Diversity without Inclusion? Learning from Hoover’s FBI Abdelilah Bouasria, Ph.D.

Diversity and Inclusion has become an immensely popular and sexy field. As there are many chiefs and no Indians, and when salvation is at a crossroad, prophets are mixed with profiteers, and some babies might be thrown with the bath water. However, we should not let perfect be the enemy of the good, or the Never again be the enemy of the Never ever. Should we count the numbers or make the numbers count? Should we all salute the “Uniform” or should some of us, at least, break conventional wisdom by believing in “Uni/corns”? After all, as diversity and inclusion teach us, we should all hear: “Thank you for your service,” because from our various and equally important stations, we are all serving (servicing) someone, somewhere. From Migration borders to areas ranging in their 50s (they have “come” of age in a way!), “Aliens” came to be erroneously synonymous with apprehension and menace. Migration brings an added value to societies in many aspects, ranging from pouring in new labor perspectives and talents to adding bricks to our melting pots. However, it raises concerns about established identities by those are individuality purists who keep asking: where is the “crack”? or “Who are we?”

We are often told, albeit tyrannically, as refurbished D&I experts, that diversity is a fact meanwhile inclusion is a choice. Pretty much like in gastronomy, the choice of colors participates in the likelihood of our meal’s triumph and popularity. However, in Fast-Food highways or slow-cooking silos, the snack must taste good in order not to be “chopped.” Likewise, opening one’s NGO or business to the scrutinizing gaze of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Metrics, qualitative and quantitative, goes beyond checking boxes (international bureaucrats will probably feel comfortable here) to secure (whither in/securities?) Federal aid or tax exemptions. It similarly transcends expecting multicultural “role players” to be content with a simple rainbow smile “photo(sh)op” with the Zeus or the Ishtar of corporate executive greedy-yet-upgraded Leviathans who learn the diversity lexicon only to twist it to their advantage.

Diversity and Inclusion ought to become sustainable and endemic. At an individual level, it must entail stepping out of one’s comfort zone and business-as-usual fixations to reach a Nash-equilibrium and a Pareto-Optimum “High” end, through what Gardner called “Multiple intelligences.” Digital nomads who are turning their backs on the Safety nets of localized attachments, thus risking their equilibrium, deserve our attention and our respect. They have traveled to places that do not eat or speak or play or pray like them, but they managed the antithesis well so that their synthesis goes beyond the photo-satisfaction. To be diversely intelligent, or efficient, at an organizational level, one must transcend standardization and legitimation and look for grounded diversity and inclusion, so that companies or institutions become a breathing “multitudinal” panacea. Once otherness is not given its deserved “breathing” room, subaltern voices “Can’t breathe” anymore and white supremacy prevails with a technique. What comes to be coldly named, in “Firm” (Exit “Soft” skills?) linguistics as “Management” needs to shift HR from categories to individuals by maximizing/optimizing potential perception in each individual/employee so that procedures will acquire an “agile” sixth sense, a soft identity that is porous and adaptive. It is not the Algorithmic discrimination that is the assassin of multiculturalism in artificially intelligent “beings.” It is simply the weapon that already sub-diverse, or anti-diverse, generic scripters are using to bureaucratize and whitewash (pun intended) their cultural (and accultured) shortsightedness, that they bluntly showcase or connivingly masquerade as “Eyes-Wide-Shut” acrobatics.  

