Don't Throw Out the Baby
The so-called attack on DEI persists. It is likely to be on blast for the next several months if not years. So what?
As a practitioner who for over two decades has worked as an insider (employee) and outsider (consultant) as a guide to complement organizations committed to incessantly creating the conditions for people and organizations to thrive, what we are seeing now occurs as the most opportune time to shed the old skin of representation-focused, grievance-laden, evidence-deficient, tired old approaches that have created the current incomplete (lack of) dialogue about what is now called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
However, with the first 100 days of a U.S. presidency and the reactions to the executive orders, many will throw out the baby when the problem is the murky bathwater.
So, “Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.”
I am sure many have heard this idiom. In the 16th century, families bathed in wooden tubs in an order: father first, then mother, then children in descending age, with the baby last.
Heating water back then was not so simple. After they filled the tub, they all used the original water. So, after the baby was bathed then and only then was the filthy water discarded.
The water was supposedly so dirty that it was difficult to see the baby in it, hence the warning not to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" when disposing of it.
Thomas Murner was a Franciscan monk, born in 1475, who completed a Ph.D. in theology and later a law degree at the University of Basel (Switzerland), where I live with my family.
Interestingly, Murner was considered somewhat of a heretic and suffered for his anti-Lutherian views during a period when the Catholic Church, particularly in Germany, was going through quite an upheaval.
The phrase "throw the baby out with the bathwater" (in German: "das Kind mit dem Bade ausschütten") originated in Germany in the 16th century. It first appeared in print in Murner's satirical work "die Narrenbeschwörung" (Appeal to Fools) in 1512.
What qualities distinguish a real Leader?
In the poem, Murner calls out “fools” who state one thing and project another. He criticized religious hypocrisy–those who perform religious acts for show while lacking true faith; social corruption–how various social institutions have become corrupted by greed and self-interest; moral decay–the decline of traditional moral values; and, class criticism–that is, he points out the foolishness present in all social classes, from peasants to nobility; and, material obsession–the growing focus on wealth and material possessions.
If Murner’s satirization of the “fools” in his day looks familiar, you can see why the current DEI discourse is blindingly equivalent. Here, I am not talking just about the most recent Executive Order on DEI. If you read parts of the 2025 version (you can find the 2020 version here) it is pretty clearly aligned with what most Americans, even the majority of DEI practitioners I engage with beyond America, would agree with:
“It is the policy of the United States to protect the civil rights of all Americans and to promote individual initiative, excellence, and hard work. I, therefore order all executive departments and agencies (agencies) to terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements. I further order all agencies to enforce our longstanding civil-rights laws and to combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.”
This paragraph, I would say, is the filthy bathwater.
IF people are practicing DEI are doing so in a way that promotes or enacts “discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements,” they should be terminated and those people who have taken on such actions should be excised along with them. They are akin to the targeted fools of Murner’s satire.
Now, here is where the water and the baby might be being confused: “Excise references to DEI and DEIA principles, under whatever name they may appear, from Federal acquisition, contracting, grants, and financial assistance procedures to streamline those procedures, improve speed and efficiency, lower costs, and comply with civil-rights laws.”
This paragraph shows that the writers are foolhardy themselves. They may not know what “the baby” is or how to find it amongst the filth.
It’s pretty clear there is a belief that DEI or DEIA principles are considered illegal by this administration. The many people who don’t know who I am (and those who do) who will not read this article might conclude the same depending on the media sources they consume. It also makes it clear that most people don’t know what “DEI principles” are.
In case you haven’t read my work before, I define the D, E, and the I as follows:
Diversity: Any mixture of similarities and differences along with their respective tensions. (from the work of Dr. R. Roosevelt Thomas)
Equity: Vigilantly identifying fairness gaps and learning what’s needed to close them.
Inclusion: Actions that create the conditions for people to thrive and contribute extraordinary value in fulfillment of the organizational mission.
The actions taken as of January 22, 2025, that I have been able to witness up close as I have federal government clients, are, from what I have seen so far, largely a fishing and hygiene exercise.
If fishing connotes looking to catch what one wants to keep, the administration will find “the baby.” If by working to eliminate illegal or unhelpful practices, they can cast out “the bathwater,” then I, as a diversity and inclusion practitioner, welcome such to be discarded rapidly.
