The Big DEI Lie

The entire Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) agenda is built on a lie. That lie is that racial disparities in America, and especially in education, are all the evidence needed to prove that America is a fundamentally racist nation, and that whites are inherently racist. It would be difficult to overstate the extraordinary significance of this deceit. Without it, the DEI agenda falls apart. The entire worldview of DEI collapses.

So why are Christian schools, including Christian colleges, incorporating DEI (“wokism,” also called “cultural Marxism”) into their programs when the DEI ideology contains eleven clearly identified false doctrines? (See Minnesota's War on Christians, Apr 29, 2024)

And why are Christian schools, especially Christian colleges, incorporating DEI into their programs when the public is now beginning to reject it? (See DEI is dead. The establishment media just doesn’t want you to know it, Joel Kotkin, The Telegraph, November 30, 2024).

The reason is that Christian schools, especially Christian colleges, have adopted the big DEI lie, the lie that underlies most of America’s education policy today and much of America’s policies beyond education. This big DEI lie is the false assumption that white kids do better than black kids in school because of pervasive racial discrimination against blacks. Along this same line are other false assumptions such as “white supremacy” (the notion that whites are inherently prejudiced against nonwhites), and “microaggressions” (the allegation that whites are continually and subconsciously demeaning nonwhites by their language). There is no evidence for any of these false assumptions, but many well-intentioned Christian people have been culturally indoctrinated to believe they are true.

These false premises are propagated by means of the strategy of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebels who said, “If you repeat a big lie often enough people will come to believe it.” But are these assumptions in agreement with the real world? With the well-documented information we have available, you may be surprised to know that they are not. Not at all. The following chart summarizes much of what we know about the racial achievement gap, most recent numbers as of 2024:

[Chart by Allen Quist, Race Gaps in SAT Scores and U.S. Census.]

This information is highly significant. Notice first that the average Asian SAT score is an amazing 145 points higher (12%) than Whites. If racial discrimination caused the achievement gap, then the fact that Asians do better than Whites would necessarily mean that the cause of the disparity was discrimination by Asians against Whites. Since this is obviously not the case and following basic laws of logic (Mill’s Canons of Causality), this completely disproves racial discrimination as the cause of racial achievement gaps.

What, then, is the cause of this huge disparity? Notice the extraordinary correlation between fatherless homes and low academic achievement across all races. As fatherless homes increase, academic achievement decreases. Again, following the well-established laws of logic, fatherless homes are the primary cause of racial academic disparities, not racial discrimination. This cultural disparity has been operating for generations, which has caused racial disparity to be inaccurately described as “systemic racism.”

Should we be surprised? The Hoover Institution observed more than 25 years ago:

The greatest social tragedy of the last 30 years has been the collapse of fatherhood. Propelled by the twin engines of divorce and illegitimacy, the percentage of children growing up in a home without their father nearly tripled between 1960 and the early 1990s. By 1994, 24 million American children were living without their biological fathers. But not to worry, we were increasingly told, all family arrangements were equal and children could do just fine without their fathers. Put simply, the modern family might need a village, but it no longer needs a dad. Hoover Institution You've Come A Long Way, Daddy

And the America First Policy Institute determined:

Fatherlessness and Education Outcomes

Unsurprisingly, those without a father in the home fare far worse in educational achievement than their two-parent counterparts. Some data shows that if fathers are not engaged, children are twice as likely to drop out of school than children with both parents at home (National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse). In a 2008 speech, President Barack Obama stated that the number could even be much higher, declaring that children who grow up without a father are nine times more likely to drop out of school (Politico Staff, 2008). Additional data has shown that 71% of high school dropouts are from fatherless homes (U.S. DOJ Office of Justice programs, 1998).

Children with an actively engaged father perform much better in school. Some data shows that they are 33% less likely to repeat a class and 43% more likely to get A’s in school (Nord & West, 2001). A study by the National Center for Education Statistics concluded that “ten percent of students living with both their parents have ever repeated a grade compared to 20% living in stepfather families, 17% in stepmother families, 18% in mother-only families, 16% in father-only families, and 21% living with neither parent.” (Nord & West, 2001). (America First Policy Institute ISSUE BRIEF: Fatherlessness and its effects on American society | Issues).

This information is actually very well known to researchers, though largely hidden from the public. It has been subjected to intense censorship over the years.

Many authors have documented differences between children raised in father-absent and father-present homes. Research has shown that father-absent children graduate from high school and attend college at a lower rate, perform worse on standardized tests, and are more likely to use drugs than children from father-present homes. (Academic achievement of children in single-parent homes: a critical review, The Hilltop Review, Fall, 2011.)

All this means that bringing DEI (cultural Marxism) into the schools has been based on a false premise, based on a lie. Fatherlessness is the cause of poor academic performance, not racial discrimination.

The racial academic achievement gap has been largely created by government policies. For example, in 2009 I discovered and publicized the marriage penalty in Obamacare. This was before the Obamacare bill was passed, so the marriage penalty could have been easily eliminated at that time. The Heritage Foundation picked up my analysis and verified my information.

Obamacare was structured so that only 17 percent of the subsidies to offset medical insurance costs go to married couples, while 83 percent go to unmarried individuals. In the Obamacare system, if an unmarried couple marries, their medical insurance could increase by over $5000 each year. Were federal lawmakers and lobbyists interested in eliminating this marriage penalty? They were not, because the marriage penalty is no accident. Anti-marriage policies have been part of an unrecognized, decades-long political agenda to weaken our nation by weakening families and educational achievement. And it has been very successful. Hopefully this agenda will change with the new administration. If we intend to improve the racial achievement gap, this is the kind of change that is needed.

But when policies are based on lies, the results will aways be unfavorable. The following chart describes the decline of academic achievement in Minnesota schools as woke ideology has been introduced. Minnesota has been leading the way in incorporating neo-Marxist beliefs and practices into its schools:

[Graph by Catrin Wigfall, Center of the American Experiment, Majority of Minnesota students aren’t meeting reading and math standards.]

As is evident from the chart, as Minnesota schools have been required to insert woke doctrines into their classrooms, the academic achievement for all races has been in freefall. This shouldn’t surprise us, because inserting DEI into schools, including doctrines of systemic racism and gender identity, alters the purpose of education. The purpose of education is transformed from teaching academic knowledge and skills to indoctrinating students into the beliefs of cultural Marxism. (The schools in the rest of the nation have also been in decline, but not as rapidly as in Minnesota schools.)

How does this all make sense? The godfather of cultural Marxism, Antonio Gramsci, said that for the Marxist revolution to succeed in the West, it will be necessary for Marxists to take control of the media and education. U.S. academia fully embraced Gramsci in the 80s. We can see Gramsci’s prescription being carried out in our schools before our very eyes.

The DEI superstructure of equity and all its corollaries dissolve in the light of this information. It discredits the deep Marxist inroads in education.

This demonstrates why it is imperative for Christian schools, including Christian colleges, to throw off the false and destructive yoke of Marxist ideology as some schools and many businesses are now doing. Will that happen? That may well be up to you, the reader.