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Mike Pesca (8:28)

Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow are back to talk about their book, How Equality A New Vision for an Inclusive America. And the book lays out seven practical strategies from revealing the stakes to supporting dissent. And the two scholars have suggested that in an ideal world they'd like to combine approaches like lifting up disadvantaged groups and leveling the playing fields. But of course, we know the recent Supreme Court rulings and the broader backlash to dei, some of those tools are off the table. So I ask you gentlemen, looking at this moment of reassessment, which parts of the backlash or actual legal pushback do you see as legitimate correctives to excesses of di? And which changes do you think risk undermining the broader goals that you're trying to preserve?

Kenji Yoshino (9:14)

That's a great question. I mean, the one that most obviously comes to mind for me is our chapter on supporting dissent, where we critique elements in the pro DEI community that have tended to enforce a kind of ideological orthodoxy, to be nervous about or try to shut down debate and disagreement, and also to shame people who engage in non inclusive behavior or who make mistakes. So we avoid using the term cancel culture in the book. We find that that term gets people's backs up a lot and often on the left at least, people will deny that cancel culture even exists and say, oh, look at all of the people who have come back from being cancelled and have thriving careers and so on. We wanted to sidestep that debate and say, look, whatever you think about cancel culture, it's hard to deny that there have been practices of shaming where, you know, people who make a mistake or who disagree with some position that's common within the pro DEI community feel shut down, even if it's just a roll of the eyes or some other practice that makes them condescended to. And so that chapter is really about saying we as a community need to do a better job of welcoming ideas, even ones that make us feel uncomfortable, to tolerate people experience expressing their point of view. And then also we need to not just move from kind of cancelling to softer methods of correction, but also sometimes to even just let it go when people make mistakes. Like we give an example of a senior colleague of ours who has repeatedly used the word sexual preference, which we don't like, it's not really favored within the LGBTQ community to use that term anymore. But, you know, our view is, look, we're going to seem like scolds and meddlesome if we go in and lecture this person about saying sexual orientation rather than sexual preference. He's well meaning, he's pro gay. Let's just let it go. So that's a good example where I would say no court is telling the DEI community that they need to change their practices, but we think it's going to lead to a healthier culture overall nonetheless.

Mike Pesca (11:24)

Right. So maybe some extremist sentiment became non rebuttable within the DEI community and you're trying to pull that back. But what about things that aren't allowed? I'll just ask you about diversity statements, which were the de facto or sometimes de jure requirement that, for instance, college professors, as you know, come in and they talk about their diversity plan and they talk about how much they support this. And there have been occasions when, as a free speech issue, a professor either literally didn't support it or just didn't want to have to be compelled to support it. From what I understand, these diversity statements can no longer be required. Is that a good thing?

David Glasgow (12:06)

Yeah, I think generally it is a good thing not to have people swear these loyalty oaths, because when people swear loyalty oaths, you very rarely persuade anybody to change their view. So one of our points in supporting dissent is not just that dissent is really important for the other side, but it's really important for the pro DEI side as well. Because if you force people to say stuff, oftentimes what you get is preference, falsification. People will sign the diversity statement without believing anything. Or alternatively, you'll get, and this is a subtler point made by Natalie Wynn, you'll get very fragile allegiances. So even if someone does agree with you, like they say trans women are women, because that's what all the nice kind people are saying. If they just absorb it as a slogan or as a diversity statement that they've signed, they haven't really grappled the deeper moral argument. So when someone pushes them on it and says, well, do you think that trans women should be allowed to compete in women's sports? And what does that mean for Title ix? They don't have really good answers, whereas the really good answers do exist. So one of the problems of these kind of loyalty oaths, of which I would put the diversity statements as one, is it's not just bad for the other side, for the conscientious Dissenter. It's bad for our own side because it leads to preference falsification and fragilec support.

