Interest Convergence and Citation Justice

How DEI uses 2 CRT Methods to Create New Zero-Sum Forms of Racial Exclusion (aka be racist)

My opinions are subject to change via evidence and new experience.

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Ada Akpala at the Equiano Project recently published this post acknowledging what she sees as the flawed application of the social justice project of DEI. An accurate criticism of DEI to be fair, and a welcome call to assess its impact on our culture, yet the criticism fails to acknowledge that CRT theories and DEI methods align: they intend to exclude. Any racial or gender exclusion is a direct by-product.

Ada notes:

Now, let's be clear: there's nothing inherently wrong with the concepts of representation and diversity.

Oh, but there is…as DEI defines them. And I’ll explain.

Her post hints at DEI’s fundamental racist feature yet fails to address this because I believe Ada seeks to open a productive conversation in her post about how to better promote inclusion while also being skeptical of misapplication. Fair enough, and I applaud her for that, yet her choice to emphasize observations of the consequences conceals the fundamental racism of the underlying methods:

Proponents may tout good intentions, but we must scrutinise the methods and consequences of inclusion and diversity efforts. Inclusivity should be pursued in a way that embraces everyone, rather than as a tool to create new forms of exclusion.

Yet create new forms of exclusion DEI does. Why? Because CRT-based and antiracist-based DEI overtly do not seek to embrace everyone.

Were she to write a follow-up piece after scrutinizing DEI methods, as I do below and at Project Luminas, she would conclude that the underlying CRT theory informs the problematic DEI methods and exclusivist consequences she rightly observes. No true DEI practitioner fails to be inclusive by excluding white people because it is designed to do just that: target white people and ‘white’ culture. If you do not exclude white people, then you are not succeeding at fulfilling the DEI vision. Ada begins to address this euphemistic logical flaw of calling DEI ‘inclusive’:

Increasing representation may seem laudable, but framing it as a rebuke or rejection of another demographic is counterproductive. True inclusion should be about “adding seats to the table,” not playing a zero-sum game where one group must lose for another to gain. (my emphasis)

Excluding white people in a subtractive fashion from the present table (to use Ada’s analogy) is justified in CRT and antiracism. White people have set the American table for decades or centuries…for too long in their opinion (my millennial self included). It’s time for the nonwhite Others to set it, to prescribe racial identities, to balance the oppression and marginalization with new Ibram X. Kendi-style discrimination in Constitutional amendments, to repeal Civil Rights law or attack norms like punctuality as simply oppressive White culture to be eradicated.

In other words, the anti-white racism Ada observes results not from well-intended misapplication, as she optimistically posits, but from intentional, theorized exclusion.

Interest Convergence

For example, of the 8 fundamental tenets of CRT that assistant professor of writing Aja Martinez (2020) lists in Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory, Interest Convergence refers to how a dominant or majority race will only tolerate minority racial advancement in society as long as the change first benefits them and their dominant ideology, as CRT scholar Derek Bell theorized it.

Martinez attempts to show how the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case was not a moral racial win but a win of interest convergence. She explains that to counter Communist propaganda that the U.S. was brutally racist and a terrible democracy, the white Justice Department and Truman administration framed the Brown decision as “not a blow to American racism but to communism” (12).

So, white people in power saw this apparent racial advancement as a challenge to their dominance over Black or Brown people and used it to further their White Supremacist ideology, cloaked as a blow to communism (no wonder that Helen Pluckrose, whom Ada interviews in her post, wrote Cynical Theories with James Lindsay). Counterstory methodology, based on CRT and intersectionality, is a common scholarly method in my discipline that Ada would do well to scrutinize along with CRT’s Interest Convergence theory.

CRT is not about lifting all demographic boats precisely because it argues the system was not built to lift all boats in the first place. Every aspect of the US System was built to subordinate one group over all Others - the only remedy? Inverse subordination - in the form of epistemic, scholarly segregation in my discipline (or DEI hiring practices).

Citation Justice

Next, take Citation Justice (CJ), or what composition scholar Erec Smith critically and correctly called Victimhood via Footnote.

One of my former PhD professors, Dr. Sano-Franchini, called for all conference presentations to engage in citation justice at our discipline’s 2024 annual conference in Spokane, WA, called the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). Since citation is a form of power in a patriarchal, white supremacist society, I as a writing scholar must cite “knowledge producers based on their identity in order to uplift marginalized scholars”, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate school. Of this conference practice, described as abundant, I asked in another article similar to Ada’s question, “But, why call for the telling of indigenous stories of Spokane at the expense of white stories, in a subtractive approach? Is that really ‘abundant’ cultural change?” No. CJ, like DEI, is subtractive, reductivist, and essentialistic, and we are too good for it. It literally erases white people and the diversity of ideas they espouse from scholarship because…white.

CJ corrupts critical thinking worse than reliance on frequentist statistics and the replication crisis in science because it centers unassessable race-based thinking, that ideas and arguments are only valuable because of arbitrary racial identity, not the validity or rigor of the ideas and methods they espouse. Moreover, CJ furthers the replication crisis because these orthodox views and methods can’t be assessed, for to do so is racist and white supremacist and because CJ is based on a non-falsifiable quality called identity.

Zero-sum Methods and Consequences

To answer Ada’s question: DEI is exclusion in disguise.

Being based on the negation or erasure of white people, not to mention any minority identity as Erec Smith abundantly points out, CRT-based DEI practices seek to remove chairs from the proverbial table (or scholarly journals and discourse in my discipline’s case).

In sum, Ada’s concepts of representation and diversity are fine, so long as they exist in an idealized vacuum, sure. But they don’t. The popular CRT and antiracist versions of representation and diversity in media, academia, and workplaces define race relations as a zero-sum game. They are inherently subtractive and exclusive, by definition, as the Interest Convergence tenet and Citation Justice method demonstrate.

Understanding this will remove DEI’s disguise and free us all to create more inclusive and diverse methods and results in politics, the workplace, media, and academia.

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At Project Luminas, I scrutinize my discipline’s CRT-based DEI research and teaching methods and assess their consequences as they impact my life and profession. One PL article I wrote traces how partisan politics entered my discipline’s scholarship in the 80s and created conditions for today’s illiberal ideology to flourish in it and across campuses in the ensuing decades.