The Arrogance of Equity

Unwittingly, the Monoculture just issued a manifesto.

Perusing this morning’s ArtsJournal, my eyes landed upon Backlash: White Male Artists Are Losing Their Careers by AJ blogger Alan Harrison. Saying to myself, “Tell me something I don’t know,” I clicked through. Perhaps never before has one of the adherents of equity in the arts displayed himself so nakedly. Let’s examine him.

It begins the way such missives must, by foregrounding the author’s identity. He’s an Ashkenazi Jew. “To non-whites, I’m a white guy. Thus, I’m a member of ‘Schrödinger’s Whites,’ hated by white supremacists and non-white activists alike.” Harrison does not bother to explain how non-white activists have come to hate Jews. It is via the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion framework that he subsequently endorses.¹ While DEI initiatives often pay lip-service to antisemitism, the underlying progressivism holds three dubious propositions as true. One is that whites are the perpetrators, not the victims, of racism.² Two is that the Jews are white.³ Three is that Israel is a uniquely illegitimate country.⁴ Of course they hate Jews. So do their white fellow travelers.

A friend of Harrison’s sent him a message:

“A huge number of artists, especially in the theater, have had their careers just halted, mid-career, and it’s very, very disturbing. I believe there’s going to be a lot of backlash and a lot of lawsuits, because white people are also protected by the Constitution.”

I hope so. The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism is suing a publicly funded performing arts organization on behalf of one of its teaching artists who was subjected to DEI training that claimed, among other things, that whiteness “divides each and all of us from the earth, the sun, the wind, the water, the stars, [and] the animals that roam the earth.” Such lawsuits have proven successful. “Surely the radical activists never expected anyone to turn the administrative state against them, but that’s what we did,” said Stanley Goldfarb, who runs Do No Harm, another organization committed to fighting such progressivism in medicine. “And it worked—even under the Biden administration.” Let the lawsuits be in number like unto the stars and the animals.

Harrison replied:

“Here’s the prism at hand for a lot of artists, especially those of color: they never even had a shot to start their careers in the first place. That’s why the goal is equity, not just equality. Pendulums swing and folks will always suffer, but ultimately, we’ll never know the daily discrimination issues that a Black person (or Latinx or Asian, etc.) deals with on a daily basis. I’ve had people in the industry treat me differently because I’m Jewish. Unearned privilege is hard to cede, but being shut out because of unearned discrimination is worse. In any case, the nonprofit version of the industry is going to have to serve community needs (including equity) over artistic vision — or go under.”

I’ve heard versions of these arguments before. His interlocutor replied meekly. I would not have. For one, I can envision well enough what it’s like to deal with “daily discrimination… on a daily basis” because I have a moral imagination. If whites were utterly incapable of empathetic reasoning about discrimination, then the situation of people of color in this country would be what it was in 1780. Second, if my privilege, such as I have any, is “unearned,” then how does it become earned when arts organizers take it away and give it to someone whose skin color they like better? What did I do to “earn” that act of discrimination? Third, what kind of art organization sacrifices artistic vision in favor of anything, to say nothing of the hand-wavy desideratum of “equity”?

Harrison continues (I took out some tiresome line breaks):

The careers of white artists who used to work all the time — extraordinarily gifted people who do consistently incredible work, are in jeopardy. But… Think of all the equally-talented artists who never had the chance to have a career in the arts because of nothing more than the pigmentation of their skin. Making a living in the arts is not a birthright, even to the talented.

In other words, you should eat your spinach because children are starving in Africa. Did those artists, suffering from discrimination, lie on the ground and accept their fate? No, they created their own opportunities, and loudly accused the organizations of failing to recognize basic humanity until they relented and reformed. And now the Harrisons of the world expect the excluded white males to lie on the ground and accept their fate. The only reason one might think that they will is because you think that they’re an inferior order of human being. This is in fact the progressive view in some circles, that whiteness is a state of endemic moral inferiority, just as Jewishness is supposedly a state of endemic moral inferiority.

In a clear description of equity, the word “fair” has to be removed. Equity isn’t fair. When the playing field has been tilted against a number of groups of people for multiple generations, the leveling thereof can’t be seen as “fair,” only “equitable.” Longstanding discriminatory resolutions are just that: resolutions.

