Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — DEI for those who love or, like you and I, hate it, is now in trouble. Think of it as affirmative action on stilts. It had a good run. But now enough people have seen, or themselves endured, its baleful effects in the workplace, on campuses, in public life.. British journalist Brendan O’Neill describes some of its most preposterous manifestations and welcomes its demise, here: “You know who will cheer the death of DEI? The working class,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, January 13, 2025:
So, is it RIP DEI? The boss class’s favourite ideology certainly seems to be in trouble. Big business everywhere is rethinking its devotion to ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’. As part of his coming out as a pretty standard tech bro who bristles at woke and loves Joe Rogan, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has said DEI might be for the chopping block. He even instructed his minions to take the tampons out of the men’s bathrooms at Meta HQ. Expecting people who menstruate to use the ladies’ loo? Guys, this is big.
The legacy media is noisily lamenting Zuck’s bonfire of the diversity initiatives. Meta is ‘eliminating’ DEI, weeps CNN. It quotes an internal Meta memo that basically says it’s game over for ‘equity and inclusion’. To these people, Zuckerberg is an apostate. To renounce the religion of DEI, the divisive ideology that holds such fierce sway on college campuses and in HR departments, is to make oneself an enemy of the new elite. I reckon we’re days away from a Vox piece calling Zuckerberg a fascist….
DEI is the old practice of divide and rule with a woke twist. Via the toxic belief system of ‘intersectionality’, which holds that ‘privileged’, ‘cishet’ men and women will never understand ‘oppressed’ groups like African Americans, Muslims and trans folk, DEI ensured there could never be a coming together around shared class interests. After all, why would black workers align with white workers if all white workers suffer from ‘internalised racism’ and ‘oppressive’ tendencies? DEI essentially hung a sign, Maoist style, around the necks of certain workers, marking them out as problematic. It was catastrophic for race relations – unconscious-bias training has been shown to increase racial animosity – and for workplace solidarity. But it was a boon for a fragile-feeling boss class that dreads pushback from the people it employs.
DEI is one of the greatest tricks capitalism has ever played on working people. In empowering the HR elites to lecture employees about their ‘privilege’ and ‘internalised supremacy’, it turned reality utterly on its head. The wage-earners were depicted as the ‘privileged’ ones, while the HR establishment was reimagined as the great defender of ‘the oppressed’. The worker became the despot, and his employer the radical. We ended up in the truly bizarre situation where female workers who stood up for their hard-won right to their own bathrooms and changing areas were rebranded by HR as ‘bigots’, and any white worker who claimed to have common cause with a black worker risked being told that he was arrogantly overlooking the other worker’s specific cultural experiences. Solidarity has long been frowned upon by certain bosses, but it is downright impossible under intersectionality.
So, will Zuck and the others save workers from the cruel diktats of DEI? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The DEI-abandoning elites are not doing this to help the working class but rather to burnish their own credentials among the cultural class as the West undergoes a pretty big ‘vibe shift’. And DEI hasn’t gone away – many workplaces still enforce this deathly creed. But even if it’s accidental, even if it’s just a byproduct of the elites reconsidering their priorities, the demise of DEI will benefit working people more than anyone else, and that’s good.
I’m all for Brendan O’Neill and his savage indignation. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion — goodbye to all that. Up with meritocracy. Let us all ring DEI’s knell. I’ll begin it: Ding, Dong, Bell.
sporticus says
The curfew tolls the knell of parting DEI…
Hugh Fitzgerald says
I wish I’d said that. Instead, I stand abashed, a mute inglorious Milton.
David M says
They can shove their pronouns where the sun don’t shine.
sporticus says
I’ll take that as a compliment Mr. Fitzgerald.
I read all that you publish here.
“Mute, inglorious…”.
Was that Keats?
sporticus says
Oh, I see.
I only remember the first verse of Grey’s Elegy.
Hadn’t read it since School.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
The best alternate expansion of this acronym that I heard – Didn’t Earn It! That in addition to others, such as Discrimination, Exclusion & Indoctrination, among others
Best part of it is that even Alphabet – the Google umbrella company that’s high on DEI – has dropped its diversity targets. I’m guessing from this year, we won’t see rainbow-themed versions of corporate logos that we saw in 2021
All that said, I’m not ready to end my boycott of a lot of those companies that indulged in it, and actively participated in the censorship campaign for 3 years to silence us
Daniel Triplett says
I never thought Affirmative Action / DEI would be eviscerated on a wholesale national level as a matter of Federal policy like this. Thank God. It is pure poison. It’s safe to say this wouldn’t have happened without Trump — at least not so soon — maybe many decades from now, if ever. If there is any consolation to the 2020 stolen election catastrophe, it appears that since Trump already had the experience of the Presidency, then he had a 4-year break to think about all the things he could do with Presidential power for America, he had time to put together a no-nonsense plan to execute that vision with maximum efficiency making the most of each minute of his second term without wasting a single moment. I doubt he’ll playing much golf. That man is all business. It’s all about America for him.
PRCS USN (ret) says
True.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Oh, I did expect that one day, DEI (and Affirmative Action w/ it) would be gone. I just didn’t expect a blitzkrieg from this administration that would do away w/ it within 2 weeks
R G says
This is great news but just like the Laken Reilly Act, DEI as well as these other laws should be passed by congress so no future leftist administration ( god forbid!) can overturn this.
Bexarkat says
The most unfortunate thing about DEI, in my opinion, is that it negates a person’s opportunity to claim that they are the “best qualified” individual to do the job. DEI means they are simply “good enough.” In a discussion I had in a classroom regarding the lack or failure of leadership in policing, the moderator, a black man I’ve known for years who formerly pushed DEI as a training course (no one registered) at that training venue raised the issue. I chimed in it should be noted that (at the time) 30 out of the 50 largest cities in the United States had a black police chief – were they hired on merit or because of their race or gender? My opinion went unappreciated.
Kepha says
I pray that there is an across-the-board rejection of the “woke” cult.
As teachers, we had it hammered into us to accommodate a confused kid’s gender dysphoria, and that if we didn’t, we’d be aiding and abetting his suicide. Well, we have cases in which we ended up doing both. In Loudoun County, VA, a school administrator ended up losing his job and liberty with it because a boy in skirts raped girls in the girls’ bathroom. However, methinks the poor zhlub saw himself caught between a rock and a hard place, and, seeing how well-organized and lawyered up the LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ happened to be, he gambled on accommodating a biological male’s “fluid gender” (which turned back into the worst kind of male when given a chance), and lost.
But Uncle Kepha is old enough to remember the Silly ‘Sixties and Sillier ‘Seventies. Then, when supposedly “liberal” intellectuals were praising the likes of Mao Zedong (毛屎洞）, Ho Chi Minh, and Ernesto Guevara Serna y Lynch as great heroes of human liberation, my beloved uncle exclaimed that “the intellectuals have gone mad!” I’ve reached the conclusion that this is a periodic phenomenon in American culture. DEI, the 1619 Project, and a host of other things are ways the educational structures of our republic seriously and soberly go out of their wits.