Anti-DEI activists believe a 'neutral,' merit-based status quo was disrupted by 'wokeness'. It never existed.

Donald Trump’s authoritarian regime did not take long to impose 1984-style thought policing and overt censorship on scientists and government agencies, forcing the removal of what amounts to thousands of reports, documents, and web pages that make reference to anything that might speak to or inform issues of diversity, racism, inclusion, etc.

This is not merely a rollback of ‘DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion)’ as a policy but an erasure of scientific, administrative, and policy information and an attack against the very principles at stake. In the world seen through the eyes of Trump and other opponents of DEI, anything that recognizes the existence of racism, gender difference, or structural discrimination is to be quashed.

After the horrific crash between a plane and a military helicopter at the end of January, Trump immediately raised the spectre that ‘DEI’ might be to blame, an overtly hateful suggestion, carrying obviously racist, sexist, and transphobic connotations.

Not all objections to DEI are quite so stupid or poisonous. But we must confront the fact that as one of the core objections to DEI, the idea that it leads to lesser qualified people advancing in employment or garnering other benefits is premised on a mythical pre-existing status quo where such decisions were once ‘neutral’ and merit-based. It’s a position that ignores the very basis of DEI policies, which is the systematic exclusion of women and minorities from a host of professions, positions, and benefits.

Recoiling at the admittedly hard to parse mass of academic-sounding concepts thrown around by advocates of DEI - white privilege, intersectionality, systemic racism, colonialism - its opponents are too quick to take umbrage at perceived accusations that the average white man benefits from systems of oppression and discrimination, and all too slow to stop and think about what the evidence and the history of these practices actually tell us.

One only needs to examine the composition of major institutions like Parliament, corporate boards of directors, and even our judiciary to realize that whole segments of society have been disproportionately excluded and continue to face systemic barriers to participation. These barriers happen at an individual level and the system level. At the individual level, many studies demonstrate that employment practices in the US and Canada and often infected by hidden biases. For example, there are studies that show resumes with ‘white sounding’ names are much more likely to advance while identical resumes with ‘ethnic sounding’ names do not. At the systemic level, it is undeniable that education and poverty gaps (and all of the associated ills) between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are directly tied to the legacy of Canada’s colonial system and the imposition of institutions like residential schools.

In this context, a concept like ‘White Privilege” is not some discriminatory attack simplistically blaming individual white people for the ills of the world, but instead a recognition that on top of whatever challenges every individual in society already has a chance of facing, members of particular groups frequently face additional disadvantages in the aggregate. White privilege is recognition that people who look like me tend not to face the same barriers as people who do not. That’s all. This does not mean that every person of colour or every Indigenous or trans person is literally ‘worse off’ than literally every white man in the country. Nor does it mean that every white man is a mediocre white man. Instead, it simply means that at a systemic level, we have mountains of evidence about the impacts of discrimination that our institutions and systems produce, even when they are implementing rules that seem ‘neutral’.

In the last 10 to 15 years, DEI has become the umbrella approach designed to deal with these major societal challenges. But it is properly seen as a basket of ideas, and its advocates push a wide variety of policy prescriptions. At their most aggressive, like any idea with ideological roots, some notions around DEI are controversial or even flat-out terrible. Some left-wing activists assert, for example, that there are entire topics of study that should not be engaged with by people on the basis of their race or gender identity. While I would agree men should not purport to speak for women, or non-Indigenous people for Indigenous people, the idea that there should be identity-based restrictions on analyzing or speaking about any social, moral, or policy issue is simply antithetical to free thought in a democratic society (and to basic scholarly principles in the academic world).

We can acknowledge that there is a segment of DEI proponents who are so dogmatic or extreme that they do their cause no favours. But throwing out the baby with the bath water means ignoring the vast and indisputable body of evidence that racism, sexism, and all the associated -phobias remain with us.

The problem is that anti-DEI activists (visibly apparent most weeks in the op-ed pages of outlets like the National Post) tend to point to the most extreme manifestations of ‘wokeness’ to misrepresent the rather simple and banal core of DEI, which is literally that public institutions should gear themselves towards the three principles in the acronym: diversity, equity, and inclusion.

