Radically Wrong: Richard Reeves and Radical Radha

On fighting bad ideas with more bad ideas

“Near obsessive” about class and race—sounds fun!

UPDATE: Radha and I connected for a Blahcast.

The optimism imperative

Standing tall in the glowing embers of liberalism are many people who can sense which way the wind is blowing, mostly because it is causing many fires to spontaneously erupt. These people are not bad people. In fact, if you teach them what is good, they’ll go out there and advocate for it. The problem is that when you teach them that certain tactics, strategies, policies and ideologies are good even when they cause 180-degree counter-intentional effects, it makes them do things that are bad, which is why they are at such pains to point out people who abuse the excesses of liberalism, confiscatory wealth distributions, discriminatory hiring practices, elaborate humiliation rituals, struggle sessions, terminations, etc. Those are people who do harm on purpose for their own devices. The good news is doing harm accidentally for what you think are other peoples’ interests, that’s all good.

Working class men: a troubling update

This constituency is highly skilled at language and trafficking ideas that are not particularly difficult to understand. Rather, these concepts (race, consent, power dynamics, discrimination, age-gaps) apply to so many baseline realities of the world that their peculiarity emanates from their ability to carve arbitrary lines that curve and zigzag through reality. They tell you this implementation is unjust but this one is not.

These ideas must be regarded optimistically. It’s totally obvious: Unless someone is “abusing their power,” everything just works out. However, critiques of their ideas, especially from outside liberal framework, must be regarded pessimistically. In short, their intentions must always excuse the tradeoffs and failures of their actions. To point out the obvious, when you have a fixed quantity of jobs to fill, if you are seeking out one group to fill those jobs, you are seeking the exclusion of everyone outside of those parameters. If you are having trouble following, you probably also have trouble understanding how per capita works. None of this is hard unless you make it so.

Richard Reeves

To pick on someone in the camp advocating for men’s interests, I’ll start with Richard V Reeves who writes Of Boys and Men. In his piece “Look to Norway,” he writes of a Norwegian Men’s Equality Commission:

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Getting the framing right

Crucially, the Commission frames the issue in exactly the right way.

First, there is a clear rejection of zero-sum thinking. Working on behalf of boys and men does not dilute the ideals of gender equality, it applies them. Here is how the Commission sets out their stall:

Many boys and men do not feel that equality is about them, or exists for them. The men's committee believes that equality's next step should be to include boys and men's challenges to a greater extent than today. . . Greater attention to boys' and men's equality challenges will strengthen equality policy, not weaken it.

Second, the Commission stresses the need to look at gender inequalities for boys and men through a class and race lens too. As the Commissioners write:

Social inequality is an important factor in understanding these differences. Some challenges are linked to class and social inequality and affect boys and men harder or in different ways than girls and women.

A good illustration is the class gap in life expectancy. The gap between affluent and low income women is 8 years: but for men, the class gap is 14 years. Another is the finding that men with a Pakistani background face more discrimination in hiring than women with the same background (though both face some).

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That’s right. When encountering groups Reeves feels are falling through the cracks of centrally planned race communism, Reeves calls for more of it but the good kind that’s accurate and more granular. I can only assume he knows how to strike the right balance of Pakistani labor participation and exactly how much more discrimination they face than women, speaking in percentages, of course. When I think of The West’s failure to activate certain groups in the labor market, I always ask myself why is there an epidemic of women and Pakistani men committing suicide at record numbers? Perhaps we should donate a month of the year to their struggles. I have always liked the pink branding Kellogg’s does in October.

One in every box.

Radical Radha

Speaking of women’s issues, which I wrote about most notably in “The Regan Arntz-Gray to Walt Bismark Pipeline,” the next person I’ll pick on is Radical Radha. In her piece “The limits of DEI: anyone can abuse their power, not just white men,” Radha writes (emphasis my own):

DEI has inadvertently created a moral licensing regime. By categorizing people into fixed groups of oppressors and oppressed, these frameworks paradoxically enable the very behaviors they aim to prevent. Individuals can now use their identity as a moral 'get out of jail free' card, excusing behaviors they would condemn in others.

While I love a good modifier and a sense of temporality, paradoxically I find that her words are inadvertently obfuscating what’s going on now. If you remove the bolded words, you can begin to understand why so many of us feel that we are not seeing a different movie on the same screen as our betters but we think they are legally blind and hitting the curb.

Radha writes, “I've witnessed DEI's evolution from the inside since before it became mainstream in the 2010s.”

Next sentence: “As a diversity recruiter at Google…”

Witnessed? Look, I don’t know what that title entails but I’m going to guess Radha witnessed DEI’s evolution in the same way I’m witnessing this post getting written, in the same way OJ Simpson witnessed the power of celebrity court cases in ‘94. Later today I’ll survive the war on drugs and witness myself become a better man as I smoke weed and lift weights. While Radha is no Kimberlé Crenshaw and I’m no Pablo Escobar, to say that she witnessed DEI’s evolution is like saying P Diddy watched the human form from the comfort of an antifriction defense system. Maybe I’m being nitpicky but I do remember DEI when it was called Affirmative Action and I suspect no one who was deselected from any of her applicant pools might call her a witness to discrimination.

Thankfully she learns her lesson but instead of learning it at Google, she waits for her next job, leading a minority interest group in the workplace:

The absurdity of these frameworks became clear at my next company, where I led the 'Asian' employee resource group. We attempted to unite people from vastly different contexts under one artificial banner: immigrants from India to Japan, their Western-raised children, and employees across Asia. My main achievement as chair? A Diwali party.

To give Radha credit, she realizes when working for an Indian firm,

Such contexts in which non-white people hold all the power are outside the logic of DEI, as though white men are the only ones responsible for subpar working conditions and unfair treatment. Secondarily, everyone is predisposed to hiring people like them, not just white men.

My critique is not that Radha has no good points to make, it’s that she:

1. Wants to make DEI do what it says it does (an impossibility) instead of realizing that it would be easier to change the name of it to Anti-White People and Straight Men Department than to make it precipitate any form of justice.

2. Thinks the answer to failed liberalism is more liberalism; answer to a failed inclusion system (also exclusion system) is a different inclusion/exclusion system.

3. Overemphasizes how DEI hurts women and BIPOC’s (true) and underemphasizes the people it plainly dislikes and tacitly discriminates against.

It’s common to look at a program that doesn’t deliver on its promise, note that when you try it the first time it doesn’t work, and then conclude that you should try it yet more (under a different name) until the solution achieves a sticky finitude. Current institutions facing this dynamic include Affirmative Action which has been rebranded as DEI, and democracy which has been rebranded as either oligarchy or populism depending on your camp.

Yet I remain optimistic. To all you allies and word-manipulators out there, I look forward to calls for yet more fairness, equality, and inclusion. In Ukraine we protect Ukrainians and their fertile terroir by turning them into topsoil. In Africa and the Middle East we deploy peacekeepers to secure all the peace flying around. And in the office, the white paper, and increasingly on Substack, we empower the marginalized by making sure we never give up Martin Luther King’s dream of massive Human Resources complexes, neo-pronouns and sensitivity trainings rife with black and white photographs of Civil Rights leaders who would have most likely hate-crimed several of your coworkers if they knew they were gay. America yearns for a balance between our current HR regime which is openly hostile to white people and straight men and the slightly nicer version we’ll get after you guys bandy about 1,000 more posts on the right amount of interference from the right kind of DEI. Just one more is all it takes.