We need a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion equivalent of Godwin’s law:
“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one”
How about this:
“As an online discussion about DEI grows longer, the probability of a comparison to racism, slavery, and lynching approaches one.”
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit C
We may have found the standard bearer, UT-Austin Professor Ya’Ke Smith “an associate professor of film at the University of Texas at Austin, an award-winning TV and film director, and a public voices fellow with The OpEd Project” who may deserve to have a “law” named after him with this column in The Boston Globe, DEI Denial is the modern day lynching (emphasis added):
In the 19th and 20th centuries, lynching was a White public spectacle meant to warn and intimidate Black people who “disrupted” the status quo, or violated the “law.” These supposed infractions by Black “trouble makers” were arbitrary. A Black person could be killed for not moving off the sidewalk when passing by a White person….
In these times, a traditional lynching is almost universally unacceptable. Most people can’t even fathom the barbaric act happening now; and they can’t believe that their ancestors may have participated in the carnage back then. However, modern day attacks on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies in higher education institutions are the equivalent of the tightened rope, and just as suffocating.
There is a perception among DEI opponents that the initiatives are about exclusion and indoctrination, but as someone who oversaw a DEI office for several years, I know it is neither. The primary functions of DEI are to make people think more deeply about how discrimination is baked into the structures of organizations, and to collectively find solutions to disrupt these inequalities and inequities. These initiatives are meant to provide tools for dismantling historically oppressive and violent systems — systems that impact everyone.
Some professors whose teachings are centered on race are altering their instructions for fear of reprimands from state and local government officials and college administrators, while administrators fear that their support for DEI could cost them their livelihoods.
Yup, disagreeing on the value (or lack of value) of DEI is just like stringing somebody up because of their race, under the 2023 version of Godwin’s Law. That ridiculous comparison is not meant to win hearts and minds, it’s meant to shut people up and advance a political agenda:
Those against DEI want people to become distracted by false notions of difference. This is a distraction that stops the fight against a larger power structure that keeps many Americans from understanding the truth of history. If we see each other as enemies, the real enemy can go unchecked. Implicit bias and hatred surrounds, consumes, and confines us. It is present in textbooks, churches, institutions of higher education, news media, art galleries, and films.
DEI initiatives open the door to face these realities. They break down barriers and offer tools to destroy the walls of racism and hatred that have shaped this country. James Baldwin famously said: “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
Not only do I love America, I am America.
The first recorded lynching in the U.S. happened in 1835 and it wasn’t until 2022— nearly 200 years later—that the Emmett Till Antilynching Act was signed into law in the United States. May it not take another 200 years to put policies and solutions into law that all Americans need to truly be free.
Do we need an Exhibit D?
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