At the centre of most DEI policy is actually a fundamental approach towards things like hiring, promotion, and the distribution of opportunities that Canada long-ago adopted in the 1980s: employment equity. The central idea of employment equity is that public (and private) institutions should tend to look like (have the same composition as) the broader society. It reminds us that if your legislature or university’s senior admin or your corporate boardroom is only 30% women, something is amiss! At the policy level, then, being conscious of DEI principles is really just about being aware of your unconscious biases and to inform hiring and promotion-type decisions.

In traditional employment equity situations, this has tended to mean an ‘all-else-being-equal’ approach: assuming similar skills, records, and accomplishments, you might want to factor in diversity as a tie-breaker. Similarly, if you had 50 applicants and your short-list of five people only includes white men, it’s possible something has gone wrong. Having sat through ‘equity training’ at my university for the various hiring and tenure and promotion committees on which I’ve served, this is about as nefarious as DEI training gets.

Employment equity as a policy has helped to make the Canadian public service more representative, but it has also been shown to have its limits. DEI advocates have thus supplemented the employment equity I describe above with more aggressive measures. For example, my own employer, the University of Waterloo, noting the severe lack of representation of Black and Indigenous members among faculty ranks, engaged in ‘cluster hiring’ a few years ago. This entailed establishing a special line of faculty positions to improve the university’s representation in those two categories. While I think it is perfectly valid to debate the normative desirability of targeted hiring along these lines, there is an onus on critics to either explain why a status quo that has resulted in exclusion is acceptable, or propose alternatives that will meaningfully deal with the problem.

A big weakness among the anti-woke crowd is that most could not even explain what DEI is or even what the acronym stands for, let alone recognize the systemic nature of discrimination and its pernicious effects.

But there are some critics who do know what DEI stands for, and it might be useful to consider their specific objections to DEI.

A recent post by Guelph political scientist Dave Snow at the conservative think tank the Macdonald-Laurier Institute is worth considering, because it shows how anti-DEI claims about ‘activism’ and ‘merit’ and ‘excellence’ and ‘objectivity’ can fall into an abyss of poor logic and self-contradiction.

Professor Snow complains that university research granting agencies have been politicized by DEI considerations, and argues they should be removed. He suggests there are three categories of DEI initiatives, ranging from ‘unobjectionable’ acknowledgements of diversity, to ‘moderate’ advocacy for equity (or ‘affirmative action’), to an ‘activist DEI’ that pursues an ideological ‘social justice’ agenda (that is, the elimination of structures of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia). It is the latter category that most alarms Snow.

In describing this grave threat, Snow makes an number of claims and complaints, some of which go completely unsubstantiated. For example, he writes that “Activist DEI is utterly incompatible with the creation of objective, falsifiable academic research.” To assert this as a blanket statement is, of course, absurd. The aforementioned studies on the impact of names on employment hiring processes is eminently transparent, replicable, and falsifiable. All manner of research relating to racism or diversity has been through rigorous peer review processes; indeed, the very same quality test that more banal institutional or empirical social science research goes through. Snow advances no evidence that a larger proportion of ‘DEI research’ is of worse or more dubious quality than any other area of research.

Snow also complains that the “ambiguous meaning of DEI enables scholars and institutions to hide behind Mild DEI language while advancing Activist DEI research agendas. Canada’s granting agencies claim that equity merely means the ‘removal of systemic barriers.’ But in practice, SSHRC-administered Canada Research Chair positions often exclude applicants who are white and male.” Again, it is valid to make a normative objection against formal exclusions in awarding positions, but Snow’s argument is undercut by his failure to mention that the first 15 years of the CRC program massively underrepresented women (who constituted only 30 percent of those awarded CRCs). Snow’s failure to provide this crucial piece of context - one that suggests his preferred ‘neutral’ system was in fact neither neutral nor purely merit-based - makes his complaint less compelling.

