True Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

We hear the terms of equality, diversity and inclusion often accompanied by the ubiquitous term of “social justice.” Almost everyone wants equality for all people and that no one should be left behind. The primary question is how do we achieve these goals? Was America founded on the wrong principles or did it just take time to get closer to them? What do we mean by using these terms and are we on the right path? 

America was founded on individual rights, not group rights. Many original Americans came from Europe where their societies were not based on individual rights, but group rights. The aristocracy had many more rights than the common man or woman. European society had classes of people that had different statuses dependent on whose family you were born into. An individual human being was entitled to certain rights purely by accidence of birth. 

The founders of America did not desire a society where there was an aristocratic class or any class that had more rights than another person. Their solution was to base rights in America on the equality of individuals rather than classes or groups. This solution was the ideal one even if it did not apply to every American right away. It is much better to build a society that is classless and fluid. One may achieve financial prosperity based on hard work or ingenuity no matter which family a person was born into. This truly was a revolutionary idea for the structure of a civil society. It was also a rebuke of the group identification, tribalism and class rights that were present in Europe at the time. 

From this concept of individual rights America became one of the most successful and creative societies in human history. We are still working on making sure that every individual in our country is treated with equality and fairness, but we have come a very long way towards that goal and will continue moving toward it in the future. No human society is perfect, nor will it be. Utopian societies are not real.   

It is the concept of treating every individual as the wonderful and unique person they are and not grouping them into classes that is the true path to equality, diversity and inclusion. We cannot group people or put them into classes and achieve these universal goals. In fact, grouping people is the most divisive way to treat individual human beings. It is what we rejected when leaving Europe or any other feudal or tribal state. We rejected groupism and the inequality that it creates to choose sovereign and inalienable individual rights. 

Unfortunately, in current day America we are reverting to the class structure of the past. They may be different kinds of classes, but we are breaking up into groups. We are asserting that there is such a thing as group rights, just as the aristocrats did, but based on different criteria. Again, you may be in a different class by accidence of birth. Some would call it tribalism where we are going back into historical tribes rather than unifying together on the principle of individual rights. This is not a progressive path, it is regressive – not a step forward, but a huge step backward.   

Tribalism and group identities are the oldest civil formations of human society. It is also the easiest. We have learned how harmful it can be with historical examples of the Holocaust and slavery. When people become tribes, they inevitably judge others by whether or not they are a member of their tribe. If not, the “other” is of lesser worth than the tribe member. Eventually, lesser worth translates into demonization and dehumanization or even murder. Group identities are extremely harmful for human relations.      

America rejected tribalism for the liberal concepts of pluralism and individual rights. This is the primary reason for its success and no other. If we choose to revert to an primitive class-based society of competing tribes or groups, we will regress into the divisiveness of other historical societies that eventually collapsed due to a lack of unity and common direction.  

True equality, diversity and inclusion is achieved not by recognizing people as belonging to different groups, but by treating every human being as the unique individual they are. Only then may we move beyond the tribalism and groupism of classes to a society that will judge you by your individual character, not any other factor. 

Groupism of “White People”

At the Center for Human Equality we are strongly opposed to groupism. Groupism is putting individual human beings into a group and judging them. There are numerous types of groupism such as racism, sexism, antisemitism, etc. and all are extremely harmful for human relations. A type of groupism that we hear almost every day is calling people “white people.” This is often used along with a value judgment of some kind. Calling unique human beings by the collective name of “white people” is very harmful for human relations. 

One of the first harms is that there is no such monolithic group as “white people.” It is wrong to try to convince others that there is such a group. To imply that all “white people” are the same is to say that a neo-Nazi and a light skinned Jew are the same. This is absurd. Light skinned human beings are as diverse as dark skinned ones. They are all individuals, not groups, and it is insulting and denigrating to say that they are all the same.  

