Seeking a better path to social justice

The current one is outraging too many people and helping Trump

Former Harvard President Claudine Gay

Here’s the tricky thing about social justice, by whatever acronym it be known: achieving it fairly, which I think most people want, defies facile politics. What some axe-wielding partisans see as matters of principle may more usefully be viewed as questions of degree.

The issue is on fire after the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay, in the wake of her stumbles on combating antisemitism (only when it “crosses into conduct,” she told Congress) and accusations of plagiarism. Some believe the African-American academic was hounded out by racists on a witch hunt, while others are convinced that her incompetence illustrates why diversity hires will destroy civilization.

I’d like to argue for a more balanced approach. It is not “the mushy middle,” as one diversity hire of a senior editor once told me in acid tones, but rather the golden mean.

To oppose diversity efforts altogether – to simply declare that “DEIA” must be killed, as some now do – is to ignore the inadmissible reality of Americans of African descent, among other things. The huge income and wealth gaps between them and the others are unacceptably high a century and a half after the abolition of slavery (as the incredible below chart from Pew shows, whites have tenfold the wealth); the ghettoization is corrosive to society; the crime and incarceration rates are, despite improvements, still hugely disproportional); the broken family incidence is unhealthy (about 70% of black kids born out of wedlock).

Unless one believes there is something natural about this disaster – which would indeed be a racist view – then it should be obvious that corrective measures are needed. And there is nothing wrong per se with applying corrective measures to a free market; the almost universally accepted concept of progressive taxation, by which the wealthier are taxed at higher marginal rates, is a form of exactly that.

But it is also wrong to ignore the corrosive nature of affirmative action that goes to the extreme advocated by the far left in the United States, where it has ballooned into a veritable cult that not only aims to fix the problems of African-Americans but has fostered obsessions about the marginalized and the oppressors and taken concerns about self-identification, especially regarding gender, to absurd extremes.

One example is the nonsensical narrative that basically says Jews are “white” and therefore “the oppressor,” which from a certain mindless perspective excuses and even justifies all crimes against them. The apparent prevalence of this thinking on elite US campuses is how Congress came to be discussing antisemitism — and in turn why the antisemitism question rapidly ballooned into a wider discourse on so-called wokeness.

A key aspect of wokeness, and to my mind the most compelling element thereof, is the campaign for diversity of race and gender.