Legal routes such as quotas and affirmative action practices are one way of righting the wrongs. Establishing Diversity Task forces is another way. For instance, when IBM created, in 1995, these task forces to address the mounting issues of racism and ethnic bias, it included several categories: African American, Asian, Disabled, LGBTQ, Hispanic, Native-American, White males, women. Should gender be a separate category? or, like Postcolonial theorists argue, should femininity, as well as masculinity, be celebrated differently across the Diversity stations? Where are the altered states of minds? The BDSM Tantric servants? The not-necessarily-veteran workforce? The Blue-collar unions? Elderly wisemen/women? The middle-men phobic? There is a paradox in the Diversity and Inclusion cognitive mapping of people: the less biased ones will fail to see potentially enriching differences. The more biased among us will see these differences while failing in assigning them intersectional value. For us to “nail” the diversity issue, we cannot come to it with a hammer, no matter where the latter is manufactured or whether it is organic or not. The lingua franca of the hammer might be of some acoustic relief (Italian might sound more enchanting than Arabic) but across all cultural boards, a hammer buries you. If it ain’t broke do not fix it? A nonviolence maxim that does not hold in the world of this Covid pandemic. The question then becomes: who would inoculate these supremacies that manage by “doing” nothing or less than the “boots on the ground”? What does fixing mean? Do it to a cat for your procreative zero tolerance and I suspect the animal not to be incredibly happy (from a box perspective, happy is generally an “end” to horny). Fixing something (the clamp on a rail) or not having it (he had not had his fix) is a big dilemma. Fixing people might lead them at times to end in a fix. White supremacists will start changing their diversity microchip when they will learn how not to judge different living and working styles, and when they will not wait for a “tragedy” to occur to acknowledge the problem and its population. Predictive behavior and intelligent forecasting ought to assist diversity and inclusion pilots in evading traffic jams or roadblocks before bumping into them. We need to inject both motivation and awareness in eradicating not only White supremacy-which is alarmingly lurking beneath our surfaces-but all kinds of Systemic Supremacies. Metaphors we live by, or images we drone over must be ethically representative without any prototypes, stereotypes, or copywriting racing. Infusing Manhattan with diversity boosters generates, at a cosmetic level, in us a “Womanhattan” reflex. On a more grounded degree, it pushes us to question the non-affordability nature of the over-gentrified ghetto. Social Justice is at the core of the lack of diversity plague. The question that often arises is the following: is Social justice the only marker that we should use to highlight lightly diverse organizations even if they are for-profit companies?  It is here where CSR and D&I are birds of a feather that might flock together and be blessed by a progeny as cute as Consumer protection or Ethics in Business.

The field of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is not a new field. It is a derivative of many other fields such as Postcolonial studies, Cultural studies, Feminism, Disability studies, Queer theory, Postmodernism, Consumer Protection, Social responsibility, Ecological branding, HR, Employment Law, Ethics, Labor economics, Race studies, religious studies (mysticism), Consumer behavior, and many other disciplines. CSR brought an eye-opening lens through which we “make” money, but it was also coopted by big corporations to pull the rug from beneath the feet of labor unions. In the same way, D&I flipped around the sameness/difference dichotomy, but it might be co-opted by marketing and PR niche diggers to “diversify” their assets and expand their brand, speech included, via a tokenism that they rebuke at the first turn. However, when poop hits the fan, there is only minimal damage control that reputation saviors can bless. The best marketing strategy rests on quality control, customer satisfaction and cost-efficiency. Diversity must be genuine, sustainable, loyalty-driven, and not fundraising-attached. The disposable and the no-strings-attached quick fixes and scheming catches have no chance in reasonably accommodating minorities let alone bringing silent majorities to a Public Forum of Equity and Reconciliation. Conformism and Political Correctness cannot take D&I to Prom. Nor can her shoes fit liability’s shoes. Freedom of Speech and hate speech are the yet-to-be-defined natural language processing of Diversity Studies. It is the reason for which linguists might be of great help in this race for the rainbow.

From a marketing perspective, we are told, everything is in the “package.” Metrosexual petitioners and male supremacy deconstructionists have other “eggs” to fry, not to the enhanced “taste” of Package situationists. Race is important but it is not the only variable that needs to be accounted for in the D&I Metric building. Gender, age, disability, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, cognitive monogram (we all have distinct mapping signatures) and generational identities (Millennials are unjustly thought to be entitled, lazy and lack respect for authority) constitute the categories that constitute this epistemic field. White supremacy is as difficult to remove as adultism or agism and brave spaces need to find their allies. Diversity blindness is a disability that needs to be gradually healed, and its only weapon is Co-optation and cultural appropriation that converts otherness into gadgets and artifacts, and creates in its victims internalized racism and oppression.

Building D&I literacy takes someone that has explored the roads less traveled across all these classifications. Alternative lifestyles should be given a chance. Not only in a Marijuana-perks-for employees-kind of way (we will call them casual Thursdays) but in a Pay-me-if-you-make-me-work kind of way as well. For instance, I had once served, as an intercultural linguist, a big defense contractor that did not pay us for trainings when a new manager, who turned out to have dark stains before he came on board, joined our company and wanted to rhetorize his way out of not paying us by saying that he was deciding if it should be Training or HR (you can call it a lamb ragout if you wish but it is still unpaid labor!).