Mike Pesca (13:19)

So I want to summarize, and you help me. There is a change in di. Some of it is forced upon us by the courts, some of it by the executive and how their moves have been ruled upon. This is an opportunity. You're going to brand it as an opportunity. To some extent, your movement, the DEI movement, has to be less rigid. To some extent, they just have to comply with the law, even if they don't like it. You've articulated a couple of ways in which maybe the law, it doesn't matter where it came from, we'll give the opportunity to have more equality, which should be the ultimate goal. So if your ideas are taken up, and I suspect that to a large extent they will be, because you have prominent positions and are leaders in the field, give me an idea. In four years, you could either speculate or not speculate about who the President will be, but what big changes will be done different from how we talked and lived DEI before 2025.

Kenji Yoshino (14:24)

So one big change that I would like to see happen is a move toward more systemic debiasing practices. We've already touched on this to some extent, but a lot of DEI that organizations adopted after the murder of George Floyd, at least in some organizations that only jumped on the bandwagon then, I would describe as performative. You know, people would put together biased training programs without assessing any rigour associated with those programs, or they would make people sign loyalty oaths, or they would run a bunch of scattershot programs to celebrate heritage months and put out social media statements. But there wasn't a lot of deep work being done inside some of these organisations to make sure that their systems are actually fair and promoting equal opportunity. So I would like to see that be a significant focus of this work going forward. And, you know, another thing that I think is likely to happen in DEI is a shift from targeted programs to universal programs. We're already seeing that to some extent in the legal landscape. Organisation after organization is being sued for having programs like grants, scholarships, internships, fellowships and so on that are reserved exclusively for members of particular groups. Like saying this grant program is just for black women, or this internship program is just for the LGBTQ community and so on. We're seeing those being opened up to allow anyone to participate who is committed to the values underlying that program. I suspect that what DEI will look like, say, four years from now is going to be much more of that programs that are still thematised around promoting values of equality and inclusion, but allow universal participation in those programs in a

Mike Pesca (16:14)

fig leaf way or in a substantive way, do you think?

Kenji Yoshino (16:17)

Well, I guess this gets to the question of what will happen or what should happen. I would like to see it occur in a substantive way. I would hope that organization, no one

Mike Pesca (16:26)

I've ever asked that question to is a fig leaf. I'm just going for the fig leaf.

Kenji Yoshino (16:29)

No, no. I mean, I want organizations to do it in a substantive way that brings as many allies as possible into the tent of promoting these values of inclusion and opportunity. But we'll have to wait and see whether or not organizations want to do that, because what we saw, as I mentioned, after the murder of George Floyd is I think some folks just wanted to do the performative fig leaf thing that made themselves look good. I think now is an opportunity to say, all right, if we're really serious about this, then let's try to find ways of doing this in a way that is more substantive.

David Glasgow (16:59)

And Mike, I would just add here, if I may, that the fig leaf strategy is even less viable here than it may be in your other interviews, because the Supreme Court has explicitly told us you cannot do indirectly what you cannot do directly. So if you're just pouring old wine into new bottles and saying, oh, we're going to call this a first gen program or a low SES program, but it's actually a race based program, then you're just as liable as if you, you know, the court is going to tear off the fig leaf essentially and say, this is a race based program. And if I could also add, like, you know, four years from now, another thing I would love to have change is that we would welcome more groups into the tent of dei. In one of our chapters, we talk about three different claims that people have made about DEI that we think are really reasonable, and we call them claims of enforcement, claims of symmetry, and claims of extension. Claims of enforcement would be, for goodness sakes, religion is protected under the first amendment of the Constitution. It's protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights act of 1964. Why is it that diversity, equity and inclusion programs have historically been much less attentive to religion than they have been to race or gender. That would be an example of a claim of enforcement and already exists in civil rights law, but not in dei. Claims of symmetry. This is where I'll get myself into trouble, is really to approach this as a public health kind of issue or as a physician would and to go to where the pain or where the hurt is, rather than just assuming that because somebody belongs to a demographically dominant group that they're going to be dominant in every aspect of their lives. So this is boys are achieving less than girls in secondary and elementary school education. Men are dying by suicide at twice the rate. Simply because they're male doesn't mean that they're deprived of the solicitude of dei. I would really love for us to move in that direction of just going where the pain is rather than making assumptions which is obviously inimical to dei. Then the last one claims of extension is there are lots of groups that are not protected under law or protected under current DEI that we would love to see more embrace. So I think about veterans, I think about people of low socioeconomic status or first gen individuals, a diploma divide being one of the greatest divides in terms of life success in America. So four years from now I hope we'll have a much, much bigger tent regardless of what we call it and welcome all those new groups in.

