What the DEI Era Taught us About The Rhetorical Power of Ambiguity
Clarity is poison to contemporary Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives
In April 2021, a leader in the field of Rhetoric and Composition announced he would boycott a prominent organization in the field, the Council of Writing Program Administrators, because of an incident he perceived as racist. He asked for other colleagues to join him and even produced a petition for all to sign. I, an erstwhile professor in the same field, along with a couple others, thought the rationale was insufficient because we never got an explanation of what, exactly, the racist incident was. For asking this, we (mostly “I”) were called insensitive and upholders of a white supremacist system. I explained that I was not going to boycott an organization and sign a petition for an incident no one would explain to me. I did not ask for hard evidence or attempt to discredit the boycotter’s scholarly work, both things I was accused of doing. I simply wanted to know what happened.
The first thing that came to my mind after being vilified for asking a basic question was why the racist incident was not being described: either nothing racist happened or nothing could be proven. It was clear that clarification was not coming; asking “what happened?” (that is, asking for clarity) was a moral failing. Why? Because clarity is poison to contemporary Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. It’s the primary reason for their current demise.
Clarity can be scrutinized, and scrutiny can expose that this particular emperor was never wearing any clothes. Clarity demystifies, and mystification was a primary tool of contemporary DEI. The industry instead relied on ambiguity. Ambiguity breeds confusion, and confused people are easier to manipulate, especially confused people who feel it is best to defer to the experts.
The Rhetorical Power of Ambiguity
The semantic game is all about ambiguity. For example, racial discrimination is not racism if done to a white person. Core tenets of contemporary DEI are made to be deliberately confusing. In the case I described, the mandate to “listen to all minority voices” was put forth while refusing to listen to my minority voice! Which minority voice counts? And what of microaggressions? Based on their official definition, anything can be a microaggression, and people will stay quiet before they risk offending people with innocuous statements.
Perhaps the most detrimental ambiguity is the concept of “disparate impact”: attribution of racism to every disparity between white people (or “white-adjacent” people, another ambiguity) and others without looking into the matter.
Disparate impact is seen as proof of “systemic” or “institutional” racism: the idea that something in the way an institution is structured must cause the disparity, and that something is rarely clarified. This is the idea that racism is something that is just in the air. It is unfalsifiable (the evidence is literally invisible) yet a part of post-civil rights case law! In actuality, disparate impact only shows us an effect; it does not directly identify a cause. Disparate impact’s only signal is that we should look into an issue, not determine a single and certain cause of it. There is no further assessment.
This is why the Department of Justice recently ended disparate impact litigation and instead mandates that institutions show proof of actual discriminatory conduct and end the immediate presumption of racial discrimination based on disparate outcomes.
This policy is compliant with the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition of discrimination based on immutable characteristics like race. Colorblindness was supposed to be a constitutional mandate for the last 60 years, regardless of how academics and activists felt about it.
The Demand for Clarity
But haven’t people been demanding clarity this entire time? Those academic voices unencumbered by fear of ostracization have been calling out the ambiguity and fallacious reasoning of DEI initiatives before the term gained prevalence. Haven’t we been trying to reinforce colorblindness and point out the gaps in reasoning and hasty generalizations that have been intrinsic to disparate impact theory for years? Why is this happening now? There are two reasons.
One reason is a wider demand for clarity and fairness; the public got involved. The reactions in the aftermath of October 7th, 2023, when Hamas took 251 Israeli hostages, showed the world how far left activism ignores nuance: people were either good or bad with no consideration of context. What’s more, the failure of university presidents to condemn the acts opened many people’s eyes to the fact that something was severely amiss in academia.
The second and most consequential reason was the ending of affirmative action in the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard ruling, which enforced the need for evidence and transparency in the admissions process. This logic has been extended to hiring practices and institutions beyond higher education. If racial favoritism is wrong in admissions, it is probably wrong in other funding, affinity groups, housing, and other contexts.
One of the consequences of the SFFA ruling was a re-clarification of colorblind ideology, the evaluation of people’s character irrespective of race, which was supposed to be a constitutional mandate for the last 60 years, regardless of how academics and activists felt about it. The rejection of colorblindness by people of color confused most Americans because it, too, was being redefined to mean blindness to racism or to the beauty of non-white races.
If the DEI era leaves us with anything durable, it is the lesson that ambiguity rewards those who control definitions and vilifies those who ask for evidence. The remedy is clarity. Asking for clarity is not a moral failing. On the contrary, it is the first obligation of anyone committed to truth.