The Media Has No Clothes

Joey Follows up on Identity Politics and the Harris Campaign

Vilhelm Pedersen, The Emperor’s New Clothes, 1849. Illustration, Danish. Image source: wikipedia.com, public domain

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Several weeks ago, I co-authored a piece for Upward News with Brandon Goldman titled Self-Segregating for Kamala about identity politics in her campaign. I am following up on the piece because I have more to say about the confusion in the media’s response to the allegation that she is a “DEI hire,” which was only lightly touched on in the piece.

The media firestorm that followed the accusation that Harris is a “DEI hire” is a recent example of the Neo-Victorian etiquette around DEI denialism common in left-leaning media outlets. The term was treated like a racial slur even though the accusation is obviously true. In 2020, Biden said he would “pick a woman to be vice president.” The media often asserts Biden’s VP pick had nothing to do with her race, fixating on his minced words in 2020, that black women were “among” the contenders.

However, her race did play a role in her selection. Biden won the South Carolina primary, saving his campaign, after House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) endorsed Biden. Before the endorsement, Clyburn pressured Biden to pick a black woman as his VP, and over 200 black female leaders signed a letter encouraging him to do the same. He almost certainly cut a deal with Clyburn. In July, the New York Times finally quoted Biden as saying in 2020, “I am going to pick a black woman” as VP. What more evidence does one need?

Regardless, the media decided that moral posturing is more important than a rigorous analysis of the accusation. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough asked, “Is it 1951?” in response to Congressman Tim Burchett’s (R-TN) comments suggesting Harris is a “DEI hire.” The Congressman argued it was wrong for Biden to “skip over” other populations for VP consideration. CNN’s Jake Tapper shook his head in disappointment at the label, as though it was an intellectually dishonest thing to say.

Some House Democrats even considered censuring Burchett for labeling Harris a DEI hire. He also applied the label to former Secret Service head Kimberly Cheatle. There is some circumstantial evidence that Cheatle was placed in her position with her sex as a consideration.

When I argue with my progressive friends about affirmative action/DEI, I often hear uninformed arguments about feelings and one-off statements like “it’s about giving them a chance” and “I want ‘people of color’ to feel successful.” This is often followed by accusations of racism and strong, almost religious, denials that racial preferences are a part of affirmative action/DEI initiatives. These DEI defenders have difficulty defining what these programs do.

The media analyst and Dilbert comics creator Scott Adams calls this form of denial a “hallucination.” Such hallucinations about racial and sexual preferences are common among progressives. Progressives openly engage in these preferences, then pretend they do not exist and accuse those who accurately quote them or their policies of racism and sexism.

Instead of recognizing that then-candidate Biden did what many progressives do, consider race and sex in hiring decisions, the mainstream press engaged in linguistic gymnastics to deny the obvious because stating these facts was not in keeping with good manners. This rhetoric was accompanied by bad arguments about implicit bias and racism that were based on emotion, logical fallacies, and facts used out of context.

The perfect example of this poor reasoning is an article in Forbes called What it Might Mean When Critics Call Someone a DEI Hire? by Dr. Susan Harmeling, Professor of “Global Inclusive Leadership” (a fabricated discipline) at ASU. The article employs a false analogy by making overly broad claims about the impact of implicit bias on voters’ views of powerful black women. It should be noted that the Implicit Association Test does not accurately measure racial bias.

She appears unfamiliar with the robust scientific criticism of the Implicit Association Test. The test’s creator says he does not understand what the test measures and scientific analysis finds the test to be unreliable as a measure of real-world prejudice. She also takes studies on in-group preferences among children wearing different colored shirts and draws a straight line from them to attitudes about powerful black women.

In a similar confabulatory fashion to the charlatans of anti-racism, she created something called the “All Things Being Equal Test” to combat implicit bias. I imagined this test was scientific and clicked on a link, thinking I would take a survey. Instead, it linked to another Forbes article she wrote. It explained that test takers should assess if they would judge a woman “of color” or LGBT person differently than a white man in the same position (I assessed my past judgments – never). This is a clear example of intellectual snake oil.

It is common for figures on the identity left to connect the dots between the hazy concept of “implicit bias” to racial inequality – with poor evidence. This is the same broken reasoning embraced by the cult of “anti-wokeness,” which sees a negative outcome in proximity to a DEI initiative and a priori assumes that outcome to be caused by DEI, often stringing together bad arguments and flimsy evidence to justify the claim.

Many arguments against Vice President Harris being labeled a “DEI hire” are straw-men that misrepresent what critics of racial and sexual preferences believe — and how those preferences are implemented. Critics of DEI are not attacking Harris’ race and sex. Instead, we disagree with considering those qualities when selecting candidates for employment.

Only an ignoramus would believe Biden picked his VP by selecting a random black woman off the street, just so happening to select a Senator. Like SCOTUS Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Harris was chosen from a pool of qualified candidates exclusive to certain identity groups to ensure the pick went to someone with intersectional credentials.

In fact, Harmeling engages in this same type of irrational thinking, saying, “...the term ‘DEI hire’ actually implies that only heterosexual, white men are qualified for such high leadership positions.” She also places the term meritocracy in quotations, implying that those who use the term do so disingenuously. These are more examples of straw-man arguments. Critics of DEI overwhelmingly hold genuine convictions around meritocracy, just as supporters of DEI genuinely believe in social justice.

The popularity of Michelle Obama puts a nail in the coffin of the argument that black women are automatically perceived negatively in politics. A Reuters/Isops poll found that Mrs. Obama was the only potential candidate definitively beating Trump in the polls before Biden dropped out of the race. Harris trailed her by 8 points. Still, both black women were the top Democratic favorites in the poll.

The dishonesty from the media surrounding this controversy reinforces the mistrust many Americans have in journalism. That mistrust is bred when every time politically correct etiquette is violated, the manners police in the mainstream media come swooping in to remind us that politeness is more important than the truth and an honest appraisal of other people’s opinions.