This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/why-do-democrats-fear-the-facts-about-dei/

Governor made ‘equity’ efforts a priority for state government: So what resulted?

Among the bits of folk wisdom that rarely work out well: “Don’t ask the question if you don’t want the answer.” 

It’s bad enough applied to the puddle of mystery your car leaves on the driveway: You may need those brakes soon. It’s worse when applied to the racially charged orders the governor put at the top of every state agency’s to-do list. Wisconsinites should know what’s come of all the scurrying that’s ensued, right?

Nope, said four legislators this week who took that age-old folk wisdom about not asking questions to heart.

Fortunately, they were in the minority. The Joint Legislative Audit Committee voted 6-4 to instruct the state auditor to find out what has come of Gov. Tony Evers’ 2019 order to make “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI, a central feature of agencies’ plans and to corral every state employee into “mandatory equity and inclusion training.”

This means the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau will — I’m paraphrasing — find out what agencies did to obey the governor, how much they spent doing it, and what has resulted.

Who could be afraid of that?

Sen. Tim Carpenter (D-Milwaukee), for one: As the committee prepared to vote on Tuesday, he could hold his tongue no more. “I wasn’t going to say anything,” he said before saying he was a history major, that asking whether the governor’s orders were effective would “hurt veterans,” and that he saw the audit  “as nothing more than trying to drag up a boogeyman to try and get people to think a specific way.”

What way would that be? Carpenter cited the earlier remarks by the committee’s co-chairman, Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Green Bay), saying, “I thought it was kind of far right-wing, and that kind of tells us the intention of the audit.”

‘To them, people are tribal’ 

You can judge the right-winginess of the remarks, linked here in full, for yourself, but Wimberger mostly lamented the modern redefinition of “diversity.” It once “was a quest for diversity of thought,” he said. “It was race-neutral, and embodied Civil Rights Act era directives to act without regard for race, creed, color, or national origin.”

Now? Academics and politicians steeped in critical theory “gave up on looking beyond immutable characteristics, believing it an impossibility. To them, people are tribal,” inevitably driven by bias.

It’s “meant to pit one socially constructed class against another,” Wimberger said. Its demand to statistically match every outcome with Census figures may look noble, but if “statistical equity is the goal, then DEI advocates must conclude it’s possible to have ‘too many of those people,’” resulting in, for instance, colleges discriminating against Asians, for example.

None of this is surprising: As the Badger Institute reported last spring, Republican lawmakers long have been appalled both by the corrosive discrimination that Evers’ DEI orders entailed and by the money spent to enforce the new racial hierarchies.

What is remarkable is the open-ended nature of the mandate to the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau. The bureau’s staff simply has to report back what activities have been performed because of Evers’ order, what’s been spent, and what outcomes have resulted.

The response of Democrats who voted, party-line, against this was that no audit should be done. DEI should be assumed a good thing, since the Pentagon and big corporations have bought in.

Camouflage 

You’d think that if, unlike Wimberger, you thought DEI was a glorious boon to Wisconsin, you’d want to find out whether state agencies were actually carrying out the orders. But DEI seems to be the priority that can’t bear discussion.

Even the governor’s order involves verbal camouflage: It starts by invoking our constitution’s guarantee of equality, using that word twice before shifting over to “equity,” a word it uses 13 times — a word, as we’re assured from the commanding heights of society, that does not mean the same as equality, that in fact means unequal treatment in search of equal outcomes. The order starts with the universally accepted ideal before shifting to the sound-almost-alike concept that much of America opposes.

Good for lawmakers for asking the question, whatever the answer will be. Perhaps the audit will vindicate Evers. Perhaps it will find Wimberger was on target in faulting mandatory DEI training for “forcing you to acknowledge you must have less because your group has too much.”

Wimberger is more or less paraphrasing best-selling author Ibram X. Kendi, who infamously wrote, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” And Kendi will be featured later this month in a daylong webinar about “equity” sponsored by the regulator of all K-12 education in Wisconsin, the Department of Public Instruction.

The old advice that you shouldn’t ask questions you don’t want answer to works fine for those who don’t mind puddles in the driveway and the four who opposed the audit. The rest of us will eagerly await the answers that might help us put the brakes on.

Patrick McIlheran is the Director of Policy at the Badger Institute. Permission to reprint is granted as long as the author and Badger Institute are properly cited.

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