As an American male of North African origin and with a loose religious background that is assumed from my name, I am often dismissed as non-African because of non-dark skin, although I have my doubts about me being allowed into the first seats of the Rosa Parks bus had I been there. Being white is a frame of mind not a skin color. Similarly, being multilingual is a raison d’etre not a tongue asset for sale or rent. I have rolled my tongues (I speak 5 languages and I have published in four of them) across both civilian and military walks of life, seeing beyond the use and lose framework, but the avatars of multicultural fa?ade lack trust in my “alike” and often parade the issue of the lack of Clearance (I am an international voyageur) as a “barrier to entry”. Free trade, we should learn, is a good conduit to peace and barriers to entry should be the remnant of rich and exclusive fraternities where dungeons would puke if they could speak, had they not been foreseeably gagged by a shrewd lawyer’s order. The instant-diversifiers or the condensed spreaders (like Decaf coffee or non-dairy milk) seem to be heedless to the fact that you have got more than a handful of double agents and spies that happened to have the utmost clearance before going rogue, and more so to the fact that even if you are denied one but you happen to be singing in the right Choir, you might “earn” the executive merit of a waiver or an override. I am myself a fan of riding (horse, camel, elephant, lama…you name it), but it is the “over” part that I am “overtly” lacking. Shouldn’t we, in the age of multiculturalism and diversity, include other perspectives on what is “clear” or “fuzzy”?

Take the issue of language and culture learning as “packaged” in the industrial-military milieus: Learners of French will automatically be glued to romance, wine, and Parisian bakeries as a complimentary side dish; learners of Spanish will have to tag along immigration or lawbreaking reading or listening topics; Arabic learners find themselves under the “friendly fires” of harems, terrorism, and educational misinformation. Some will be drawn into loving a language while others are accultured into despising it, and from the top of the pyramid you are your most basic Maslow needs, some cold war relics have set the culture of divide-and-conquer in stone, but it is precisely when one is “stoned” that the alternative thinking is supposed to be “enhanced” (from a military perspective it might be just a “technique”).  While the issue of clearance discrimination is structural discrimination, cloaking in technicalities the segregated lexicon, expecting language and culture experts to “act the culture” (named “Roleplay”) is cognitive discrimination where “representation” supplants “presentation” and where we, US citizens not born in this amazing home of the free, land of the brave, are expected to obey, like canines, commands like “Sit” “bark” and “get the ball.” We are not even allowed, and this is where diversity draws the line of healthy “insubordination”, to ask: who dropped the ball? Who let the “dogs” out? We should make diversity Essential without essentializing it, and tokens relevant without tokenizing them.

The Late Edward Said had clearly enunciated how “orientalism” came to dominate Hollywood, Art, and Academia by mis-presenting Arabs and Muslims under a violent, greedy, and womanizing bastards’ lenses. The Jewish people have suffered the same plight, in a different and darker aspect, with Nazi propaganda. The Armenians with the Turks. The Muslim Arabs with Pre-Islamic Arabians. Asians with Pearl Harbor Americans. Black Slaves with Arabs and Europeans (forefathers of Americans). White slaves by Barbary corsairs. Indigenous people by pretty much everybody. The list is long. History (not the revisionist one) will help us refine the script and codify the Equity “Python”. There is upgraded and mutating white supremacy that has been feeding on the timid Reggaetón of Diversity and Inclusion as a field. In the case of Saidian Orientalism industrialists, pretty much like the democratization complex prophets and apostles, it has become a defense mechanism by white liberal academics to appropriate the subaltern “struggle” by appointing themselves as representatives of the representation, using voices like myself as natives-for-hire at best and as background dummies at worst. If I open my mouth to criticize an aspect of public policy, for instance, of my country of birth (Morocco), there will be two categories that will shun my criticism: the Moroccan diplomat (understandably so and I have no qualms with his/her branding) and the Saidian American “cultural warrior” whose mercenary bellicose aura pigeonholes me into representation when I am merely expressing a Public administration criticism. The Diversity industry (Inclusion is still awaiting its coverage) becomes lucrative for our diversity tricksters who want me to moan in tongues but never to speak up or holler. My voice is only allowed as dubbed. As a background noise that will not rise to outshine the synthetic buzzing of bees that are incapable of producing any honey because precisely the tongue palate has been singularly conditioned to despise not only sugar but sweetness as well. Similarly, we should not let the middlemen and the trophies’ vultures take ownership of something that should not be culturally patented. Our challenge in today’s Diversity and Inclusion industry is to put in place a serious and fair vetting process where the murderer should not be allowed into the funeral parade lest our baptism becomes an abortion, and both life defenders and choice protectors have their loudspeakers.

