Foreign Lessons in the Perils of DEI and Affirmative Action – WSJ

The details of affirmative-action policies in India, South Africa and Malaysia vary, but all have led to similar outcomes. Each of these countries faces a brain drain as some of its most talented and driven people head for the exits. A large chunk of Malaysia s well-educated ethnic Chinese have settled in Singapore, Australia, the U.K. and North America. The ethnic Chinese proportion of Malaysia s population has fallen from 38% in 1957 to 20% today. In the U.S., Silicon Valley is filled with Indian and South African engineers and tech entrepreneurs who see America not the countries of their birth as the promised land.

In South Africa, infrastructure is crumbling and the unemployment rate for blacks was nearly 40% last year. Malaysia, despite its natural resources, trails neighboring (and brutally meritocratic) Singapore in per capita income. In a 2021 essay, University of Tasmania Professor James Chin wrote that Malaysia s New Economic Policy has poisoned ethnic and personal relations in a way that now defines the country s polity and economy.

Mr. Trump may help the U.S. avoid a similar fate, and his actions are in keeping with the American spirit. In a phone interview, Richard Hanania, author of The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics, points out that affirmative action was always unpopular in the U.S. I think there s something about American exceptionalism here, he says. The arc of American law and American history goes against race-based governance.

via www.wsj.com

Sadanand Dhume.

I agree. Getting off the DEI track might have been the most consequential decision Trump will ever make. Of course, we’ll never know for sure.