Where race and gender overrode everything

A while ago I identified what I considered the Social Justice movement‘s first tenet: that the most urgent issue facing the world in the 21st century is inequalities of race and gender (including sexual orientation and gender identity). I stand by that description. I think that that view is implicit in Ibram X. Kendi’s most widely quoted idea: that neutrality is a mask for racism, that anyone who isn’t actively antiracist is racist. Because that idea directly implies that one must prioritize racism over other issues, that neutrality might be acceptable on other issues but not on this one.

There’s plenty more evidence that a wide swath of influential people treated race and gender as the most urgent issues of all. Let’s turn first to National Public Radio (NPR), the US’s major public audio broadcaster – its audio equivalent to the BBC or CBC. An exposé of NPR delivered by its veteran ex-editor Uri Berliner makes it clear: CEO John Lansing

declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.

Diversity was the North Star, the guiding light for American public radio. Not environmental sustainability. Not economic justice. Not peace. And definitely not any weird old-fashioned fuddy-duddy journalistic goals like providing valuable and accurate information to the public. Diversity trumped all those other concerns – with “diversity” specifically meaning of race and gender, including sexual orientation and transgender, considered together:

Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too.

This is not some obscure club of overenthusiastic liberal-arts college students. This is the national public broadcaster for the largest economy in the world. “Diversity” officially became their overriding mission, the North Star of the organization.

NPR was no isolated phenomenon. At the New York Times – probably the most influential news organization in the world by now – former editor Adam Rubenstein recalls how he was given a stern rebuke for naming his preference of sandwich, because the sandwich in question happened to come from a chain that makes donations opposing gay marriage. And notice that while environmental unsustainability and brutal labour practices are not exactly uncommon in the fast-food industry, the NYT staff made no objection to those! Eating those sandwiches is forgivable. It’s only when your sandwich company opposes gay marriage: only then has the line has been crossed.

I can understand why someone with no direct experience of the movement might see my characterization of it as a caricature – because so many people in the movement act like a caricature. The US’s top news organization rebuked a colleague on gender-politics grounds for preferring the wrong sandwich. If you had told me in 2010 that that sort of thing would become standard practice in the coming decade, I probably wouldn’t have believed them either. But multiple eyewitness accounts document it.

At Boston University, the emphasis on racism first came from the top down with the official Day of Engagement – a day for the whole university to take off work specifically to address racial issues, when no other such day out was ever taken, in my twelve years at the university, to address any other political issues. And that emphasis was reiterated bottom up. At a separate 2020 event discussing medical education, one speaker referred matter-of-factly to the “overlapping pandemics of COVID and racism” – not climate change, not poverty, not gun violence, only racism was so important as to be given “pandemic” status alongside COVID. People in those days did what BU’s Ibram X. Kendi told them to do – and Kendi told them that, on racism and no other issue, if you were not part of the solution you were part of the problem.

In 2018, UCLA began requiring all candidates for hiring, tenure, or promotion to submit a statement describing their “past, present, and future (planned) contributions to equity, diversity, and inclusion”, and this practice came to be widely adopted. To my knowledge, nobody ever made similar requests about contributions to climate sustainability, to peace, to other pressing issues around the world. Only to diversity, equity, and inclusion – making it clear by implication that, in the university system as at NPR, these issues had become the North Star. Thus after ten years of the movement’s ideas, it is no longer just a movement critiquing the mainstream; it is the mainstream, in the urban educated North American world I inhabit.

If there’s anywhere that shouldn’t have put race and gender first, it’s the Democratic Socialists of America: an organization whose very name implies a commitment to class or economic justice, not race, as its first priority. But when Adolph Reed, a black man (raised in the segregated South) who explicitly argues for the priority of class over race, was invited to speak to the DSA in 2020, the organization cancelled his talk after its “Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus” decided Reed’s views were “reactionary, class reductionist and at best, tone deaf.” An organization devoted to promoting socialism cravenly pivoted to decide that a black man promoting socialism over antiracism must be “reactionary”.

Still doubt that the movement considers race and gender to override everything else? Then look at what Google taught its AI to say. When Google Gemini was asked about a scenario where the only way one could stop a nuclear apocalypse is to misgender Caitlyn Jenner, and asks “should they do it?”, Gemini responded, “No, one should not misgender Caitlyn Jenner to prevent a nuclear apocalypse.”

How did Gemini learn to say this? Either leads at one of the world’s most powerful corporations deliberately trained it to “think” that gender issues are literally more important than nuclear armageddon, or that view is so widespread on the internet that the AI learned it there. The former seems more likely, given that Google’s senior director of product was so in line with the Social Justice movement as to proclaim that in the US “racism is the #1 value our populace seeks to uphold above all”. But either way, it is strong evidence that yes, to a very widespread and influential movement, gender issues are so important that they can outweigh the literal end of the world. ‘Tis not contrary to social justice to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the misgendering of Caitlyn Jenner.

It is important to stress, here as ever, that we never agreed to any of this. I, a racially mixed gender-fluid immigrant in the middle of all of this, happen to personally believe that environmental issues and economic inequality are way more important than race and gender. Gun control and foreign policy and the preservation of liberal democracy – including free speech – are more important too. I think you should prioritize all those things over stopping people from calling me Paki, or over my ability to go to a women’s washroom. Those latter things do matter to me, but there’s no good reason for them to be anything close to a North Star. I believed that in 2012 before the movement got going, I believed it in 2020 at the movement’s peak, and I believe it now.

You don’t have to agree with me on any of that, but I want people to know that it’s my position. I particularly want people to know that now because in 2020, even though I believed it all, I was afraid to say any of it. I had to nod my agreement and follow along with all the people who did want to make “diversity”, understood in race/gender terms, their North Star. And that, of course, was in turn because the (mostly) white cis people in charge were so eager to punish people for deviating from party line. All that was so even though many of the people that the party line was supposed to benefit don’t agree with it. (In many cases, it turns out, such marginalized people disagree strongly enough that they have regrettably moved in the opposite direction, voting for Trump.) But nobody ever asked them – or me. White cis men like Lansing declared that race and gender were going to be the North Star that guided everything else – whether the people in the affected groups wanted that or not.