If the pinnacle of this much-awaited Diversity and inclusion call has been given by the horrible and condemnable killing of Breonna Taylor and Eric Garner, it is worth culturing police. Before doing that, let us reminisce how culture was “policed.” John Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) has a trick or two under his sleeves for us, culturalists, to learn from. Thanks to diversity, he created, out of the Bureau of Investigation that he joined, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He did not ask for defunding the bureau (another facelift of the Cancel culture), as some wrongly claim today for the police, but he modernized it and updated it. He created his own bureau. Diversity? Maybe. Inclusion? Not so fast. Other than staying as the tzar of the Feds for 37 years until his death at the age of 77 (some rightly argued the 10-year term limits…I am more concerned about Nobility inheritance disguised as pedigree), his personal touch was not of a diverse nature: centralizing fingerprint file and exceeding the house’s jurisdiction in monitoring and control. Hoover was aware of the importance of brand narratives as he was a consultant to Warner Brothers for a movie about his agency (The FBI Story). Clyde Tolson, who represented a “diverse” brand, pretty much like Hoover, was an assistant to Edgar. His hard work paid off, no matter how we come to define the concept of work. Hoover had a very distinctive style: he kept an exceptionally large collection of pornographic material of celebrities and others for blackmail purposes, something that the Mafia would also do in returning the favor. Edgar Hover was fair when he investigated the Osage Indian murders in Oklahoma, despite the complicity of state officials and law enforcement. He stood adamantly against the detention of Japanese Americans. However, he did not expand his diversity lenses to include the Communist party (White Supremacists do the same thing today with ANTIFA). When he engaged in the surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. it was under the tutelage of attorney general Robert Kennedy and with the knowledge of President Kennedy. The depictions of Hoover came also to espouse culturally divergent paths.

Decades later, we have “come” a long way from Lavender closets to “don’t ask don’t tell” policies and here we are with Fifty shades of Grey culture as a celebrated-but somehow acceptable-kink. Hoover might have been diverse in the sense that he was different, opting for his own brand narrative. He was not encompassing differences in his managerial style.

I had, one time, a boss from a military background who used to say: “if you do not supervise, you will be supervised.” That Top-down approach, living on bread and Commands, is oblivious to the diverse and inclusive faces of power with, rather than power over. The late French scholar Michel Foucault amazingly called our attention to the fact that the queen of the beehive rules without a stinger. Zen masters tell us that the best battles are those that you win without fighting. Navajo sand painters instruct us to the value of erasing the drawing that your ego came to meticulously sand out. A language is more than a tongue. It is speaking the heart’s mind. Diversity is not only compliance with some ISO-certified procedures or protocols. It should become our creed, our motto, our pledge of allegiance. From a diversity and inclusion perspective, we are all sinners. Let the one who had never sinned throw the first stone. The real question is: who should cast the first diversity stone? A more crucial question would probably be: Who has the Holy Grail? Let us be aware that the Pharmakon is both the poison and the antidote. “Iatrogenics” suggests “harm caused by the healer”: obvious iatrogenics (amputating the wrong leg) and non-obvious iatrogenics, such as ordering antidepressants and ADHD medication irresponsibly. Part of this problem comes from the fact that the doctor’s interests and those of the patient do not dance to the same Tango. Let us give voice to those among us who do not confuse freedom of speech and servitude to the common bad. The Diversity and Inclusion mission is pretty much like the fight against COVID: it is not a public diplomacy stunt where all what we need to do is to win the hearts and minds of haters. It is a much more surgical bypass where transplants need to be done, with the caveat that the donor does not share necessarily the same blood as the receiver. Yet, both of them live…..happily ever after.