I often joke that I am the undefeated champion of victimhood bingo. It’s as if God had an unexpected surplus yield of victimhood traits one season and decided to sprinkle them all on me the day he made me.
“I’ll make this one a female - a black female. But not just any black female, a black African female born in a Third World country. And she will later become an immigrant. I think I’ll also make her be raised by a single Mum - a poor, homeless one.” And, as goes the Genesis verse: ‘God looked at what he had made, and saw that it was very good’
In fact, it turns out some good would come from these unforgiving combination of traits - in theory, at least. In 2020, following George Floyd’s death, the world suddenly flipped in favour of ‘people like me’. Virtually overnight, I became the theoretical poster-girl for a new social order - one in which the pale males dramatically sunk straight to the bottom of the hierarchy like the Titanic in fast-forward. I, on the other hand, rose to the top of the food chain.
In theory, I should’ve welcomed this new obsession with diversity, equity, and inclusion. Why would I reject something that so greatly benefitted someone like me. Rational choice would dictate that the opportunities and the newfound social advantages that came with all these victimhood points I found myself in possession of would make me throw my full weight behind the ideology. After all, I could now weaponise every real and imagined disadvantage I was perceived to have - and, my God, I could make a shit-load of money doing it.
Yet, there I was. Uncomfortable, unsettled, and unwilling to jump on the bandwagon. Why so… ‘irrational’?
Thinking back, I now realise it was always inevitable that my personality and my principles would’ve led me down this path. I was always a competitive child, a grafter, an ‘all or nothing’ kinda kid. There was no greater feeling than earning something in my own right on an equal footing to my peers. Sometimes you watch people on TV, gleeful, holding a giant cheque after winning some large cash sum and they all say the same thing: “I’m shocked. I’ve never won anything in my life!”
‘I never win anything’ is also a common complaint of many on online message boards like Quora and Reddit, despairing at their apparent mediocrity and ill luck in life. I, on the other hand, pretty much ‘won’ everything growing up - I ‘won’ at school, I ‘won’ at sports, I ‘won’ student elections, I ‘won’ competitions I entered (she says, humbly).
Those who knew me growing up will tell you I was a precocious, stubborn child who wouldn’t let anyone do anything for me. I challenged the ideas of adults around me with a confidence that caught them completely off guard. I’m sure, thinking back, what they were really thinking is, “this kid is a smug little shit”.
So, when DEI came along and gullible liberal do-gooders suddenly saw me as nothing but a dark-skinned damsel in distress, a victim of a white-supremacist, patriarchal system who needed to be freed from the clutches of the Wicked Whites of the West, that naturally triggered a tinnitus-inducing number of alarm bells in my mind. But, more than that, I felt that - in reducing me to nothing but my race and background - those well-meaning ‘anti-racism allies’ erased the parts of me that truly mattered: that I was a free-thinking, strong-willed, resilient person with agency. That hurt.
So, when I started a Master’s of Science in Comparative Social Policy at the University of Oxford, I used that chance to immerse myself in the literature and data on why society is the way it is. I wanted to understand how scientific methods and mathematics could help us grapple with the true nature of social problems - their causes and consequences. I wasn’t interested in disprovable theories, but hard data and rigorous analysis.
And then something extraordinary happened. In 2020, I was appointed by the government to sit on an expert panel to look into the issue of racial disparities in the UK. The panel was not chosen for it’s ‘DEI credentials’, but on merit - it included a high profile astrologist, a leading economist, one of the country’s top Doctors, one of the most senior educators in the country.
The culmination was a 250 page report which meticulously laid out, through the latest available evidence and a plethora of original analyses from esteemed academics, that the causes and consequences of inequalities were highly complex. The evidence did not suggest ‘people of colour’ were being systematically discriminated against in the UK, nor that some nefarious forces dictating their life chances were at play.
In fact, some minority groups were thriving far beyond the white British population, although some were not. The existence of disparities - as we on the panel evidenced - was not necessary evidence of discrimination.