Mike Pesca (19:16)

So in order to affirm that this wasn't a fig leaf, they'll have to well, you tell me you're an eminent law professor, will there will there be a sort of inverse quota that they'll look to see that a certain percentage of scholarships or opportunities went to people who weren't people of color in order to qualify as not violating the law?

David Glasgow (19:40)

Yeah, that's exactly right. Like if you're going to have a first gen program, then it's a really good idea to just prove your bona fides by making sure first gen meaning first generation to go to college. For those listeners who might not be familiar with that term, but it's a really good idea to have some of those first gen individuals be not people of color. Right. So choose the white kid from Appalachia who was the first generation to go to college for your program in order to emphasize your bona fides of this is not a fig leaf. This is really a first gen program, not a race based program in disguise.

Mike Pesca (20:17)

What about the working class just as a category that could benefit from the new DEI with D being equality possible?

Kenji Yoshino (20:25)

Yeah, I mean this is one of the categories we talk about in the claims of extension of saying working class individuals are not explicitly protected as a category under law in the way that say race or sex is protected. And it's not as though people within the DEI community have completely ignored issues of class inequality. So I don't want to suggest that, but it has been kind of under emphasized in the community so if you look at diversity statements, diversity goals, diversity programs within organizations, they are often thematised around the kind of categories protected by law like sexual orientation and race and gender. And there has historically been less emphasis on class. So we think organisations should be doing more. For example, there is research by sociologist Lauren Rivera that indicates that a lot of elite firms screen out individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds in order to hire the kind of economic elite into their organization. So you can improve your hiring practices to ensure that you are not biased against lower socioeconomic status or working class individuals. You could make sure, for instance, that college degree requirements are not in every job that you're posting, that you're really thinking, seriously, do we need to have a college education for this particular job? And that is something that even the current head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Andrea Lucas, has said organizations can lawfully do. So even people who are virulent opponents of DEI have been on the record like Andrea Lucas saying, yeah, programs that are about promoting, you know, working class individuals and making sure they have access to opportunities and jobs. That is a perfectly lawful thing that you can and should be doing.

Mike Pesca (22:11)

Well, of course. Why does she do this? I think there are political considerations of who the their base of voters may be. Now, I want to take a couple seconds to ask you about what actually has happened under DEI and then if the predictions of what would happen met your expectations. So first of all, we talk about this landmark Supreme Court case and we do see a couple of college classes that have been admitted in anticipation. And then under the new laws which say you can't take into account race. And to my mind, or I think the statistics show that it is far less than the decimation or hollowing out of black and Hispanic students in undergraduate institutions that has happened. The New York Times did a write up of 66 schools and they found that there was a 1% drop from, and these are elite schools, from 7% to 6% acceptance and from 14 to 13% and almost no rise in or subsequent concomitant rise in white and Asian applications. Some schools, it happened greatly. Johns Hopkins, 18% more Asian admissions and didn't come at the cost of black students. But did what actually happened meet your expectations? Because I know it didn't meet the most dire expectations of the people who were ruin this decision. Go ahead.

David Glasgow (23:36)

I was a little bit surprised by it, frankly, because when we saw the state bans on affirmative action, we saw much more precipitous drops. And the way that I.

Mike Pesca (23:46)

So California did a ban, we had a history of this, we anticipated what would happen, which is, for instance, at ucla, a true, I think, use this word before hollowing out of the number of blacks in the undergraduate classes.