What I mean by that is there are many things well-meaning people have done in the name of social justice, gender, or racial equity that need to come to a close. Even those reframing DEI as a new acronym where the focus remains on superficially increasing representation of less represented group identities and fighting for the rights of the “marginalized,” which are usually highly educated people with a skin color, gender identity, or ideology resembling their own might be continuing to miss the mark.
Until efforts related to representation and equal rights are practiced in their most magnanimous sense, they are simply as Dr. R. Roosevelt Thomas calls, “Shamming” (not to be confused with the “Shaming (ˈshā-miŋ) that has historically been accompanied by “blaming”.
I am not knocking representation efforts entirely. I am knocking the who and the how to create the conditions for such representation. If it is about going upstream to identify people who, beyond their group identity, might be diamonds in the rough without the means and access to places where they can make a meaningful contribution, representation is likely to increase, naturally.
Otherwise, we are creating superficial and short-term increases that don’t solve the problem many seemingly want to solve. Dr. Roland Fryer, who if you don’t know, you should. He is a professor of economics at Harvard, who speaks data-informed truth, even when it is uncomfortable. This mini-documentary tells his story.
A story he told on a podcast when asked his perspective, sums up what constitutes what I would consider ‘good wine’, rather than ‘old wine in new wineskins’ that some popular DEI practitioners are drumming up via re-juxtaposed frameworks with historically ineffective approaches.
Dr. Fryer said in response to the podcast host asking what he thinks about DEI:
"I think of DEI [the representation part] as talent optimization - putting the best people in the best jobs. When DEI focuses on sensitivity training, that doesn't have much effect. But if DEI means developing better technology to find talent in hidden places in America, I'm all for that.
Take this example: A medical school typically flew in 75 candidates and chose 40. During COVID, they switched to Zoom interviews with 300-400 people. This resulted in their most diverse class ever across multiple dimensions - simply because more people got a shot at being in the applicant pool.
Similarly, while Harvard accepted 25 graduate students, the University of Chicago would take 50 first-year students, letting the cream rise to the top before selecting 25 for subsequent years. That's what I'm talking about - creating opportunity.
This is how I view [positive action] and DEI at their best: finding ways to identify and nurture talent wherever it exists. Should skin color alone matter for school admissions? No. But skin color correlates with other factors like parental income that can limit potential. Obama's kids don't need affirmative action, but for someone from the inner city, race correlates with other limiting factors on their potential. It's all about talent."
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I hope this was helpful. . . Make it a great day! ✌🏿
DEI is only part of the problem. Biden was not smart enough or competent enough to resist caving to the whims of the far left wing of his party. He left the Democratic Party in shambles from which it may never recover.
If the remaining party leaders (whoever they might be) were smart (which they are not) they would look closely at at Trump’s many executive orders (EO’s) and maybe find a few popular ones that they could agree with and then use those along with the more popular positions that they currently endorse as the basis for a resurgence in 2026 and 2028.
So what’s currently in their bag that people don’t hate and what can be done with them to make them more salable to a majority.
First, a woman’s right to an abortion is popular but many believe there should be some time limit put on its availability as development proceeds from a single cell ( . ) to a 👶. So consider limiting it to the first trimester except to protect the health of the mother or when the fetus is not viable.
Second, most people are worried about climate change but the intermittent renewable energy sources located far from load centers Democrats are currently pushing will never provide reliable energy. The best long term solution is nuclear power plants located at existing coal fired plant locations that already have cooling and distribution infrastructure and are located near where electricity is needed. In the meantime we should be leading an international effort to develop geoengineering solutions to the problem because we will never reduce carbon emissions in time to stave off disaster.
Third, most people support vaccinations when their development is transparent and their use is voluntary. Use that approach to offset the current anti-vaccine rhetoric of the Republicans.
Back to Trump’s executive orders. There are three worth considering supporting.
The first of these EO’s recognizes that open borders are politically unacceptable and that the age of mass migration is over. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here destroys the wages of working class Americans and drives up housing costs when we can't house our own citizens. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their own country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay home and work there to improve their living conditions.
His second important EO addresses the insanity of gender identity which denies the reality of human sexuality and results in men invading women’s sports, restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. Women need and are entitled to privacy from men. Even more diabolical is the mutilation of innocent children (many who would grow up gay) in pursuit of the impossible because you can’t change your birth sex.
Finally his EO that corrects the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others is absolutely the correct approach. Who could believe that creating a new privileged class and a new discriminated against class would provide a solution to the problem? Not to mention that it’s clearly unconstitutional.
Would these actions help the Democrats recover? Who knows, but absent change there is no hope for them.