unjust systems. For example, if I were a school principal comparing job applications for an open position at my school, adopting a race-blind policy toward that process (perhaps by hiding applicants’ names during the initial application review period) would likely benefit white applicants. . .[Instead] I would consider the race of my applicants, along with other aspects, in light of what I know about systems of discrimination and oppression in the United States."
"The racial category white was created by white power holders to codify the superiority of white people over others."
"Many white people, especially those who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s at the peak of color-blindness rhetoric, were explicitly taught that color-blindness is a positive goal. However, true color-blindness is not only impossible (see Module 4 on Implicit Bias), but actively harmful toward anti-racist work."
(Our favorite is the one that says the term "color blind" is ableist, presumably because it somehow discriminates against people who are actually color blind.)
We're not arguing the legislature or UNC administrators or anyone else should fire Project READY's creators or bar UNC faculty from advancing these types of materials. They're well within their rights to publish whatever they like.
But these materials are indicative of how DEI proponents see things. We don't think higher education institutions should endorse them by maintaining entire DEI bureaucracies -- staff upon staff who are hired to think about and disseminate DEI philosophy.
And even the DEI bureaucracy can't decide which groups qualify as marginalized and therefore deserving of protection. We don't need to rehash the whole episode, but the DEI bureaucracy's silence after a UNC-sponsored event featured a speaker celebrating the actual massacre of Jews sent the campus reeling.
The mass DEI experiment has gone on long enough. Send it back to the hallways of the social sciences department where it belongs.
