The thing about Yglesias is that frequently it's difficult to tell the difference between someone asking provocative questions and someone just trolling for clicks. His latest straddles this line.
The thesis is one that he keeps returning to about "woke" DEI practices. I share some skepticism of the efficacy of these programs, but I often find arguments against them to be in bad faith. This argument is similar, as it caroms back and forth between good faith and bad.
His argument is that a lot of DEI practices are similar to the British class system in a John LaCarre story he just read. (This is typical of his writing, where he takes a personal experience and shoves it through a pre-existing prism.) He takes his experience at Harvard learning to tie a bow tie (honestly) and compares it to an upwardly mobile character in the LaCarre story who wants to assimilate the manners and affect of a gentleman by working at a posh "public" boarding school in Britain.
The interesting nugget is the idea that "manners maketh man" is a deeply elitist idea, whether it's the black tie events he went to at Harvard, a LaCarre character peeling an apple "the wrong way" or the sort of language codes that arise in DEI training. Yglesias went to Dalton and extrapolates from that very elitist experience all private schools today. Some of what is frustrating is that a lot of these elite American schools (I teach at one!) make a substantive effort to create a more diverse student body. We are a relatively small school with the children of hedge fund managers and students who are, for lack of a better word, refugees. Fifth generation students at the school and students who will be the first in their family to go to college.
We really don't care whether you can or cannot tie a bow tie.
However, the idea that we can tweak language practices to create inclusive communities seems to lack evidence to support it. It seems precisely like the strategy that an English major would come up with. There is also the psychology of "jargon" which is to create a language that is inherently exclusive. I tried to read Liam Kofi Bright's essay where he argues that "culture wars" are really just "white psychodrama". Interesting idea! However, the philosophy jargon immediately held my understanding at arm's length. I would have to research a new term every paragraph just to understand his point.
In Bright's essay (apparently), he argues that DEI practices are really just etiquette lessons like learning how to tie a bow tie or peel an apple the right way or know how a sherry glass is different from a port glass.
Calling them etiquette lessons that instill a sense of cultural cache is a great example of that line between provoking interesting questions and being a troll.
However, in trying to approach this criticism in good faith, I would say this. A great deal of DEI training revolves around language norms, because the people designing them are "language people." They spend a great deal of time thinking about and using language. What DEI practices rarely address are institutions and structures.
Example: Our school has been a constant cycle of various forms of DEI training that accelerated after George Floyd's murder. We recently hired a new Head of School - a cis, White, male alum. The trustee committee that hired him was laudably diverse and trained in bias and all that, but in the end, they did the most expected thing ever and hired the straight, White guy whom they were comfortable with rather than really shaking up our institution. We spend a great deal of money on various projects and window appeal, when we could be expanding scholarships. We tweak our language all the time, we try and bring in diverse faculty and students, but many of our basic institutions don't change. This is especially true of the world at large.
There is, I think, a very real, emotional appeal to knowing the shibboleths of inclusive language, but one that doesn't actually change people's minds or the world's practices. It's a self-congratulatory exercise. (It's also incredibly burdensome for teachers of good faith to try and keep up with constantly changing expectations, but that's a separate issue.)
What's more, I think it naturally excludes those who are not attuned to language. The "education gap" in DEI practices isn't simply about the elite cultural institutions "indoctrinating" their students. It's about the sort of literate, word-oriented people who go to liberal arts colleges finding their natural métier. There is a selection bias at work here. It's not that you go to Wesleyan and become indoctrinated in "wokeness." The language of "wokeness" naturally appeals to the sort of people who are at Wesleyan.
Our hardest demographic to reach appears to be our White male students. Surprised, right? This is why we call them privileged; they are. And yet, the use of "privilege" as a teaching tool only really works if you're willing to unpack what the word means. If you're a White (or Asian), upper middle class student who does good or even very good academic work, you're not going to feel privileged in the college admissions process compared to a Black athlete. You are! You most definitely are, when you understand the nuances of language and cultural context in the concept of "privilege." But it doesn't feel that way, and so intellectual concepts run headlong into the brick wall of emotional experience.
This is why calling your average Trumpist "privileged" isn't going to work, and in fact will backfire. Trumpists are typically not people who revel in exploring the nuance of language.
In understanding DEI practices as "etiquette lessons," Yglesias seems intent on grinding his favorite ax. He's denigrating the practice, with what seems like trollish intent. However, if we understand them as etiquette lessons, we might instead focus on the limitations of this work, and find a way to better practices. I'm not at all convinced that this is Yglesias' objective, but I do think it's an interesting lens.
To give a counterexample, I think the concept of "representation" actually does have merit. Seeing interracial or same sex couples in car commercials does change minds precisely because it doesn't exist in the realm of language norms. In fact, the generally more socially liberal attitudes from Gen Z are more likely to be rooted in simply seeing a diversity of people and characters in media than reading Robin DiAngelo.
Monday was MLK Day, and we - as always - did special programming around it. In the past, this next week has been a time when someone will write racist graffiti somewhere in the school. Correlation is not causation, but it does suggest that we aren't reaching precisely the people we need to be with current "best practices." The use of affinity groups will hopefully build resilience and emotional well being in our students of color; they should feel like the belong here. That's the goal.
Are we doing the most efficacious things to make that a reality? I have my doubts.
