Why do White people keep falling for tropes and fallacies about diversity, equity, and inclusion?

In a recent essay in City Journal about the brouhaha over the congressional testimony of Ivy League presidents, Heather Mac Donald wrote the following about Bill Ackman, a donor to Harvard and a billionaire investor:

“Ackman, who has taken the lead in the campaign against Harvard, had been going through a very public education about the diversity, equity, and inclusion complex. On November 6, he admitted on CNBC that until recently he had never read Harvard’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion statement. When he did, he was surprised to learn that the school’s DEI mandate did not cover “all marginalized groups,” as he put it, such as Asians and Jews. The solution, in Ackman’s view, was to expand the diversity bureaucracy’s client base to include the full panoply of students and faculty who were “at risk of being taken advantage of, of being harmed, of being emotionally harmed,” in his words, by the “majority.”

Source:  https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-academy-at-the-crossroads)

Ackman’s thinking is astonishing in three ways.

First, although Ackman is a Harvard benefactor, and although DEI is one of the most controversial issues in academia and society today, he had never read the university’s DEI statement. 

By contrast, I didn’t graduate from the Ivy League, am not a billionaire, and am average in IQ.  But I’ve read scores of DEI pronouncements from universities, corporations, government, and nonprofits.  Not only that but in 1990, while I was still active in advancing equal rights and equal opportunity in business, I read the Harvard Business Review article that came out that year and started the diversity movement:  “From Affirmative Action to Affirming Diversity,” by R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr.  

Since then, diversity has degenerated from Mr. Thomas’s reasoned argument into divisive tropes and fallacies that have no place in institutes of higher learning or in society at large.

Second, it’s ludicrous for Ackman to claim that Asians are a marginalized group in need of DEI.  Which of the many nationalities, races, and ethnic groups force-fitted into the Asian category is he referring to?  Is he referring to the Han Chinese who hold most of the power in China?  The Koreans who hate the Japanese?  The Mongols who conquered and colonized scores of other peoples?

My extended family includes so-called Asians, but they refer to themselves by their ancestral nationality and ethnicity, not by the label “Asian.”   They are smart, industrious, successful, and just as family-oriented, if not more so, than Americans of Italian or Jewish ancestry.  They don’t need Ackman’s pandering, condescension, and virtue signaling.  Nor do Americans of East Indian ancestry need help from Ackman, especially given that they rank at the top in income.

Third, there is no doubt that when Ackman refers to disadvantaged groups being harmed by the majority, he is equating Whites to the majority.  This is a particular pernicious nostrum.

So-called Whites are only in the majority because of the specious and arbitrary way in which “races” are classified and counted in America for purposes of DEI.  A hundred or so unique ethnocultural groups are lumped together and labeled as White, even though many of them have little in common and many are dirt-poor and far from being privileged. 

The underlying fallacious assumption is that everyone labeled as White is homogeneous and monolithic in skin shade, DNA, socioeconomic status, outlook, values, beliefs, experiences, and ethnicity.

Even more ridiculous is the belief that everyone labeled as White cannot be a member of a minority group is an automatic member of the majority, has never been on the receiving end of injustice, and, by virtue of birth, has political power, privilege, and other unfair advantages.

It’s particularly troubling that college presidents and their large bureaus of diversity, equity, and inclusion administrators hold this belief.  They do so despite professors of anthropology, sociology, ethnography, genetics, and history knowing that it’s ridiculous.

At the same time, colleges encourage students to use their preferred pronouns.  Yet they would look askance at me for refusing to use the adjective “White” to describe myself, preferring instead to use “Italian.”  I do that to make the point that Italians, including my forebears, were not seen as White and were treated accordingly by the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment for much of the twentieth century. The same for many other ethnocultural groups that were not seen as White back then but are seen as White today

Ackman doesn’t seem to understand the ethnocultural and economic diversity of people classified as White.  Maybe he only hangs around with people who are as uninformed and guilt-ridden as himself.