The second harm is to use this type of groupism to imply collective guilt. The term “white people” is commonly used to denigrate people who are light skinned by stating that any such a person is automatically a member of this group. Being a member also makes them responsible for the actions of all others in the group. Another way to put this is to say that any light skinned person is collectively guilty for the acts of any other person with the same skin color. This is also absurd. Human beings are only responsible for their own actions, not the actions of people who may share their skin color. 

A third harm is to imply that all “white people” conspired together to create a society that prohibits non-white people from achieving prosperity. This is insulting and denigrating along with being one of the most far-fetched conspiracy theories ever proposed. To say that individuals, because of their skin color, made sure that society only benefited them is to imply that they all conspired to be greedy and racists. This denunciation of light skinned people is a blanket judgmentalism that is extremely harmful for human relations. It also cannot possibly be true.  

The Center for Human Equality rejects groupism of any kind including using the term “white people” or “black people” for the same reasons. Some racists grouped dark skinned people and then denigrated them by using insulting stereotypes. They applied these stereotypes to all people who were dark skinned as a blanket judgment. They also held all dark-skinned people to be collectively guilty for the actions of others who shared their skin color. Anti-Semites use the exact same monolithic approach with Jews. 

The truth is there are no monolithic groups of human beings. Every human being is unique and cannot be grouped with other humans to be a carbon copy of them. Not only is this true, to group people and judge them has been the most horrific approach to human relations in history. It is why the 20^th Century was the bloodiest century in human existence. It is also why the Holocaust was the worst human tragedy in modern history. 

We suggest that individuals who wish to improve human relations in the 21^st Century stop grouping people based only on skin color. We strongly urge that no one assign values to abstract groups of people because of the harm that such judging causes. We encourage every human being to see the uniqueness and diversity of every other human. This is, in our opinion, the only path to reduce the horrendous harm of groupism and improve human equality for everyone.   

Artificial Groups

Throughout human history we have put other people into groups using a large variety of factors. These groups are abstract and artificial in that human beings cannot legitimately be grouped with any value assigned to the group. The problem is that we almost always assign a value to groups of people just as we do with anything else. We need to understand that any grouping of human beings is artificial (not real) and should never include an assignment of value because it cannot possibly be true.  

Let’s look at a group of individual human beings that has been labeled recently as “People of Color.” The first observation is that every human being has color, but we also know this label is directed at those with darker skin colors than others. The second observation is that there really is no such thing as any group of people of skin color who all think exactly alike or experience the world identically. In every group of color that one may put together there is a diversity of opinion and worldviews. The only commonality that “People of Color” have is that they may have darker skin color than another abstract group. It really says nothing about them as individual human beings or about their unique character. 

Skin color is probably the most primitive of groupings human beings have ever been collectively judged by. It requires no thought to say that one person’s skin color is lighter or darker than another. If we think of people with one skin color or another as being monolithic, we are on the path to racism. It is only the racist who believes that human beings of one color or another are all bad. Even the idea of one color being all good or superior is also racist. We cannot legitimately assign a value, such as good or bad, to any group of people based solely on their skin color. Skin color does not define anyone. 

The term “People of Color” is artificial and cannot be used to define any real group. A more accurate group name may be “People of Darker Skin Color” which is also artificial and has no meaning for valuation. Black, White, Brown or any other group name based on skin color is artificial and without meaning. The only individuals who assign value to skin color are racists. Any other individual should recognize that skin color is irrelevant when defining anyone. As MLK told us, no one should be judged by their color but only by their individual character. A good or bad character is defined by an individual’s actions, not the color of a person’s skin. 

This is difficult for individuals to understand because we have been inculcated with the malignant idea that skin color alone defines people. It does not, but it is also very hard to break away from this kind of thinking which is reinforced every day in the media. If we truly want to achieve MLK’s dream that we are judged only by our individual character and not our skin color, we must reject any attempt to create abstract and artificial groups of human beings. We must think differently to get beyond racism, sexism and all other artificial groupings that harms human relations and equality.