Counterpoint: Anoka-Hennepin’s DEI policies actually do warrant a debate

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Abbey Payeur’s defense of diversity, equity and inclusion elements in the curriculum of the Anoka-Hennepin Public Schools (Opinion Exchange, April 27) does little to either explain what those policies actually are, or more important, what specifically the criticisms being directed at that curriculum by some school board members have gotten wrong.

While she accuses the members of the board of refusing to engage in dialogue, this is exactly what she does when she vilifies one as “a right-wing provocateur” and says that he and others like him “prey on fear and cause divisions because they fear an end to their dominance in society.” Their efforts to have their voices heard are mere “antics” that represent “hyperpartisanship that does not contribute to a civil dialogue or serve the district’s students.”

By using ad hominem attacks of this sort, Payeur is not only not engaging in the kind of “civil dialogue” she presumably favors, but obviously feels she has absolved herself of the need to actually engage in any ideas contrary to her own.

She needs to know, if she doesn’t, that many of the strongest arguments against what is now called “DEI” are coming from known thinkers and writers on the left, not from “hyperpartisan” right-wingers preserving their “dominance” and “privilege.”

Yascha Mounk, for example, a known progressive scholar and writer, currently a professor at Johns Hopkins, recently wrote “The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time,” a powerful book that exhaustively reviews the history of “wokeness” or the DEI movement (which he calls “the Identity Trap” in an effort to examine the issues without the politically charged labels). Mounk is anything but a conservative convert. He fully and proudly embraces equality and the long progressive battle to achieve it, as well as his own very public part of that fight. Yet while he notes that those who battle for those ideas under the name of wokeness or DEI are full of good intentions, he argues that they ultimately will make it harder — much harder — to achieve progress toward the genuine equality he believes is desperately needed. He fears that woke progressives are stuck in an intellectual identity trap that indirectly has made them allies of the MAGA movement.

George Packer, whose thoughtful article in the most recent addition of the Atlantic, “The Campus-Left Occupation That Broke Higher Education,” would appear to agree: “The right always knows how to exploit the excesses of the left.” Pointing to Richard Nixon and the Republican successful efforts in 1968, he notes: “This summer the Democrats will gather again in Chicago, and the activists are promising a big show. Donald Trump will be watching.”

Packer briefly traces the evolution through the emergence of critical race theory, postcolonial studies and identity politics into the toxic intellectual soup on campuses “that are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying campuses today. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.”

So much for “civil dialogue.”

Whatever the intentions or origins or what has made of current progressive ideologies, there is no question that we have seen the transformation of concerns about equality generally into a counterproductive obsession with group identity in all its forms. A new ideology aiming to place each person’s matrix of identities at the center of social, cultural and political life has quickly taken the place of the old ideals. It stifles discourse (as we have seen in Payeur’s commentary), vilifies mutual influence as cultural appropriation, denies that members of different groups can truly understand one another and insists that the way governments treat their citizens should depend on the color of their skin or sexual identity.

This new ideology, of course, flies in the face of traditional American notions of individual rights and identity as reflected in the stated ideal of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. of an America that judges individuals not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. The conflict between this new ideology and generally accepted American mores evokes immediate and visceral, if often inarticulate, responses from conservatives.

But the most powerful critiques are now coming from progressives and the left. Coleman Hughes, for example, another known progressive commentator and writer (who happens to be Black), very recently published his book “The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.” Coleman passionately but carefully argues that departure from the former progressive colorblind ideal has ushered in a new era of fear, paranoia and resentment. Marked by draconian interpersonal etiquette, failed corporate diversity and inclusion efforts, and poisonous race-based policies, DEI and the new ideology it is part of now hurts the very people it was intended to help. At their best, the most that can be hoped for in DEI efforts is a mere illusion of racial equality, and not real, meaningful progress.

It is very disappointing when a person holding herself up as an academic in the field of education is reduced to uncritically spouting ideological platitudes, as Payeur did, in defending what could be questionable curriculum choices in a school district. More important, though, Prof. Payeur would owe to her students and her profession a more nuanced and very much deeper understanding of the very real pitfalls (indeed, dangers) that exist in promoting and adopting a DEI-based philosophy in the instruction of our children as seen by fellow progressive academics and writers.

Frederic W. (Fritz) Knaak is an attorney and former member of the Minnesota Senate.