I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today. -Martin Luther King
I self-identify as a liberal. Although I love Jesus, quote Martin Luther King, and have occasional spontaneous peak experiences, I’m not particularly religious. I know in my bones that everyone is created equal. My choice to pursue a career in biology rests on another bedrock identity variable: I have a novelty-seeking phenotype that’s pretty much pegged at maximum. The phenotype comes with lots of imagination and very little discipline.
Another core philosophical stance, which I embrace with scientific confidence, is that teams with a diverse range of thinking styles make better decisions than culturally uniform teams. People with different thinking styles challenge each other in ways that weed out faulty thinking. The problem with having five old white guys slapping each other on the back while making life-or-death business decisions on the golf course isn’t that they’re old, white, male, and rich - the problem is they’re slapping each other on the back instead of double-checking each other’s starting assumptions. It’s uncomfortable to have your assumptions challenged, but comfort isn’t the point of diversity.
I grew up in Columbia, Maryland - a planned city founded with the explicit goal of implementing the ideals expressed in Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. I’m the type of egalitarian who flinches at King’s use of the word “judged”12, but to the extent that the travails of day-to-day life force me to be judgemental I wholeheartedly embrace King’s underlying message. Skin color is among the least informative and most treacherously fraught characteristics you can possibly use when judging another human being. Judging individuals based on their gender isn’t much better.
I’m a bisexual white man who is married to a black man. This isn’t an aspect of my identity, but rather a reflection of my identity. I’m close enough to the middle of the Kinsey scale that I imagine I would also have been happy in a standard straight marriage, if that’s how things had shaken out. I’m fortunate to have wonderful parents who taught me from an early age that there’s nothing wrong with same-sex relationships and there’s nothing wrong with black people - so when I happened to meet the man who would become the love of my life in a rowdy bar a quarter century ago, his gender and race didn’t strike me as the most salient variables to consider when deciding to embark on the fulfilling journey we’ve taken together. Our marriage is strong because of complementary thinking styles and mutual respect. That stuff really matters! Gender and skin color? Not so much3.
A little while back, I agreed to serve as a peer reviewer for a journal owned by the scientific publishing leviathan Springer. Before I was allowed to download the manuscript, I was diverted to a diversity survey on a third-party website that was so buggy I couldn’t get past the invalid certificate warning. I see it as a case of a publisher dangling shiny equity baubles in a clumsy attempt to paper over its iniquitous rent-seeking business model, in which unpaid peer reviews are leveraged into extracting article charges from scientists and/or the taxpayers who fund our research4. It’s insulting for Springer to imagine I can be glamoured by a virtue-signaling skin color-judging contest. When I was eventually able to take the survey, it didn’t ask me about any uncomfortable identity variables such as my politics, religion, or thinking style. It didn’t ask me whether I grew up in a household that precariously scraped by from paycheck to paycheck in my formative years. It only asked me identity questions that I see as falling somewhere between useless and unethical.
It was an a-ha moment. How did I fall into the unexamined habit of answering these types of questions? They just provide substrate for inappropriate judgements. If everybody declined to answer these inane questions, the DEI industrial complex might be forced to consider diversity variables that actually matter! Dust off hands emoji.
I consider King one of the top few greatest thinkers in all of human history. I had to wear shades while walking San Diego’s MLK Promenade because so many of the quotes put tears in my eyes. This one celebrates the power of diversity:
Every MLK Day I read a few sermons. I rarely read anything twice (pesky novelty-seeking alleles!), but I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve re-read Loving Your Enemies and Drum Major Instinct. King’s wisdom sometimes feels like it’s helping me reconnect with my own true identity. I’m confident the “I Have a Dream” speech was making a rhetorically strategic choice to temporarily set aside the higher dream of Matthew 7:1
Do not judge, or you too will be judged.
For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
Song of the day: “Pride (In the Name of Love)”. I also flinch at U2’s use of the word pride (Proverbs 16:18)
Gender actually did matter a bit, at a logistical level, because my husband was a naval officer when I first met him. In the bad old days, signing up for a same-sex relationship meant signing up for discrimination. For many years I never answered our home phone for fear it might have been one of the witch-hunters of the don’t ask don’t tell era. The ultimate victory of the gay rights struggle is that I don’t have to waste any energy thinking about that type of bullshit anymore.
The other a-ha moment in this story is that I’m considering a plan to boycott all investor-owned journals. There are quite a few nonprofit journal systems out there to choose from. I’m not aware of any employee-owned scientific journals. Another datapoint illustrating the need for public capitalism.