Intro
We mention the “motte-and-bailey” strategy quite often on these pages. There is a good reason for that. In many other countries around the world, reverse discrimination is the official law of the land… yes, France, we talk about your gender quotas! South Africa with its racial laws would be too obvious. Here, in America, we tend to be serious about equality. Even the Affirmative action was supposed to be a stop-gap, and so it was. On our shores, the Social Justice Warriors have to hide their intent to build a rule order based on the oppression totem pole. The “motte-and-bailey” fallacy is a rhetorical camouflage specifically designed for that purpose.
Parsing those motte-and-baileys is fun. And this what we are going to do now, my Dear Reader.
John Stewart and others
Bailey:
Motte: DEI does not narrow the talent pool but instead it “expands competition.” This “widening of the pool fallacy” is replicated in the Guardian, almost verbatim. Boston Globe is not too far: “[DEI is there to] assess whether you’re fully utilizing the talent available in your workforce and whether there are barriers that are artificially excluding qualified people… Nobody’s saying you need to meet that target… [It’s not about] discriminating against `white, Asian, male, or straight.’”Really?
Michele Wu, our Mayor
Bailey:
Motte: “I am talking about snowflakes.“ Snowflakes or not, a lawsuit followed.
Diversity.com
Bailey: “[The traditional markers such as:] Graduated from a short list of elite universities; Worked in specific industries or roles deemed prestigious; Speaks and presents in a narrow, often corporate-coded way [are biased.]” What do you replace it with, then? Shoe size? Oh wait, larger shoe sizes are biased towards men.
Motte:
“Inclusive hiring involves:
Removing biased language from job descriptions
Widening sourcing channels to reach underrepresented talent
Using structured interviews to evaluate skills consistently”
Ah, how sweet!
Michael A. Yassa, a DEI officer
Sometimes, the motte and the bailey are contained in the same paragraph. Foucault, the all-time greatest practitioner of the fallacy would be very jealous.
Motte:
Another challenge that continues to undermine trust in DEI efforts is the perception of the so-called diversity hire. The phrase is loaded, toxic and -when DEI is done badly - not entirely baseless. In institutions where hiring is reduced to checking demographic boxes, this perception takes hold. And with it, the person hired is immediately set up to fail…
Bailey:
… not because they lack qualifications, but because their colleagues are convinced they were chosen for the wrong reasons.
A little philosophical rant
Motte vs. bailey is not your dialectical juxtaposition of the opposites leading to the big truth; it’s is a choice between a useless truth and a damaging lie. The useful truth belongs elsewhere. Even according to the gradually wokefying Wikipedia, “After controlling for grades, test scores, family background (legacy status), and athletic status (whether or not the student was a recruited athlete), [it was] found that whites were three times, Hispanics six times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian Americans.”
The times are changing though. They are not the ones the “University for The Times” was for, b**ch! (“b**ch” added here for the sole purpose of not ending a sentence on a proposition.) The reverse discrimination in university admissions has been already dealt with, b**ch. And the first ever reverse discrimination in hiring case is making its way through the courts. (Thanks God, no propositions here to deal with…, b**ch.)
Finally, us, at UMass Boston
Here, at the UMB, it’s all one big bailey. There is no need to hide in the cold and moldy motte: King Donald is so far away. UMB still has the “equitable student outcomes” in its Strategic Plan (see Strategic Priority 1 there). According to the Provost Borg (and, unsurprisingly, the Massachusetts Governor), “DEI is here to stay.” The acknowledgment of the challenges DEI is facing, followed by a complete denial of these challenges, as recently covered by the Flickering Beacon, and rolled out by our “Vice Chancellor for Inclusion and Belonging,” fits the pattern. Random guess: there is no motte yet. It is “under construction.” Like the UMB quad, for all these long years.