Thoughts on the Intersection of DEI and Character
Tony Klemmer
How might the current push for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training (DEI) dovetail with a parallel push for character formation? Both these areas of personal and social development address the individual and her/his roles and behaviors as an individual person and as an individual person in community.
The purpose of this memo is to sketch out some thoughts on these important matters.
Our Capacity for Understanding Across Difference
Our country’s long history of inequity need not be recapitulated here, and that history coupled with recent current events has brought the need for better understanding and cooperation across difference to the fore again throughout the country and across sectors. Within the field of education, this renewed push began long before the events of last summer (2020) catalyzed a “movement.” Few of us would argue that this heightened attention is unnecessary, rather it is long overdue. Countless examples exist in which gender, race, ethnicity, age and other social identifiers diminish levels of acceptance and opportunities available to persons identified with such groups.
None of this is new. “Justice too long delayed is justice denied,” as Martin Luther King, Jr. reminds us. Overlayed on the specific challenges of race, gender and ethnicity, are the yawning political divisions in our country that prevent us from engaging in the kind of civil discourse that most of us feel represents a cornerstone of a flourishing democracy. These are separate but related problems that, when combined, have frozen our leaders and institutions into inaction and delayed reaction.
A strong wave of training sessions (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion [DEI]) has emerged as one remedy to better understand the dynamics of difference and some of the underlying psychological and social theories that underpin these dynamics. Social identity, implicit bias, stereotype threat and other related concepts help us understand how we engage with others as human persons in community. Organizational training efforts to sensitize individuals, particularly those in positions of power who hire, manage, set policy and otherwise control resources and decision making, to become more inclusive and to treat others with the same dignity, with which they would expect to be treated, constitutes the crux of much of the DEI work that is underway. An entire industry has emerged to guide individuals and organizations toward these more equitable aspirations. Achieving success in this area beyond its core benefit of strengthening our common humanity has the added organizational benefits that come from building diverse, equitable teams (e.g., improved outcomes, better solutions to problems, increased creativity and more).
Many DEI initiatives are designed as stand-alone activities. There may be an opportunity for deeper learning and higher transfer if such initiatives were integrated into a broader range of learning activities for individuals and organizations. The starting point for much of the DEI work underway, almost by definition, centers on social identity and the theories that drive that field of research and behavior. The groupings referenced earlier (e.g., race, gender, age), are all aspects of our sense of ourselves in society – our social identities – with associated “in groups” and “out groups” and our behavior in and toward both, explicitly and sub-consciously. One question to be raised is the potential for a more foundational starting point, perhaps that of personal identity.
Personal identity theory and social identity theory are two separate, related strands of psychology and are essential to our full understanding of ourselves and others. A focus on personal identity leads to an understanding of the construction of my essential sense of self, in time and space. Leading with this kind of work, even prior to exploring the dynamics of my social identity, might strengthen and contextualize explorations into the dynamics of my role(s) in social and organizational settings.
The Foundational Role of Personal Formation
In recent character formation work, this distinction between the individual self and the social self is shown to be vitally important. While these two dimensions of the self are wholly symbiotic in practice, their development may be best sequenced by starting with the individual self and the intrinsic traits, values, beliefs, attitudes and perceptions of that self as a self, first. Then we can move toward the broader exploration of that self in community. When we use a virtues framework to develop (form) adults, in fact, the moral virtues separate into two useful groupings that mirror these parallel dimensions of identity. See diagram below.
Ironically, an adult’s personal formation journey (i.e., her/his efforts to live a virtuous life of good character) requires deep self-reflection and at the same time a community of others. We are only fully human in community and we live our lives in community, so that dimension is essential to our individual growth in this domain of personal formation. At the same time personal formation is a deeply personal journey requiring solitude, self-reflection, metacognitive effort and selfdevelopment. As stated above, these are separate but tightly coupled aspects of moral development (i.e., the self and the self in community).
There seems to be a parallel in the realm of unpacking our social identities for the purpose of building better understandings and actions across difference (DEI), in order to achieve a more accepting and equitable citizenry and set of institutions in society. Starting with the individual self in that exploration may have similar benefits. We might consider this combination – personal identity work (the self) and social identity work (the self in community) – as an essential and integrative foundational step, in order to broaden and deepen the impact of this work.
How Might DEI and Character Work Intersect?
Beyond these hypotheses about the impact of actively incorporating personal identity work with the existing social identity focus of current efforts in DEI, the question remains: how do these important developmental objectives (DEI and Character) intersect?
If we envision personal formation as an exercise or journey for the whole human self in pursuit of a life of goodness, flourishing and meaning, it is foundational to much of the other kinds of learning and development we can experience. Our approach to the moral life should permeate all the aspects of our lives (e.g., social, familial, personal, interpersonal, professional, faith). There should be a coherence to our approach to living virtuously across these many segments of modern life. It could be argued that even in our pluralistic world, it would be very hard to make claims about living virtuously, if we did not believe in and actively live the ideal of “the dignity and worth of every human person.” Being good selectively, does not constitute a fully formed life of goodness. In principle, we must strive to be good to and with all human persons in all situations.
In order for this to take hold as an intrinsic aspect of our whole moral selves, the use of a moral virtue framework tethered to the sacred writings of the world’s wisdom traditions has been proposed (see separate writings). With this as a scaffold, building a personal formation learning program that allows participants a balance of self-reflection and development in a community of others with the goal of shifting participants’ moral mental schemas (mindsets, mental models) can address these dual dimensions of personal development.
By taking a new approach to the representation of the wisdom traditions, we can begin to bridge the worlds of equity and character. We incorporate a broad range of traditions including eastern (i.e., Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism), indigenous traditions (i.e., Africa and N. America), and monotheistic traditions (i.e., Judaism, Islam, and Christianity). Beyond this we capture the voices and lenses through which different groups hear and see their wisdom sources, given their lived experience and histories. The rationale for this approach parallels the beliefs of DEI proponents who remind us that different lived experiences and personal histories lead to different worldviews and approaches to life and such differences require understanding. This is true, we argue, in the moral realm as well. As scholars have corroborated, for example, individuals with a lived experience of oppression and a 400 year history of struggle gravitate toward different passages, readings and interpretations of wisdom sources then would those with a different history (i.e., European). These differences in sources, interpretation and prioritization among the moral virtues lead to varied insights and individualized paths to goodness. By incorporating the specific voices of Latinx, Feminine, and African American wisdom writings alongside the other more traditional wisdom sources, we are able to see these differences clearly, and discuss them deeply within the adult learning programs for which they are designed.
The benefits of this design are twofold. First, this approach exposes us to the plurality of valid ways toward goodness in our world. Second, it begins to sensitize us to some of the fundamental moral differences that exist within a diverse community. As we operate in our social, familial and professional worlds among a diverse range of other persons, these understandings, rooted in the sacred sources of our world’s wisdom traditions and framed by the moral virtues, cannot help but open our eyes to the similarities and differences among us.
We speculate that by incorporating this nuanced and expanded presentation of wisdom sources into a program designed to help adults answer the central questions of living virtuously through moral goodness, toward lives of flourishing and meaning, we make a contribution toward the objective of fostering understanding across difference and giving us reason to act with goodness across those differences in the name of our own moral development and that of others with whom we live, work and serve.