I can only respond to Grim’s comment by making three points about DEI:
Corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are not synonymous with egalitarian politics. Some of them, like programs that train hiring managers to not discriminate against applicants based on identity, are important. Others — like workshops that educate workers about standpoint theory as commonly misunderstood in social justice discourse — are not. In fact, some DEI initiatives are quite harmful to the cause of egalitarianism insofar as they conflate it with irrelevant and often unpopular ideas that have nothing to do with social justice. We do no one any favors by equating support for DEI with support for egalitarian politics, or vice versa.
Americans, and workers in particular, are generally fine with DEI. The polls have been fairly consistent about this: Pew, for example, found that only 16% of polled workers consider DEI “a bad thing.” This makes sense, because your average worker’s exposure to DEI generally just involves the occasional mandatory workshop or training video-and-quiz that has to be completed by a given deadline.
Most opposition to DEI seems to come from higher income brackets. I suspect this is in part because it’s only in the most prestigious jobs, like positions in academia, media, or management, that you really have to spend a significant amount of time dealing with DEI issues and initiatives at work. It’s also, I think, simply because most opposition to DEI is being ginned up by intellectuals and politicians whose influence is most keenly felt by people who are extremely plugged in to the discourse. Your average cashier at McDonald’s has probably never heard of Chris Rufo. And on that note,The right is trying to leverage opposition to DEI against both ordinary egalitarian politics and socialism. Chris Rufo, for example, has been quite clear about both. Note again that this does not mean that DEI is synonymous with egalitarian politics. What it means is that the right wants people to think this because it wants to tie the legitimacy of the left political project to the most unpopular and irrelevant initiatives of DEI.
Much mischief has emerged in just the past few days from confusion about these points. Liberals see that the right is using DEI to wage a fight against civil rights and have decided that the two are synonymous, which is exactly what the right wants to happen. And some leftists, meanwhile, have seen the right’s ginned up controversy over DEI, have seen the way that this ginned up controversy is taking oxygen away from real controversies over class war, and have bought into the right’s hype that there is some massive working-class resistance to everything called DEI.
But none of this is true. If leftists want to wage war against the corporate corruptions of egalitarian politics that some DEI initiatives represent, they ought to be fighting an extremely narrow war which labors to make clear our enduring commitment to real egalitarianism. Above all, however, we need to acknowledge that DEI just isn’t something the working class is too worried about — and that the right is actively co-opting legitimate critiques of DEI to fight a much broader war on left politics in general. The notion that we should be thanking Chris Rufo for that is absurd.
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