It’s time to shut down the diversity industry

Anyone my age or above will need no reminding of the late, great Michael Wharton, whose Peter Simple column on these pages introduced readers to, among other creations, Dr. Heinz Kiosk. Chief among Dr. Kiosk’s inventions was the “prejudometer”, an anti-racist measurement device. When used on suspected racists, it emitted a reading in “prejudons”, the “internationally-recognized scientific unit of racial prejudice”.

When I was a teenager, the antics of Heinz Kiosk made me laugh. I wonder now, though, if those lost in the modern world of corporate correctness might find Wharton’s work eerily prescient. What he didn’t foresee was that the concept of intrinsic prejudice would grow to encompass bias against a far wider range of minority groups than the prejudometer was programmed to tackle. …

There are endless sociological papers intended to prove that “diverse” workforces are more productive. But there’s a gap between a statement of the obvious (“If your workforce is composed of people with diverse backgrounds and experiences, they are likely to produce multiple potential solutions to move the business forward”—what most of us would recognize as the common sense definition of diversity) and the political/corporate synthesis of that concept as it translates into working life: the entire industry that revolves around uncovering and treating institutional prejudice. …