No More Magical Negroes: Making DEI the scapegoat in support of a fake meritocracy

By Ellis Cose

No More Magical Negroes: Making DEI the scapegoat in support of a fake meritocracy

DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) has never been popular among champions of the so-called meritocracy. But to be brutally honest, those champions were largely hypocrites. Most never truly believed in their own philosophy. What they did believe in was more privilege for those already privileged.

Whether we are talking about legacy admissions to selective universities or appointments to prestigious positions in business and government, fortune consistently favors the well-connected. DEI was a sledgehammer designed to break through that wall of privilege.

Sledgehammers are not particularly delicate instruments and don’t always yield great results. But neither did the system DEI was designed to change—a system Donald Trump and his acolytes embrace when they argue for denying jobs to so-called DEI candidates, by which they essentially mean women and people of color.

To use an obvious example of what the old system produces, you need to look no further than Robert Kennedy Jr. Does anyone with a functioning brain believe he was qualified to be Secretary of Health and Human Services? Despite his lack of qualifications, the Senate approved him.

Meanwhile, he made it his mission to attack DEI. “DEI research has never cured a disease,” he argues. But then, neither has racism. And certainly. Kennedy has cured nothing. Instead, under his watch measles increased nearly tenfold and food borne illness increased roughly fourfold—in part because of his insistence on cutting programs that promote inoculation and that monitor foodborne pathogens.

Or take Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. He is very good at playing a tough guy; but his most important job before his ascension was hosting a TV show. His management record largely consisted of running a couple of small nonprofits, where he was accused of fostering a hostile work environment, showing up drunk, and financial mismanagement.

Nonetheless, he was deemed qualified to become a cabinet secretary, a position he has used to fire or block the promotion of highly qualified Black and female soldiers whom he deems to be supportive of DEI.

Then, of course, there is Trump himself, who, according to a New York Times investigation, squandered most of the more than $400 million (in today’s dollars) he inherited from his father. But he was resurrected by a TV show in which he pretended to be the brilliant businessman he never was in real life.

Meanwhile, he claimed to have graduated at the top of his class at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, although the school has never listed him among its top students, or among those who achieved any academic honors. Still, America rewarded him with the most powerful position in the world, which has allowed him to wreck the economy, while plunging the nation into a costly war that he cannot coherently explain—which brings me to the curious case of Jason Arday.

Arday is famous for becoming a professor at the University of Cambridge at the age of 37. He also claimed to have accomplished some amazing feats, including running 600 miles in six days for charity and overcoming an inability to speak before the age of 11 and to read before the age of 18. A few months ago, it all came tumbling down.

Some of his superhuman achievements were revealed to be lies and parts of his PHD thesis proved to have been plagiarized. Unable to cope with the reversal in fortune, Arday apparently committed suicide.

Writing in The Atlantic Tyler Austin Harper attempted to inject some common sense into the dialogue: “What I propose is that the public give Arday a courtesy in death that he was often denied in life: Let’s treat him like a person. Not like Cambridge’s magical negro, or like Simon & Schuster’s golden goose, or like the fetish object of internet racists, but like a flawed human being … After all, it was systemic, ritualized dishonesty—his own and others’—that undid him.”

I took the time to peruse Arday’s thesis, as well as the work of his chief accuser. I could find no particular sign of breathtaking brilliance in either one.

Arday’s thesis, titled, “An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice,” submitted in July 2015, is essentially a 400-page argument for treating junior colleagues with respect and dignity. He argues that student teachers can learn more from their peers than from superiors and urges student teachers to provide “professional and pastoral support for one another.” It is certainly a sensible suggestion, but nothing worth shouting “Eureka” over.

As for Nathan Cofnas, a post-doctoral fellow at Ghent University who became Arday’s chief accuser, his work is even less enlightening. In 2020 he published a paper in Philosophical Psychology titled, “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry.”

The paper is an argument for free speech embedded within an argument about differences in intelligence among various ethnic or racial groups. He poses what to him is apparently a pressing question: should science “be absolutely committed to the truth, or, as some philosophers and scientists believe, are topics such as race differences in intelligence just too dangerous to face openly?”

Cofnas’s work is a modern example of the kind of research that was popular among eugenicists at the turn of the last century. In that era, Henry Goddard administered early versions of IQ tests to arriving immigrants.

He claimed the tests proved that the vast majority of Jewish, Russian, Italian, and Hungarian immigrants were "mentally defective" or "feebleminded. It was also the era of Madison Grant, whose 1916 book, “The Passing of the Great Race,” argued that northern Europeans were superior. He claimed that Jews and other groups from Southern and Eastern Europe were intellectually and biologically inferior, and he warned that "race-mixing" that included them would lead to the destruction of American society.

I cover all of this in a book I wrote decades ago titled, “A Nation of Strangers: Prejudice, Politics and the Populating of America.”

Cofnas has nothing important to add to the debate. The question he raises is problematic in part because race is not a scientific classification. In the United States, for instance, some 90 percent of “Blacks” have some white ancestry and perhaps 10 percent of Southern “whites” have some Black ancestry.

So, what do these arbitrary racial classifications really mean? And even if we could establish (and I seriously doubt that we can) that when controlling for all other factors (which itself is virtually impossible) some racial groups are smarter than others, where does that take us? Particularly when it is irrefutable that countless individual members of groups considered inferior are smarter than countless members of groups considered superior? It certainly doesn’t add up to a coherent argument to treat individual members of various racial groups differently.

In other words, such so-called research ultimately takes you nowhere but back to the obvious, as does the Arday affair. The truth and tragedy of this affair ultimately have nothing to do with DEI. Instead, it is simply a reminder of something we already know intuitively: which is that when someone seems too wonderful to be true, there is a large probability that they are less than what they seem—and should be considered such until reality proves otherwise.