Diversity

The first sentence removes the subject. If diversity exists between every two humans then it is a constant rather than a quantity a group can have more or less of, and any programme for increasing it is doing something other than what it says. What it is doing is named next. In endoreality the word is used to create endo-identities, categories that assign people to groups, which is the opposite of diversity because it replaces the difference between any two people with membership of a type. That is the same operation Marsh identifies under demographics, dividing an already objectified population into new identities available for coercion, and it accounts for why diversity initiatives so often produce sharper boundaries rather than softer ones. Her proposed replacement is negative and deliberately so. The concept could be replaced with anti-endo-idealism, and better still, endo-idealism could simply be pointed out wherever it appears, leaving anti-endo-idealism as the default rather than a programme requiring its own vocabulary and machinery. The reasoning is consistent with how she treats feminism, where she prefers removing male endo-idealism to establishing an endogroup in response. Naming a positive goal creates something to belong to, and anything with an inside acquires an ideal member and a negative image.

Diversity is an institutional term of art, embedded in equal opportunity law, corporate policy and university admissions, and usually measured by the representation of defined categories. Criticism comes from several directions at once. Legal scholars have questioned whether category-based remedies entrench the categories, Walter Benn Michaels argued that diversity discourse displaces attention from economic inequality and management research has repeatedly found that mandatory diversity programmes can increase bias rather than reduce it. Marsh's objection is more fundamental than any of these, since it is not that the programmes fail or misfire but that the concept names a constant, which makes any programme built on it necessarily a programme for something else.