[Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, as they exist in
education, are failing, because they emphasize personal feelings over
the need to collectively organize. ]
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HOW DEI PROGRAMS AND LIBERAL POLITICS ARE FAILING GAZA  
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Dave Zirin
January 4, 2024
The Nation
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_ Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, as they exist in
education, are failing, because they emphasize personal feelings over
the need to collectively organize. _

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The operative word in high school and college faculty meetings is
fear. If you say anything about Gaza, if you criticize the Israeli
military or display any anguish about an ongoing genocide, you risk
retribution. For many teachers, there is an even greater fear of
raising the issue of Gaza in class, where a student armed with a cell
phone camera could brand you as an antisemite to the administration
and beyond. So the default choice is usually silence.

Students are then too often left to figure it all out on their own.
One veteran high school teacher told me, “This is like something
I’ve never experienced. You are scared to breathe. After 9/11 and
then after the start of the Iraq War, we were leading conversations
about war and its history across the school. As teachers, we weren’t
perfect but we never thought that if we said a wrong word or if a
discussion went off the rails, we could pay for it with our careers.
So our kids are left without guidance.”

This fear has stifled conversations about why a chief ally of the
United States is using US-made weapons to bomb an already deeply
impoverished civilian population. The question is where this fear
comes from and how can we stand up to it?

The first part that must be acknowledged is that this fear is based in
the reality of a new McCarthyism. There is a middle school teacher
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my liberal community that was suspended for using the Palestinian
independence slogan “From the River to the Sea” as a tagline on an
e-mail. The redefining of that popular phrase as something antisemitic
and even exterminationist has been a propaganda coup for those who
defend the shelling of Gaza.

There is also a 14-year-old Muslim student in my city who was doxxed
with her photo pasted on walls across her high school campus with the
words “antisemite” under her face because she posted a cartoon on
Instagram. (I’m not describing the details of the frankly tame
cartoon, to protect her anonymity.) Her picture and that of her family
were then pasted up on the surrounding streets. The school’s
response? _To suspend her _until she takes a special course called
“social media ethics.” (The civil liberties attacks on high
schoolers since October 7 has gone underreported.)

College students also feel under a microscope with administrators
banning clubs, canceling rallies, and trying to enforce campus
placidity rather than inquiry. A few college presidents are now on the
unemployment line because they—quite clumsily, one must
say—refused to bend the knee before rabid Trumpists in Congress. The
resignation of Claudine Gay as president of Harvard has both AIPAC and
anti-Black racists crowing. It feels like any statement, any question,
any protest of Israel’s military incursion will be met with a
fusillade of poisonous accusations. Across all levels of education,
heads are down, and mouths are understandably shut.

But fears of heavy-handed punishment are not the only factor stifling
discussion. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that train
faculty in both secondary school and higher ed must be also held to
account. DEI is proving to be woefully inadequate as a project to
challenge a brutal and, yes, racist war

The right wing is trying—and often succeeding—to ban DEI
departments and other programs that discuss the realities of
oppression in the workplace and beyond. The first act of Governor Ron
DeSantis and his baldly racist apparatchik Christopher Rufo in their
hostile takeover of the New College of Florida was to abolish the
school’s DEI department. These programs should be defended because
they strive to create space to discuss societal inequity and are in
the crosshairs of the radical right. But defending these liberal DEI
programs from statehouse goons should never be the same as endorsing
them as a method to fight racism.

DEI, as it exists in most institutions, holds sacred, in the words of
one teacher, “the idea that all experiences are valid and your
personal pain or trauma must be centered and validated.” This fails
Gaza on multiple fronts. First, it provides a false equivalency that
allows supporters of Israel to speak about feeling attacked whenever
so much as a Palestinian flag is displayed on a Trapper Keeper. The
DEI process provides space for people to claim that any critique of
the Israeli state rises to the level of antisemitism. In many DEI
circles, the weaponization of the charge of antisemitism has proven to
be effective. An individual’s feelings that a criticism of Israel is
antisemitic is often weighed as a view just as valid as those of
people distressed by the IDF’s shelling of Palestinian civilians.
But it’s not just about process. DEI arises from mainstream liberal
politics, a cornerstone of which for decades has been to be
progressive except for Palestine. In the face of this, when the choice
is silence or being branded an antisemite, it’s understandable why
fear would rule the day.

DEI also fails this moment because its emphasis on the personal steers
people away from the political discussions that schools need to be
having. We need students and teachers talking about why this story
does not begin on October 7, why Palestinian lives are so devalued in
this country, and why the United States relentlessly supports this war
over global objections. And yet a combination of ruthless donors,
anxious (to be kind) parents, and nervous administrators are thwarting
these critical discussions right when we need them most. Clearly we
should demand diversity, equity, and inclusion, but we also need a
deeper kind of anti-racist education and practice. DEI programs may
look at structures of power, but, because DEI is rooted in the
politics of mainstream liberalism, they rarely analyze how to
challenge or transform them. Without that, DEI programs mostly become
just conversation.

The solution lies in something far easier said than done: collectively
organized courage. During McCarthyism, it was the small acts of a
brave few in education that first punctured its power. Today we
don’t just need similar heroes willing to break the silence. We need
networks of support and solidarity. The moment demands organization,
open speech, and love for the Palestinian people. The alternative is
we go about our lives as if everything is normal: haunted with the
knowledge that future generations will ask why we did nothing.

_Dave Zirin is the sports editor at The Nation. He is the author of
11 books on the politics of sports. He is also the coproducer and
writer of the new documentary Behind the Shield: The Power and
Politics of the NFL [[link removed]]._

_Copyright c 2024 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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* Colleges
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* inclusion
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* Gaza
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* McCarthyism
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