In response to a mandate from the Arizona Board of Regents, the Tucson-based University of Arizona will begin requiring students to take two DEI-related courses in order to graduate.
This is at a time when the University of Arizona is having a financial crisis, when the cost of a college degree has skyrocketed and buried students in debt, when colleges are bogged down with administrative bloat, when curricula are full of non-rigorous courses and political agendas, when America’s preeminence in higher education is waning, and when universities are facing a threat from artificial intelligence.
According to the university, the courses will focus on such issues as “racism, classism, sexism, ableism, imperialism, colonialism, transphobia, xenophobia, and other structured inequities.”
Will the courses be scholarly and non-ideological, or will they be sophomoric and ideological? Let’s take two of the issues, race and colonialism, to see how this can be determined.
The Social Construct of Race
A sure sign that DEI is sophomoric and ideological is the reduction of the rich diversity of the US and world into the seven contrived categories of White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, and the latest anthropological travesty, Middle Eastern.
It’s absurd to think that human diversity can be neatly separated into seven boxes, or that each box is discrete and homogeneous, or that there is no overlap between the boxes, or that mischief won’t result from arbitrarily putting people into boxes as if they are Amazon deliveries. This foolishness makes a mockery out of DEI.
On a personal note, I don’t know what box my beautiful baby granddaughter belongs in, given that she has Filipino and European ancestors.
The seven boxes are social constructs. As geneticists, anthropologists, sociologists and historians at the University of Arizona and other universities know but are afraid to say, they are largely political inventions that have little to do with science. Each construct, or category, is an arbitrary agglomeration of many unique ethnocultural groups that don’t have much in common other than perhaps some physical characteristics and geographic origins.
The irrefutable fact is that are hundreds of unique ethnocultural groups in the world, consisting of diverse nationalities, religions, languages, customs, rituals, values, ideologies, and histories. As one of the most diverse nations in the world, the United States has many of them, but is characterized on college campuses and other thoughtless echo chambers as a racist nation.
Maybe a case can be made that such reductio ad absurdum serves a worthwhile societal purpose, although I don’t know what it might be. For sure, however, it doesn’t serve a worthwhile purpose in higher education, where impartial scholarship and academic rigor should matter more than stuffing people into their assigned box. It smacks of political indoctrination and racial discrimination to then label each box with positive or negative stereotypes, such as the White box being labeled as privileged and racist and all of the other boxes being labeled as disadvantaged and oppressed.
The labeling doesn’t change the irrefutable fact that there are marked differences in the contents of each box. Azerbaijanians are not the same as Swedes, Armenians are not the same as Turks, mestizo Mexicans are not the same as the Spanish aristocracy of Mexico, Columbians are not the same as Cubans, Brazilians are not the same as Argentinians, Persians are not the same as Arabs, Shia Muslims are not the same as Sunni Muslims, reform Jews are not the same as ultra-orthodox Jews, East Indians are not the same as the Japanese, Tutsi are not the same as Hutus, Nigerians are not the same as African Americans, the Comanche are not the same as the Navajo, a Boston Brahmin is not the same as an impoverished Apalachin living in a hollow in a dilapidated single-wide, and . . . well, the examples could go on for pages.
My own racial/ethnic group of Italian is difficult to categorize, given that Italians have some of the most diverse DNA on earth. For much of modern American history, Italians (a k a dagos) were considered non-White and treated accordingly—as one step up from Blacks. But don’t expect a college DEI course to mention this or to explain how Italians magically turned White. It doesn’t fit the indoctrinating narrative.
Likewise, you can expect a DEI course not to mention the Immigration Act of 1924 but to mention the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The latter fits the narrative but the former doesn’t. That’s because the 1924 Act was passed to stop the immigration of Italians and other Southern Europeans, who were seen as unwashed, uneducated, and uncivilized; but, again, are seen as privileged Whites today.
It’s astonishing that so many college professors not only go along with such intellectual fraud but teach it to impressionable students.