Snow’s describes his core complaint as follows: “many prestigious grants are ultimately awarded to Activist DEI projects. Building directly off preliminary research I completed for The Hub, my new report assessed more than 2,600 individual SSHRC awards between 2022 and 2024. As expected, Activist DEI language was present in as many as 63 percent of project titles for the federal government’s specialized identity-focused ‘Future Challenge’ grants.”

The Future Challenge grants are a special category of targeted grants, many of the ‘global challenges’ targeted by the program lend themselves well to DEI analysis. While I would prefer state granting agencies refrain from directing research to specific areas as a general rule in favour of funding open, curiosity-driven research grant competitions (governments cannot predict the next major policy challenge, so they should leave it to scholars to pursue the widest possible diversity of projects), the idea of ‘priority’ research areas has always been with us. I can think of no reasonable grounds to object to targeted themes only when they involve DEI issues.

Snow also conducted an analysis of the titles of research projects awarded under the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s two biggest research funds, the Insight Grant and Insight Development Grant awards. He writes, “More troublingly, Activist DEI language was present in many of the titles of SSHRC’s prestigious Insight Grants (10 percent) and Insight Development Grants (14 percent). These grants are supposed to promote research excellence; instead, they are funding projects with titles such as ‘Just Kids: Children and White Supremacy’ and ‘Reclaiming the Outdoors: Structures of Resistance to Historical Marginalization in Outdoor Culture,’ with the latter costing taxpayers more than $250,000.”

Here is where Snow’s argument runs itself into the ground. First of all, it’s not at all clear why “DEI”-infused research is ‘activist’ relative to any other research. Snow likely passed by all kinds of project titles relating to topics like religious freedom, climate change adaptation, the Charter’s notwithstanding clause, or the rule of law, just to throw out a few plausible examples. Scholars pursuing research about these things tend to be rather passionate about them, and come with all sorts of normative pre-commitments. We don’t call scientists who want to eradicate cancer ‘activists’ because of their recognition of the harms of cancer, or a scholar pursuing a project on religious freedom an activist because of their likely pre-commitment to that very thing. Why not? Why are people with normative pre-commitments towards diversity, equity, and inclusion ‘activist’ where these other scholars aren’t? Snow might have an answer, but he does not tell us in his post.

Second, Snow specifically juxtaposes “research excellence” against research projects with titles like “Just Kids: Children and White Supremacy.” His post does not explain what makes a study relating to children and white supremacy not meritorious. He appears to believe the reader can tell based on the title alone that this proposal does not have the qualities of an excellent project. I’m not going to pretend that on my own perusal of funded project titles I wouldn’t come across ones that seemed to me to be of low value or even downright silly, but I also recognize the inherent subjectivity of such an appraisal. Snow’s own methodology and analysis here leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to ‘objective’ and ‘falsifiable’.

Finally, it is not clear why it is “troubling” that 10 percent of Insight Grant projects and 14 percent of Insight Development Grant projects have some keywords relating to DEI. What would be the objectively appropriate, or untroubling, proportion of funded projects touching on issues of diversity, equity, or inclusion? 4 percent? Zero percent? I sure as hell can’t answer that question. But I have trouble seeing why 10-15 percent of projects relating to the pressing (and in fact, growing) problems of hatred, discrimination, exclusion, inequity, etc. of our society is somehow terrible. And yet Snow writes as if he has somehow proven this is a problem as a matter of social scientific fact.

Snow’s arguments are among the more informed of a broader anti-DEI movement. The opening of his post troublingly endorses the anti-DEI wave currently swamping the US, and calls for its replication in Canada. While I am sometimes troubled by the more illiberal conceptualizations of DEI, looking around North America today the anti-DEI side of things is far, far more troubling. It is a movement of people who either deny the discrimination, hate, and exclusion endemic to society and our institutions, or who are simply fine with it.

But even pushing aside the moral values at stake in this debate, the central analytical idea that supporters of DEI are ‘activist’ and opponents of DEI are merely for ‘neutrality’ or ‘objectivity’ is utterly vacuous. It’s time to push back against this false framing, and state loudly and clearly that when people on the anti-DEI side of things accuse others of activism, they are telling on themselves.