I mean, I’m just thinking, for a few years you’ll have teachers and administrators thinking, “Well, we ‘fixed’ the problem,” through a bizarre solution that isn’t a solution at all, a major problem that needs to be changed probably on multiple levels to really get these students up to par and get them the help that they need.

I do want to pivot and just ask you a little bit about something that you referred to, which is director of diversity. This has become a popular job title at a number of schools. Lots of schools, lots of businesses are hiring someone that’s specifically just on staff to make sure that that community is racially aware, that they are diverse enough.

So what exactly do these people do who wear this title of something like director of diversity?

Lehman: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s a person who is responsible for, the industry buzzword is DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—and broadly speaking, it’s the person who is responsible for any initiatives related to those things as a set of priorities for a business, or a school, or a nonprofit, what have you.

And I think that can mean metrics for diversity, that can mean organizing a speaking event, that can mean consulting on who’s getting promoted and who isn’t. I think it’s a person who’s specifically responsible for forwarding a diversity, equity, and inclusion set of goals.

To some extent that might be good. It’s conceivable that they could do that role well. I think often in practice, that role, as I argue in the piece, often in practice what that role does is identify reasons that more diversity, equity, inclusion are needed.

So if you look at these schools, their roster of DEI people [has] only grown over the past five to 10 years. They might’ve started with one diversity chief, and then because of that person finding issues, they hire another person, and then another person, and then you have a seven-person group who’s responsible for diversity.

And it is telling to me that as these organizations add administrators, the number of acquisitions of racism only increase, the number of identified instances of racism only increase. Maybe they’re measuring better, but they may also typically be measuring more.

I think it is generally true that administrators of this sort seek in their own interest in trying to accrue, just like anybody, trying to accrue resources. And the best way to do that is to say, “Well, actually, you need even more DEI than you first thought.”

Allen: Wow, fascinating. And I know you have specifically written about that subject in other pieces, and we’ll link those in the show notes so our audience could read your work on that.

But I want to ask, apart from education, we are seeing that woke culture is really seeping into things like professional sports, of course, TV [shows] and movies, large corporations. So if we fast forward maybe 10 or 15 years, what [effect do you think] this very progressive woke culture ideology is going to have on America long term?

Lehman: I’ll say two things. One is, I’m not sure what’s going to happen in 10 to 15 years, in part because it is hard to disentangle this push for wokism and it’s contemporary political context.

Clearly, it started the second half of the Obama administration, but was empowered by the Trump administration, a liberal visceral backlash against the Trump administration. Maybe with Joe Biden in office, it’ll ratchet back. Maybe not. Who knows? Let’s imagine it doesn’t.

I think I would say, here’s the thing that’s not going to happen, I am not optimistic about the spread of woke ideology actually reducing substantive racial inequality in United States.

If our priority is doing something like reducing the black-white wealth gap, I don’t think it’s going to have a major impact on that. I don’t think Uber Eats-ing from a black-owned restaurant is going to have a major impact on that, even though they lecture me about it all the time.

I certainly don’t think you lecturing your employees about their white fragility is going to have a major impact on that. And I think in general, it is unlikely to even help diversity at the top end of the distribution. The Nasdaq can require you to have a more diverse board in order to be admitted to it, but I think companies will be really good at skirting that.

Instead, what I imagine is that mostly the serpent will leave its own tail, that as with diversity execs I talked about a minute ago, in schools, the principle applies more broadly.

What mostly will happen [is] they’ll find new ways to identify hard-to-measure racial problems, racial wrongthink, and then hire new consultants and new employees and new directors who are responsible for ferreting it out, none of which will have any interest in correcting any substantive imbalance from a policy perspective, but will instead so focus on reinforcing this idea and therefore, frankly, generating more profit for the people who propound it.

Allen: Charles, we just so appreciate your insight on this issue. I do want to ask, where can our listeners follow you, find your work?

Lehman: Absolutely. I think the best place is at the Free Beacon. That’s freebeacon.com. I’m there. All of my great colleagues are there. You can also follow me on Twitter. I’m @CharlesFLehman. … Those are both good places.

Allen: Great. Charles, thank you so much.