What’s a Quant to a King?
Why your numbers don’t add up to equity
Education is not a panacea for systemic prejudices, and awareness will not solve all of our problems. Well intentioned folks suggest we solve diversity issues with data, just like they suggest combatting climate change with pictures of wet polar bears. This tactic is incomplete. While education may be a necessary step in combating injustices, it falls short without coercion as a counterbalance.
Social justice that leans primarily on education implicitly invokes the neoliberal assumption of personal responsibility to solve collective ills. In so doing, we narrow the scope of our fight and minimize our potential impact. This, my fellow liberals, is how you build a house on a shaky foundation.
Knowledge is not power. Power is power.
By and large, people will not be educated out of structural advantage. Niebuhr notes this trait of the human condition:
Since reason is always, to some degree, the servant of interest in a social situation, social injustice cannot be resolved by moral and rational suasion alone, as the educator and social scientist usually believes. Conflict is inevitable, and in this conflict power must be challenged by power.
Education cannot pull all the work for social justice. When we allow companies to simply “educate” their employees or “spread awareness” by publishing dismal diversity numbers, we let them off the hook. Change requires more than education — it requires conflict.
Liberals touting “awareness” and “education” unwittingly adopt economic liberalization(neoliberalism) as their philosophical base. In cowing to private market thought, they place the onus of societal change upon benevolent, and often elitist, individual action. Shifting the responsibility for societal conditions on individuals has been a neoliberal tenet employed to justify eroding numerous elements of the welfare state — defined benefit retirement, health insurance, living wage assistance — and contributing to the very conditions liberals “seek” to change.
So what power best complements education?
We’ve seen new tools and paradigms move the meter a bit. My favorite complements are social power, people power, and economic alignment.
Social power (moral suasion mediated through social networks)
Folks such as @Shaft, EricaJoy, and Julie Ann Horvath using their social platforms to create communities capable of forcing entities into action.
People power
Good ole demonstrations still pack a punch vis-à-vis Mizzou Football.
Economic alignment
Social entrepreneurship and impact investing co-opts capitalism’s consumptive energy in service of social justice. Big fans of Kapor Capital in this realm.
When we let companies employ awareness and education as their only tactic for achieving diversity, we give them consent to uphold the status quo. We must exercise power.
Two Factor Authenticity is a community publication on Medium, curated by Clef. For more from the Clef team, follow us on twitter @getclef
