A Sleeper Sampler
Life After ‘Diversity’ The best way to understand the current controversy over Trump’s unremitting assault on “D.E.I.” (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) protocols in business corporations and public institutions is to revisit the argument against D.E.I. that I made in my book Liberal Racism in 1997, long before I or anyone else imagined that anyone like Trump would win control of our government and much of our public discourse. Hideous though I believe that his and MAGA’s premises and policies are, I’ve never departed from my conviction that it was liberals who, in what I called “a colossal blunder,” opened doors to those racist assaults in the ways I described in Liberal Racism, whose introductory chapter I’ve linked above. Twenty five years later, I reiterated and extended my argument for Commonweal, “Scrapping the Color Code.” But be sure to read Life After ‘Diversity’, which shows what we should have seen in 1997.
Why Niebuhr Now? My review of John Patrick Diggins’ book about the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, for Bookforum, in 2011.