DEI, Intellectual Consistency, and Philosophical Racism

There's been some energetic engagement at our house since last night, over this "Diversity Digest" newsletter by Dr. Sharita Golden, Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer of Johns Hopkins Medicine:

This stirred such controversy that she later "apologized" but her apology was not an apology but a statement that she could have worded things better. But the real problem is that her initial statement lacked all internal consistency and she was not aware or it, or apparently that consistency was important.

Golden is very sharp, and yet thinks about race and racism in the most superficial and contradictory and sometimes disingenuous terms. As to her disingenuity, she uses the word "privilege." She defines it as "unearned" benefit, such as being born white or able-bodied. But then she includes both people who have learned English and those who have worked and saved to, for example, own rental houses as possessing unearned "privilege." But EVERYONE is privileged in some way. When everyone is privileged, the term loses all its meaning; except perhaps as a hierarchy of privilege in some way, but a hierarchy is not how she uses it.

And this over-broadness requires her to reduce the meaning of "privilege" to a very circumscribed meaning and usage that only fits one category of speaking, which is philosophical racism.

As to contradictions, she lists "able-bodied" as an unearned privilege. In this case, being born healthy and functional is privilege compared to someone born with, say, spina bifida. But this also includes, and this is something that Golden ignores, being born with a brain that can achieve the intellectual heights that Golden has achieved, becoming a Professor of Medicine at one of the world's greatest medical schools. In other words, she doesn't consider the unearned (born with it) high intellectual potential to achieve greatness as a "privilege" comparable to the privilege of being born normal and healthy.

And furthermore, she doesn't acknowledge that she, even though being born black, achieved far more professional success than most who were supposedly born with racially-oppressive white privilege.

And the severity of the contradictions and inconsistencies lay in the way in which DIE has been constructed. With all other simple truths, such as, say, "Nuclear Power Now" or some such, there is a vast pyramid of truth, facts, interlaced facts, some facts which nullify other facts, and yet all together produce a mountain of knowledge that rise to the capstone of, again, say, "Nuclear Power Now." The brief summational statement is the RESULT of the a great quantity of knowledge and a winnowing of the facts which it's built upon.

DIE, on the other hand, begins with the summation, and creators and proponents of this summation only go down a layer or two in the underlying knowledge, and ignore the tremendous amount of interrelationships of facts, winnowing of contradictory facts, finding internal relationships between facts, and discovering what the truth is most likely to be. In other words, DIE is shallow and hollow, and because of only its personal desirability, it's intellectually insubstantial nature is ignored.

This is why Professor Golden could feel free to create a list of "privileges" that caused so much controversy. She, and the whole realm of DIE, was never tested for internal consistency. And so when she exposed DIE to the light of day, she was surprised that others could see any inconsistencies and would protest what was otherwise so obvious in her own chosen pseudo-intellectual bubble.

People like Professor Golden live in the real world but imagine an extra fantasy world, like Hansel and Gretel and the Witch's gingerbread house with the blazing oven. And they all imagine and agree that their shared fantasy is somehow real. But others, facing the oven, do recognize it as a pernicious fantasy.