The Treatment of Colonialism
Another sign that DEI is sophomoric and ideological is if it treats colonialism as solely a European and White evil—that is, as a horrible injustice inflicted on indigenous people and people of color for centuries by only the British, Dutch and Spanish empires (and, later, by the American empire).
It certainly was a horrible injustice that should be told, as all history should be told. It’s also understandable that hundreds of millions of people around the world continue to resent what was done to them. But the popular narrative is incomplete, for two reasons: First, colonialism, warfare, conquering, subjugation, oppression, and occupation are distinctions without much of a difference; second, it’s hard to find an ethnocultural group that hasn’t committed one or more of these injustices at some point in human history.
To that point, it’s difficult to see a moral difference between (a) the past subjugation of Native Americans by the British, by the Hispanics of Spain and Portugal, and by the Americans; and (b) the current barbarism inflicted on native peoples by ISIS in establishing a caliphate in the Sahel of Africa. The same for the genocide being committed by Arab Muslims against Blacks in Sudan. But strangely, these current travesties get less attention on campuses than the past ones committed by Europeans and Americans.
The political agenda of DEI courses can be seen in the focus on European and American colonialism but not on the colonialism of the Ottoman Empire, which lasted for six centuries and, ironically, extended into parts of Europe. Likewise, the imperialism of the Persian Empire, the Russian Empire, the Japanese Empire, the Soviet Empire, and other empires are overlooked.
Remarkably, the Mongol Empire is also overlooked, although it conquered a huge land mass, stretching from China to today’s Eastern Europe. Mongolians are so proud of their warrior heritage that they built an immense monument to Genghis Khan. The monument is 130 feet tall and topped by massive statue of Khan on horseback. It is a major tourist attraction, and visitors can climb an inside staircase to an observation deck at the top.
Incidentally, what is the race of Mongols? Which of the seven social constructs should they be assigned to?
In my parochial school of a long time ago, the nuns taught the moral principle of the occasion of sin. The principle held that desiring to commit an immoral act but not going through with it due to not having the opportunity is just as sinful as actually committing the act.
In a similar vein, there is the occasion of colonialism. Large scale, cross-continent colonialism was employed by kingdoms and nations with the opportunity and means to do so—namely, the means of large sailing ships, standing armies and navies, canons, muskets, navigational technology, temperate climates, settled agriculture, a sophisticated administrative state, a monetary system of coinage and other financial instruments, and experience at organized warfare from being in close proximity to competing kingdoms and states.
Imagine if the Comanche had had all of these means. America might be called Ten Bears today, after the famous Comanche warrior chief of that name.
The human propensity for warfare, brutality and colonization is so universal that even peoples who lived in paradises of benign weather and ample food sources engaged in violence and oppression.
Take Polynesians. Long before the arrival of Europeans, Polynesians on one island would often engage in violence against Polynesians on another island. Some would even eat the dead of their enemy.
It was a similar story in the archipelago of Hawaii, or Hawaiʻi, to be politically correct. The archipelago was unified (colonized?) by Chieftain Kamehameha the Great, after decades of brutal warfare.
Finally, there is the sobering fact that victims of colonialism have sometimes become victimizers. India is an example. After winning independence from Britain, the subcontinent had to be partitioned into the two nations of Pakistan and India, because Muslims and Hindus distrusted each other, for good reasons. Muslims who remain in India continue to face discrimination and worse to this day. The two nations also have fought two wars over the disputed territory of Kashmir and continue to have skirmishes there.
Meanwhile, in an example of how the times have changed, the current prime minister of Britain is of East Indian ancestry and has secular leanings, while the current prime minister of India is a devout and jingoistic Hindu.
Conclusion
If the mandated DEI-related courses at the University of Arizona cover the subjects of race and colonialism in a sophomoric and ideological manner, then it’s almost a certainty that other DEI subjects will be covered the same way.
If that proves to be the case, students should demand a tuition refund, and the Arizona Board of Regents should demand academic rigor from the university or cut off funding for rinky-dink courses.
Over his career, Mr. Cantoni was at the vanguard of equal rights, equal opportunity, and outreach. Contact: [email protected].
