DEI Panic in a World of White Nepotism
So the newly selected Democratic Party nominee for president is a black lady and also the term “DEI” is trending again. This is about as surprising as night following day, the tides coming in, or Tesla missing a deadline. Anyone who claims at this point that “DEI” isn’t a euphemism for “not a white dude” is being willfully dishonest.
And I’m a guy who likes to give people the benefit of the doubt, which gets me in trouble with less charitable readers who often disagree with my views on who is or is not Hitler (surprisingly few people are, I believe). But DEI—ostensibly diversity, equity, and inclusion (the new affirmative action)—is a lot like “Woke” in the sense that it was a real term that meant something specific to the people who coined it, but has since been hijacked and repurposed by people who don’t feel emboldened to say the words they really want to say.
When people are slinging “DEI” around in reference to elected officials, black people in fiction, or just folks you see walking down the street, you know one hundred percent that this is just a placeholder for the N-word now.
These euphemistic games are played regularly by the right-wing tech oligarchs who sit upstream of online culture. The old world arch-conservatives who run the grand old political parties and think tanks borrow from this culture in a transparent effort to keep relevant with the voting youth, but they always lag behind and it never fails to make me cringe when some septuagenarian Heritage Foundation goblin starts calling things woke or based.
One thing I do sincerely believe is that nobody wants to think their prejudices are anything less than rational, so in one sense I think maybe they kind of think they’re being, to some extent, honest? Some of them? Maybe? By the same token, though, racists also think that anyone who isn’t racist is themselves an irrational agent pretending to be rational. And because the True Factual Nature of race realist hierarchical malarkey is blinding then they often view the anti-racist position as dishonest or insidious.
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