In an editorial, Jersey City resident Robert Choi outlines his belief that DEI only persists in Hudson County because no one pays for it failing, only for questioning it.
In Hudson County, DEI is no longer an abstract concept debated on cable news or inside corporate boardrooms.
It shapes how local governments hire, how school districts frame equity initiatives, how nonprofits allocate funding, and how public institutions justify decisions that directly affect taxpayers, families, and workers across Jersey City, Hoboken, Union City, and beyond.
DEI does not dominate modern institutions because it is especially persuasive, rigorous, or empirically successful. It dominates because it offers bureaucracies something far more valuable than truth: insulation.
It allows organizations to signal moral seriousness without bearing responsibility for outcomes, while enforcing conformity far more reliably than effectiveness. That asymmetry explains almost everything that follows.
DEI’s intellectual thinness becomes most visible in how it treats outcomes.
When DEI initiatives fail to close gaps, fail to improve performance, fail to increase trust, or fail to meaningfully alter life trajectories, there are no consequences.
Programs are renewed, language is refreshed, new metrics are introduced, and the underlying premise is quietly preserved. In a county where public dollars are finite and schools, infrastructure, and social services compete for the same resources, this lack of accountability is not theoretical—it is material.
The system absorbs failure without friction because failure, in this domain, is not treated as disconfirming evidence.
In practice, disparities function as indicators that something must be addressed—perhaps not discrimination per se, but some institutional failing that requires intervention.
Once that presumption is embedded, demographic proportionality becomes the unstated reference point. Numbers stop describing reality and begin defining it.
Deviations are no longer data; they are risks. And when disparities are treated as risks, standards inevitably become negotiable.
This is where the fantasy collapses under even modest scrutiny.
Hudson County is one of the most diverse counties in the country, shaped by immigration patterns, working-class mobility, neighborhood differences, and uneven access to opportunity that long predate any DEI framework.
Complex societies produce uneven outcomes for reasons that cannot be neutralized by institutional process: migration histories, family structure, age distributions, cultural norms, educational pathways, geographic concentration, and accumulated advantage.
These forces operate slowly, compound over time, and sit largely outside the control of any single organization. DEI does not deny this complexity in theory. It simply cannot function with it in practice.
This truth is consistent with what the research literature says about the effectiveness of DEI interventions.
Decades of studies on diversity training—the most common and visible component of institutional DEI—show that while such programs can temporarily influence attitudes or self-reported awareness, they rarely produce sustained changes in behavior, promotion patterns, or organizational performance.
Large-scale reviews published in peer-reviewed journals find mixed or negligible effects on hiring, retention, and advancement, especially when programs rely on mandatory training rather than structural change.
Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev’s widely cited work on corporate diversity programs, for example, shows that compulsory diversity training often fails to increase representation and can even provoke resistance, while voluntary programs tied to mentorship or recruitment pipelines have more modest but measurable effects.
The lesson is not that inclusion is impossible, but that symbolic or compliance-driven efforts are poor substitutes for real investment—and that most DEI infrastructures are built around the former.
Another uncomfortable empirical reality is distributional.
When institutions track the beneficiaries of DEI-adjacent policies—preferential admissions, targeted hiring initiatives, leadership development programs—the gains tend to accrue to those who are already well positioned to take advantage of them.
This matters locally, because Hudson County’s deepest inequities are often concentrated among residents with the least institutional access, not those already navigating elite pathways.
Research on affirmative action and elite educational access has repeatedly shown that beneficiaries are disproportionately drawn from the upper and middle tiers of the targeted groups, not from the most economically or educationally disadvantaged.
This pattern is visible across sectors.
In higher education, students admitted under diversity-oriented policies are more likely to come from higher-income households than their peers within the same demographic categories.
In corporate settings, diversity hiring gains are often concentrated in entry-level or non-core roles, while senior leadership composition changes far more slowly.
These outcomes are rarely framed as failures; they are framed as progress, even when the underlying inequalities remain intact.
What DEI redistributes most effectively is not opportunity but legitimacy—access to elite spaces for those already close enough to enter them, coupled with institutional narratives that imply deeper transformation than has actually occurred.
The tension with meritocracy is not philosophical; it is operational. Meritocratic systems rely on the stability of standards and on the idea that evaluation criteria are justified by the demands of the work.
DEI systems, by contrast, require continuous monitoring of outcomes and intervention when those outcomes fail to align with demographic expectations.
Over time, this produces predictable effects. Employers adjust criteria to reduce legal or reputational risk.
Universities rethink admissions metrics not primarily to improve predictive validity, but to manage distributional optics. Performance evaluations shift away from differentiation and toward calibration.
None of these changes are announced as rejections of merit, but they function as such in practice—particularly in public-sector and quasi-public organizations where transparency and fairness should matter most.
The result is not the elimination of standards, but their politicization. Standards remain, but they become conditional, contingent, and increasingly opaque.
Those inside institutions learn to navigate them intuitively; those outside are told the system remains fair.
Refusing to participate in the shallow fantasy DEI sells—that disparities can be responsibly managed through proportionality, process, and symbolism—is a different matter entirely.
Skepticism carries costs that are immediate and personal: stalled careers, reputational damage, silent exclusion from influence.
Institutions learn quickly which questions are welcome and which ones are not, not through formal prohibition but through patterned response. That is not how robust ideas endure. It is how fragile ones protect themselves.
The deepest cost is not inefficiency or resentment, though both are real. It is the narrowing of permissible inquiry.
When demographic disparities are treated as presumptive evidence of institutional failure, it becomes difficult to ask honest questions about preparation, incentives, culture, or choice without triggering moral suspicion.
Over time, this corrodes the capacity of institutions—local, regional, and national—to learn from their own data. A society that cannot speak plainly about why outcomes differ cannot design effective interventions. It can only manage appearances.
The result is a contradiction that everyone inside large institutions understands but rarely names: a genuine meritocracy cannot coexist with DEI as it is currently practiced.
Meritocracy demands that standards be tied to the work itself and applied without regard to demographic outcome. DEI demands continual attention to those outcomes and intervention when they fail to align with expectation.
These logics compete, and one consistently erodes the other. Because DEI failure carries no institutional penalty while deviation from DEI orthodoxy does, merit predictably loses.
Robert Choi, SHRM-SCP
Jersey City Resident
CEO of StratVis (A public sector consulting group)
Lots of whiny claims. No proof offered. Typical.
You didn’t have to mention that you’re a consultant. Using 1100 words to say exactly nothing makes that very clear.
This is a fantastic editorial, that is fact specific and convincing. We know, DEI does not work. However, it’s the Democratic Party that insists on DEI. We saw this in the recent Mayoral race in Jersey City, of course, the issue was affordability. We are not all even. However, some have great wealth, or have achieved much success. Capitalism over Socialism. The subscribers of DEI, have to understand, no one is going to give it to you. You have to earn it. Jersey City, is one of the centerpiece’s of diversity. It will be uprooted eventually by its own failed socialist policies. Urban Centers across the State, are seeing the change with the asset class moving in, Artificial Intelligence taking over manual jobs, and forcing the unskilled folks to move out or go back to their country. It is only a matter of time,robotics take over and the only the survival of the fittest make it. This is why DEI is failing and it’s a false narrative.
Dear Lord, grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man.
Ravinder Singh Bhalla
Hoboken is and will continue to pay his mistakes