Ep.142 I Deciding Against DEI: A Diversity Trainer Speaks Out with Erec Smith, Ph.D.
DEI training has shifted from promoting equity to being weakly replaced with critical social justice, which today’s guest claims is inherently racist. Dr. Erec Smith, an anti-racist activist, shares how business owners can foster a diverse company culture – without the guise of generic performative activism.
KEY TOPICS
The ways that contemporary DEI trainings are “inherently racist.”
How to “climate check” your company.
Ways to organically foster diversity in your company – WITHOUT QUOTAS.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction and Mission of Decidedly
00:52 Boring Required Trainings
04:13 Dr. Eric Smith's Experience with DEI Training
06:11 Prescriptive Racism
09:09 Limitations of Modern DEI Initiatives
12:29 Shortcomings of Critical Social Justice
19:00 Changing Definitions of Words
27:54 White People’s Involvement in DEI
29:20 The Pressure to Conform
32:42 Root Motivations of DEI
35:07 Fostering a Diverse Business
37:58 The Culture of Your Company
41:25 Getting 1:1 with Your Team
44:00 Social Groups
48:00 Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone
51:02 Bridging Relationships
52:58 Empowerment Theory
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CONNECT WITH EREC SMITH, PH.D.
Website: www.freeblackthought.com
Erec Smith is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania. Although he has eclectic scholarly interests, his primary work focuses on the rhetoric of anti-racist activism, theory, and pedagogy, as well as the role of rhetoric in a free, pluralistic, and civil society.
He co-founded Free Black Thought, a nonprofit highlighting viewpoint diversity within black communities. Free Black Thought includes a compendium of black artists, writers, academics, and public intellectuals not discussed in mainstream media. The organization also has a Journal of Free Black Thought, which publishes anything–from poetry to scholarly work—that discusses or displays a variety of viewpoints within the black diaspora.
Smith is the author of A Critique of Anti-Racism in Rhetoric and Composition: The Semblance of Empowerment (2020), a book in which he scrutinizes contemporary modes of anti-racism in his field. The book was conceived after Smith's observations of his field led him to conclude that anti‐racist initiatives did more to disempower students and faculty than empower them.
Smith is an advisor for both the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism and Counterweight, an organization that advocates for classical liberal concepts of social justice.