Welcome to The Fulcrum’s daily weekday e-newsletter where insiders and outsiders to politics are informed, meet, talk, and act to repair our democracy and make it live and work in our everyday lives.
Moving from inquiry to truth
Diversity, equity and inclusion are words that excite passion on all sides of the political spectrum. Yet as so often happens when passions are aroused, the possibility of having a meaningful discussion with any semblance of the critical thinking required to understand the complexity of the subject is virtually impossible.
I recently read an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal entitled DEI Spells Death for the Idea of a University in which the author Matthew Spalding made this statement:
DEI+ and the rightness of being wrong
In part 1 of this series, Doing the Right Thing the Wrong Way, we introduced the notion that some of what challenges DEI+ initiatives in many organizations is the traditional production based business model built on reducing or even eliminating variation in order to maximize productivity. Because DEI+ initiatives are fundamentally based in celebrating and leveraging variation, they can tend to run contradictory to the unspoken cultural influences of certain organizations. Whether or not we’re able to point our finger at it, most of us have experienced this tension. So the question is:
Where Do We Go From Here?
Two terms that I have been using a lot lately to communicate to people what I believe is required to recalculate when an organization’s DEI+ efforts lose their way are intellectual humility and cultural humility. One of my favorite descriptions comes from the Templeton Foundation website which states that intellectual humility "involves recognizing and owning our intellectual limitations in the service of pursuing deeper knowledge, truth, and understanding." In a post that compares cultural competency to cultural humility, therapist matching site, Two Chairs, states that cultural humility “acknowledges that every individual has their own unique culture arising from a variety of sources and that may change based on their context.” In my estimation, the pairing of these two insights functions almost as bumpers at a bowling alley keeping our interactions across the many diversities from going into the gutter.
Podcast: Battle for House majority in 2024 starts as toss-up
Kyle Kondik, Managing Editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, discusses House Ratings for 2024, why control of the House of the House Representatives begins as a Toss-up, the most competitive seats and the role that redistricting and gerrymandering will play in determining outcomes.
Podcast: Rights of passage
As many as a quarter of U.S. residents are foreign-born or the children of immigrants. Since the country’s founding, newcomers have made and remade the United States every generation. And yet debates about immigration policy are deeply fraught, highly cyclical and often coded in racial animus, says legal scholar Amanda Frost. America’s pathways to citizenship have gotten narrower in recent years, even as they face constant fire. It’s a problem, she argues, that political leaders shouldn’t ignore.