But, no single event than the reaction to this report by the left and liberal media classes revealed to me the true nature of the entire discourse on race and equality. The panel were lambasted as white supremacist sympathisers for daring to suggest that not all minorities were disadvantaged. I learnt that day that, in the mind of these ‘allies’, it was not about evidence, about truth, all along.
(Aamna Mohdin, Guardian, 29 Apr 2021)
The discourse on diversity, equity, and inclusion was being driven by an activist class full of mediocre people trying to gerrymander the rules of fairness in their favour, motivated by a vendetta against capitalism and the West. And, dare I say it, many simply had a vendetta against white people. The sanctimonious, liberal self-professed ‘allies’ with their respectable, intellectual veneer were merely passengers in a ride in which people of an intellectually deficient disposition were at the wheel.
It was clear nobody in our political class was taking this seriously. So, when Kemi Badenoch, the UK’s Conservative Secretary of State for Business and Trade and Minister for Women and Equalities asked me to join her team to support the delivery of her equalities agenda, I obliged. One of my duties was to oversee the work of an independent panel looking at the state of DEI practices in the UK corporations - a profoundly eye-opening experience.
The UK makes for an interesting case when it comes to DEI. Fundamentally, our equalities legal framework - which is pretty much the strongest anywhere in the world - leaves no room for ‘positive discrimination’, unlike in America. Many ethnic minority groups - Indians and black Africans, for instance - are on course to, or have already, overtaken the white British population insofar as life prospects are concerned. Whilst things are on the up for many ethnic minority groups, things are stagnating or declining for many ‘white communities’.
It is also completely socially unacceptable to be - or to even be seen to be - racist in any mainstream setting in England. Unlike in America, where the first amendment effectively protects racially offensive views, the (albeit questionable) legal and cultural system in Britain polices racist thoughts and views heavily.
Despite this, DEI has firmly taken root. According to LinkedIn data published in 2020, the UK employs almost twice as many D&I workers (per 10,000 employees) as any other country. A 2022 report based on Freedom of Information requests to 6,000 public bodies in Britain estimates there are around 10,000 DEI jobs costing the taxpayer over half a billion pounds a year. You can land a job in a public hospital as a diversity manager earning nearly £80,000 a year working alongside specialist Doctors who earn £60,000. Let that sink in…
Given this huge focus and spend on DEI, you would think the evidence shows it has a significantly positive impact. Wrong. A leading annual survey of British businesses finds that only 25% bother to consult data before implementing new DEI measures, and 1 in 4 also say their approach to DEI is in reaction to societal events such as Black Lives Matter. Far too many companies don’t bother to review what the effect of their DEI initiatives are, nor do they care to know whether DEI is value for money.
There is also ample academic evidence to show DEI practices rarely lead to better outcomes for those they purport to help, and virtually no evidence to show they meaningfully reduce bias. Where positive outcomes are found, causality is impossible to determine (Urwin et al.’s 2013 systematic review and Kalev and Dobbin’s 2020 analysis of 30 years of diversity training data are good places to start for those interested).
I have not arrived at my views about DEI purely because I have broadly conservative leanings and I in any way feel compelled to prop up conservative narratives. I don’t. Nor so I have aspirations to be a controversial, contrarian conservative commentator. I am essentially just a data nerd and policy buff who is unafraid to say what I believe to be true, irrespective of the consequences.
My views about DEI stem from years of looking at evidence on social inequalities, and are buttressed by my professional experience.
Finally, I want to clear something up. I’m not “against” diversity or inclusion. I completely believe that a diversity of thought and experiences can enrich institutions and that people should be given the opportunities to participate fully in society.
But I fear that fairness, meritocracy, and science have been crucified in the mass worshipping of DEI. I hope those crucial principles will emerge from the tomb into which they have been banished and live to reign supreme again in the discourse on race and equality.
Great read and good on you for truthfully addressing the elephant in the room. I would recommend giving this a read if you haven't already:
https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/
The long term effects of the DEI industrial-complex could end up being fatal and far-reaching. I still have faith that there's time to turn the ship around though!