David Glasgow (23:57)

Exactly. And I think that the way to explain it, at least I would hypothesize, is that we got smart like we saw that happen, and then affirmative action got much more modest. So it suggests that the thumb and the scale that was being placed or the plus factor that was being given to black Latinx Native American communities was much smaller than was that our opponents or opponents of affirmative action would characterize it as being. It's a kind of good news, bad news story, frankly. Because the way this often comes up in my world is someone says, well, Kenji, can I just put a tiny, tiny tiebreaker thumb on the scale for the person of color who's underrepresented when two people are equally qualified? My answer is absolutely not. Of course you can't do that. Harvard wasn't saying, oh, you're black, you're into Harvard. Harvard was saying, here are these two equally qualified people. Roughly both of them would succeed hugely at Harvard. But because of this history of discrimination, and that continues on to the present, we're going to put a thumb on the scale in favor of the person who's underrepresented. If the Supreme Court is saying that's not permissible, then tiebreaker preferences, even very small ones, are no longer going to be permissible on the basis of race. But the good news about the data that you describe from my perspective is to say that organizations seem to be doing quite a modest, thoughtful job in the way that they were doling out these plus factors relative to how they had been characterized as operating.

Mike Pesca (25:28)

Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow are officials at the Meltzer center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at nyu. Thank you both so much.

Kenji Yoshino (25:39)

Thank you, Mike. Been a pleasure.

David Glasgow (25:40)

Thanks so much, Mike.

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Mike Pesca (26:52)

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Kenji Yoshino (28:04)

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Mike Pesca (29:10)

So the question is, why isn't the public feeling it? I Don't know. Because all the public ever feels is anxiety because we're trying to sell them something. Biden says things are improving. Oh my God, is he derided? Is out of touch. Trump gets enraged. Anyone would even ask the question, same numbers, same sometimes unfair and unanswerable question. Why isn't the public feeling it? Same refusal to consider. I don't know. Maybe the public's wrong or they don't have a good time horizon. Or it might take a couple months to price this reality in that anxiety is real because your feelings are real. But the ability to purchase a few more things than you did a year ago, that's also real to anxiety is a business model. Increase the unease, increase the opportunity and you don't even have to increase the unease. It just happens. Even valid anxiety, like with the economy as I just talked about, tariffs aren't helping. But now that the Supreme Court has struck down the mechanism by which Trump imposed tariffs, has the reporting been, oh, things should get better now? No. All the headlines I saw was this just injects more uncertainty into the markets. Concerns about private credit and potentially attacking Iran. Those would take top billing if it weren't for the uncertainty increase and the tariffs. Put it all together. There's a lot of uncertainty. Yeah, or valid anxiety about America drifting towards autocracy that becomes a product. Subscribe to a historian who reminds us we survived worse. Buy the daily reassurance that this isn't 1933 or buy the daily confirmation that it just might be. That's another form of selling the anxiety induced product that says, hey, you're not crazy. We do live in an age of abundance. You know that, right? Abundant food, abundant goods, abundant information. In fact, superfluous. Too much of all those things. And so what does that cause us? The answer is anxiety. Scarcity is not the engine. Anxiety is. Classic marketing theory says a great product solves a problem. But most marketing today isn't about solving a problem. It's it's about maintaining. Just enough worry that you'll keep paying. To manage is now the ultimate consumer good. And that's it for today's show. Corey War is the producer of the Just Kathleen Sykes. She edits the Gist list, she puts it together, she slaps it up there at Mike Pesca that substack.com Jeff Craig edit so much of the show. You know, he's the editor of how to. All those words are chopped together by him. He does our videos as well. Ben Astaire is our booking coordinator and Michelle Pesca oversees it all. Peru? G Peru? Duparu and thanks for listening.

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Mike Pesca (32:44)

We're looking to get to the campground. Well, you're gonna take a left at the old oak tree end of this here road. No, I'm just kidding. Let me get my phone out.

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