And that’s why good people hate equity, and bad people love it. The sense of fairness is hard-wired. Babies have it. Primates have it. It is the fundamental factor of prosocial behavior. Adults who don’t have it are sociopaths.

White, male artists don’t have to disappear. That doesn’t serve anyone. In fact, what it does is place a line down the middle of our relationships with people…. We’ve seen the perils of painting people into a corner. They tend to become enraged. Violent.

This is illustrated with a photo of January 6 protesters. It’s comical to think that white male artists are going to become violent over any of this, or that the January 6 crowd typifies them in any way. But white male artists are in fact being made to disappear by the DEI priorities of the organizations, as I’ve already documented. Why they should willingly participate in a patently unfair, anti-humanistic, sociopathic vision of progressivism is not clear to me.

Nevertheless, sensing a revolt, Harrison cautions the DEI implementers to enlist us gently into our own subjugation.

As DEI implementation has no moment of victory over an unnamed foe, but rather a steady series of positive events based on the idea of making ourselves better people, the engendering of crowds of support can only force those who (despite everything) refuse to change to become more isolated in their habits.

In a country where 1/3 of the population is (and always has been) comprised of supporters of white supremacists, maybe that’s too much to ask. But gathering support perhaps ought to include people from all potential sources; even white male artists.

I have no idea where that one-third number comes from, but it does happen to be the portion of Americans who identify as conservative. So here’s one layer of arrogance: the idea that the world is divided into DEI-supporting progressives, and bigots.

The icing of hubris on that cake of grandiosity is this notion that it’s the lofty destiny of Harrison and his fellow do-gooders to take up some program of self-betterment, for the ultimate purpose of forcing the sinners into isolation. 19th century WASPs were not so full of themselves.

Harrison’s document is essentially the manifesto of the Monoculture. It says, almost in so many words, that the purpose of the arts and their attendant organizations is to put aside their artistic visions and devote themselves to forcing everyone who questions the fairness, humanism, and sanity of DEI to survive in the margins. It’s not racial justice, it’s Stalinism in blackface. Harrison says that the organizations must adopt this pernicious ideology, or be destroyed. I say instead that any organization that adopts it deserves to be destroyed.

1. Richard Cravatts, Jews Don’t Count in Diversity and Inclusion Discussions (2022); Armin Rosen, Campus Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Excludes and Targets Jews (2022); Jay Greene, Ph.D. and James Paul, Inclusion Delusion: The Antisemitism of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Staff at Universities (2021); Adam Milstein, The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies: a danger to Jews and all Americans (2022); Yaron Steinbuch, Google diversity head in 2007: Jews have ‘insatiable appetite for war’ (2021); Elizabeth Redden, DEI Training Gone Wrong? Two Stanford University mental health practitioners say a diversity, equity and inclusion program launched by the campus counseling center created a hostile environment for Jewish employees (2021).

2. In fact the progressive redefinition of racism as “prejudice plus power” makes it impossible to describe whites as the targets of racism even if they’re victims of hate crimes, which they are, at higher rates than any other racial group except blacks. That this definition makes antisemitism disappear should be seen as deliberate. Additionally, the idea that the Jews are too powerful is an old antisemitic trope. That they consequently can’t be victims of racism is a new one.

The inability to reconcile two of these ideas, that Jews are white and whites are not targets of racism, is in my opinion the ultimate reason for the postponement of “Philip Guston Now,” which demonstrated that at least one of them was false.

3. It came to light last year after Whoopi Goldberg characterized the Holocaust as white-on-white violence, and therefore not a racial crime per se, that even the Anti-Defamation League had a couple years previously redefined racism as “The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.” If it seems like Harrison is suppressing an obvious contradiction in his beliefs, such suppression is necessary for Jews to carry on as progressives.

4. In 2020 more than a hundred progressive organizations signed an open letter calling for a boycott of the Anti-Defamation League due to its support of Israel, or more particularly, for its “history and ongoing pattern of attacking social justice movements led by communities of color, queer people, immigrants, Muslims, Arabs, and other marginalized groups, while aligning itself with police, right-wing leaders, and perpetrators of state violence,” by which they mean Israel. Activists associated with Black Lives Matter commonly express solidarity with the Palestinian cause. The 2016 platform of the Movement for Black Lives accused Israel of genocide and apartheid and its leaders characterized it as an “occupied state.”