alt Hacker News> We should just stop using the term DEI. It has been demonized in the common parlance so successfully
Whatever term you pick to describe a concerted effort to overcome the tendency to bigotry, they'll just hijack that, too.
There's a whole industry built around this, and the media is so receptive to the right-wing that they'll openly describe how they'll do it[1], will execute the plans in public, and the mainstream media will act as their stenographers.
[1] https://xcancel.com/sykescharlie/status/1396844806547050499
Replies
I think the demonization comes from people resenting the use of authority to restrict liberty, and from conflating the resentment of authority with bigotry. In this case, let private people discriminate freely.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -H. L. Mencken
I think people should be allowed to make their own choices in terms of whom to hire/associate with, with absolutely no outside intervention. That doesn't make me a bigot.
DEI wasn't demonized because it tried to fight bigotry. It demonized itself because it routinely became a dishonest two-faced movement that public denied to be discriminatory, but then privately implemented policies that explicitly discriminated on the basis of sex and gender.
When your leaders publicly condemn the idea that your company is discriminating on the basis of sex, but then privately institutes a system of reserving headcount for women, that'll make most people real cynical about DEI.
Do you mean there’s a whole industry built around DEI? Or that there’s a whole industry built around countermessaging the DEI industry?