LETTER TO THE EDITOR: The problem with categorical thinking

Current backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies is not (yet?) as severe in Canada as in Trump’s America. Designed to promote proportional participation and fair treatment of all categories of people in organizations, particularly groups which have been historically underrepresented and marginalized and thereby subjected to systemic discrimination, such policies are problematic for many.

In 1971, Canada was the first country to adopt multiculturalism as an official policy, entrenching it in Section 27 of the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and solidifying it through the 1988 Canadian Multiculturalism Act. Nevertheless, pushback is clearly growing on many controlled access fronts, from immigration to education to employment to leadership.

Prior to current DEI policies, affirmative action policies already promoted proportional representation of social categories in organizations by enforcing quotas approximate to the group’s percentage of the population. If a category was 10 percent of the population, they were required to be 10 percent of admissions and hirings. However, that was critiqued as reverse discrimination in that it bypassed more qualified and credentialed individuals from dominant majority groups, such as white males, to meet the quota of historically disadvantaged minority groups. It contravened the ideology of meritocracy.

Nonetheless, a deeper problem with DEI policies is that they are built on conceptions of clear categories of people, when in fact all people fall somewhere along multiple spectrums or continuums of characteristics, not into neat tidy groupings. And this is true not only psychologically, socially, or culturally, but physically as well.

For example, some physical features with which people are born have been categorized as racial, and consequently demeaned. However, the very concept of race is now outdated and obsolete because genetic variation within any one category of people is as great as variation between categories. In reality, the human species is a spectrum of physical characteristics in which the original three categories— Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid—or three hundred categories could be drawn.

Scientists have now concluded that there are no objective criteria in general, no biological bases in particular, for categories of race. They have therefore turned to the concept of racialization, which is the political process of ascribing racial identity to persons. Race, they conclude, is a vacuous, false thing (noun); racialization is a loaded, true process (verb).

Persons born with neurodiversity is another physical example. Whereas neurotypical persons fall within the average range of neurocognition, neurodivergent persons fall somewhere on the continuum of neurocognition. Some divergences, such as autism, have been classified as mental disorders despite the differences not necessarily being pathological. Indeed, differences are not necessarily deficits, some occasionally even functioning as “superpowers,” as Elon Musk exemplifies.

A third example is the often more surprising fact of persons born with both male and female physical features. There are approximately thirty types of intersex persons located somewhere on this physical spectrum. Some have various combinations of visible external genitalia, but some have XXY or XYY sex chromosomes, or a unique combination of testes and ovaries as gonads, or a mix of the WNT4 gene and the RSP01 gene that determine sexual organ development. All of these externally invisible features are probably never revealed to and known by the individual possessing them.

The physical spectrums of racialization, neurodiversity, and intersexuality are sample starting points for questioning the validity of imposing arbitrary categories on people for the purpose of conceptual clarity, categories which turn out to be unfair, unhelpful, and simply untrue. Granted, it is enormously difficult to avoid mentally assigning people into different groups, because doing so facilitates thinking by providing easy, ready-to-use, cognitive schemas of them. Indeed, every word is a category of thought. Nevertheless, categorization also lamentably facilitates prejudice (pre-judgment), stereotyping, discrimination, and ultimately self-fulfilling prophecy.

Perhaps DEI policies merely address the surface of the problem, and thereby simply remain oblivious to its underlying complexities. If we could lessen our categorical thinking and understand diversity better as the multiple continuums on which we are all located, perhaps we could abandon such awkward and controversial policies. But perhaps that’s naïvely idealistic. But again, perhaps, as Camellia Bryan of the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business writes on this issue, “Backlash isn’t the end of the story; it’s the beginning of a conversation.”