In Support of Imagination and Viewpoint Diversity
Imagination is at the heart of being curious and at the heart of building relationships, which is at the heart of really seeing beyond yourself.
Are you keeping up with all of the buzzwords lately? With the popularity of diversity training, you may have heard of something called Standpoint Theory. Or maybe you don’t know it by name, but you recognize its basic principle — we can only speak from our own lived experiences; this is the fount of knowledge.
The infusion of such theories throughout our society has even led to accusations of racism and sexism in math and science for emphasizing rationality over emotionality. Rationality is classified as a “white male” characteristic, whereas minorities and women tend towards emotionality, according to the categorizations of Standpoint Theory and other Critical Social Justice propositions.
One of the gems in our conversation with Amna Khalid was her take on Standpoint Theory. She says if we go down this path, that increasingly people will not be able to relate to each other, and will only be able to speak from their own personal experience, which is the antithesis of imagination. Imagination is at the heart of being curious and of building relationships. If you start circumscribing imagination in the name of experience, she says, you are really just hurting yourself because you are limiting how far you can grow.
I felt I was having a Pentecostal moment as she dropped these truth bombs. Can I get a hallelujah?!
Perhaps, however, the biggest truth she dropped was that if she had to create a diversity training — diversity being something we all agreed on, including the diversity of thought — that it would not be a training. It would be an education.
A training imparts a certain skillset with the objective of mastering it within a predetermined amount of time. Education, on the other hand, is a life-long journey. Diversity training, especially training that is centered on Critical Race Theory, has been shown in many studies to not only fail in its objective, but to also creates more division. These trainings promote a certain ideology as the one and only way to approach diversity, often with religious fervor. Conversely, diversity education allows for many more ideas and options in its approach, not only of the demographic variety of diversity, but also of the cognitive sort, which we call viewpoint diversity.
Stripped of ideological zeal, diversity education, according to Amna, would start with a historical review of various racial categories, which are historically and politically contingent and not static. Perhaps Critical Race Theory would be introduced as one approach to understand race, but not the only approach, allowing for people to expand their understanding without dogmatic indoctrination.
Imagination. Curiosity. Education. Let’s make these the new buzzwords to promote an authentic diversity that builds on a foundation of relationship and growth.
In the Hold my Drink Podcast — navigating the news and politics with a chaser of civility — Episode 21, In Support of Imagination and Viewpoint Diversity, I team up with co-host David Bernstein to create a joint podcast with Counterweight; the first of many to come. David and I sit down with Amna Khalid, a Professor at Carleton College and the former John Stuart Mill Faculty Fellow at the Heterodox Academy to discuss how we can promote diversity without division. Amna suggests imagination, curiosity and education as the cornerstones for building a new diversity paradigm. All discussed with a chaser of civility, of course, and a rum punch.
Hold My Drink welcomes all people with all kinds of beverages to join us as we discuss what it takes to imagine a new American identity, together.
Find us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or watch the conversation unfold on YouTube, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
What Amna is reading:
The Elect, John McWhorter (selected excerpts of forthcoming book released on Substack)
How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, Alan Jacobs
The Trouble with Diversity: How we Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, Walter Benn Michaels
Free Speech: And Why You Should Give a Damn, Jonathan Zimmerman
What David is reading:
Liberalism and its Discontents, American Purpose, Francis Fukuyama
The Constitution of Knowledge, National Affairs, Jonathan Rauch
The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business, Stephen R. Soukup
Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity — and Why This Harms Everybody, Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay
What Jen is reading:
Can Liberalism be Saved from Cancel Culture? Jewish News Syndicate, Jonathan S. Tobin
Poverty of the Imagination: #DisruptTexts and the problem of teaching literature for social justice, Arc Digital, Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder
When Students are Afraid to Speak, We All Lose, Real Clear Education, Amna Khalid
Dr. Seuss Books are Pulled, and a ‘Cancel Culture’ Controversy Erupts, New York Times, Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris
Amna Khalid is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. She specializes in modern South Asian history and the history of medicine.
In 2020/21, Amna served as the inaugural John Stuart Mill Faculty Fellow at Heterodox Academy, an organization dedicated to promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement in higher education. In this capacity, Amna helped launch the new “Heterodox Out Loud” podcast, which she curated and hosted.
Born in Pakistan, Amna completed her Bachelors Degree at Lahore University of Management Sciences. She went on to earn an M.Phil. in Development Studies and a D.Phil. in History from Oxford University.
Amna’s research explores the connections between Hindu pilgrimages and the spread of epidemics, with an emphasis on the role subordinates played in the colonial governance of British India. The author of multiple book chapters on the history of public health in nineteenth-century India, she is completing a manuscript titled “Pilgrimage, Place and Public Health: Sanitary Regulation of Sacred Space in British India.”
Growing up under a series of military dictatorships, Amna has a strong interest in issues relating to censorship and free expression. She speaks frequently on academic freedom, free speech and campus politics at colleges and universities as well as at professional conferences for organizations such as the American Association of University Professors, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and Heterodox Academy. Her essays and commentaries on these same issues have appeared in outlets such as the Conversation, Inside Higher Ed and the New Republic.
David Bernstein is an unwavering advocate for the free exchange of ideas and intellectual honesty. He is an Affiliate at Counterweight, which opposes the imposition of critical social justice on people’s daily lives, and a founder of Viewpoint Worldwide, a consultancy dedicated to advancing viewpoint diversity in organizational settings.
David has spent much of his career heading up major Jewish advocacy and pro-Israel organizations. He has written widely in such publications as the Washington Post, Areo, Education Week, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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