Buh-Bye DEI

Colorblindness is back baby!

Can you see the whites of my eyes?

Of course you could if we were in-person chatting. And I would see yours as well. You know why that’s important? Because the difference between the whites of my eyes and the iris allows you to know what I’m looking at. That’s why it’s so easy for women to catch us dumb men looking not at their eyes, but at…well not their eyes.

It’s an important aspect of the social creatures we call humans. We need to know what the other human is looking at so we can understand where their attention is directed. It tells us what they value. And if I know what other humans value, then I start to value it as well.

That’s why DEI has to go, or at least be reigned in. Understanding how and if race affects our social structure is interesting and important. But it shouldn’t be centered as the way that our societies are structured.

Now I do have a particular bias and I should reveal it here.

Born Colorblind

It’s easy for me to understand why someone would have an innate tendency to identify their in-group based on skin color. Most people in families are of similar color, so finding your in-group outside of the people in your home might naturally lead to finding people of the same skin color. Ok, fair enough. But I don’t get it.

Being raised in a house with my white grandmother and mother, a Chinese grandfather, an Iranian stepdad all raising my brother and I who are half black with half Mexican cousins did not comport with any familial ties around race, ethnicity, or skin color.

Even in the nuclear family my wife and I have created, nobody in my house has the same skin color. So the “innate” need to identify your in-group based on skin color never took hold for me. It just doesn’t land, as they say.

We could look at that “bias” as a type of social experiment. Is group identification by skin color innate or is it learned? Maybe the “innate” process is the learning itself which is shaped by the familial environment. I have a sneaking suspicion that families of mixed race orientation have a particularly different outlook as compared to non-mixed families.

So what do we know?

Human beings value what they see other humans valuing. We adopt the values of the society in which we live as we see what others are paying attention to. Race and ethnicity have had affects on how our societies are shaped and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s sought to move us away from identifying value in the color of our skin and towards the content of our character. But still, both matter. The key is to identify and promote which matters most.

We do that by paying more attention to whichever matters most in a very public and intentional way. Other humans have to see us paying attention to the content of our character more so than the color of our skin. And we cannot do that when we produce national, corporate, and socio-economic goals framed around ethnicity or skin color.

It’s ok to understand that people who look a certain way have a higher tendency to see things in a particular way. But that lens of color through which we have attempted to understand people should not be primary. The primary lens should be the exhibition of that person’s character. The racial differences should be at least secondary if they are important at all.

In the Rear View

Dismantling DEI programs or at least curbing their primacy in governmental and corporate structures is important to remind us that our race, gender, and sexuality is not the primary lens through which to see ourselves or others. Nor should it be a substitute for character. (Please read that last line again, slowly.)

During a 60 Minutes interview, Morgan Freeman once told Mike Wallace that the best way to move forward with racial issues is to stop talking about them. Now that might sound overly simplistic, but there is great truth in that. People value what others value and we identify what others value based on what they talk about, look at, and raise to the forefront.

I hope we continue the official devaluation of race in how we see our friends and family, and get back to the goal of our Civil Rights heroes: “Not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character.”