The tide is turning against modern diversity bureaucracies. But that's not necessarily bad news for progressives, at least if they believe in the goals of the civil rights movement.
For the rest of my life I don’t know if I can ever forgive the people who made HR departments, drag performers, and racial grievance book writing millionaires the vanguard of the left now.
In the workplace I want more profit share for workers, better benefits, sick time, and maybe just maybe a piece of ownership of “means of production”. Being made a captive audience so capitalists and managers can preach morality to you, the unwashed worker pleb is not any form of leftism I ever ascribed to and it makes it much harder to identify with the label anymore.
Btw, nothing at all against drag performers, but it stopped being transgressive and “shocking” to the bourgeoisie once they started promoting it on VH1 and in libraries for the yard sign private kindergarten soccer mom crowd.
Yea. RuPaul's Drag Race is promoted on the Roku device every time you pause for more than a minute. It's been seared into my elderly parents' minds at this point.
I would say in my professional experience, the DEI efforts have had little positive impact on my workplace. I work in a very progressive company so it was already very diverse, accommodating to different needs, and they generally treat you well. One drawback is that there is no paid sick leave. You have to use your PTO, which is common in the private sector. There are constant complaints about this lack of benefit since it encourages people to work while sick (who wants to give up their vacation?).
The problem is that we are owned by a much larger firm that does not want sick leave. But that firm is ok with us having a bloated DEI team that does not produce much of anything except encouraging us not to use certain words and have yearly training sessions done by outside consultants for people that really don’t need it.
DEI as currently implemented is a full-employment program for bureaucrats, and also a way to give graduates of "Studies" programs jobs in corporate HR departments or government offices as DEI staffers. (Not saying this is the "intent", but this is the effect, and the effects are all that matter.)
One crucial aspect of DEI is it says absolutely nothing about wealth or poverty (other than pie-in-the-sky ideas like "reparations"), other than indirectly implying that "equity" will work it all out, with "equity" definitions created and implemented by DEI bureaucrats.
Corporate CEOs - particularly those with any "intersectionality identities" in their makeup - could be fully DEI-aware without actually doing anything other than establishing a DEI bureaucracy and staying out of its way. They certainly didn't have to concern themselves about wealth distribution or anything else.
I'm not much of a leftist (more of a somewhat libertarian-inclined centrist), but I do think a proper and mostly "economics-focused" left - and a healthy right - are needed to maintain a good level of political tension and turnover in a working democracy.
But an "identity-warfare" and bureaucrat-centric left that says next to nothing about class or distributional questions - and that ignores or dismisses basic competence in favor of filling out intersectional spreadsheets - is certainly not a healthy left.
Tesla is being sued because white workers created a segregated workplace, lovingly called the Plantation. I would say that type of behavior in workplaces is what breaks solidarity.
And honestly the lefts failings is that beyond “unions” they’ve never solved the conundrum that it’s really easy for the owner class to pit white workers against their non-white class companions.
Ah yes, I remember seeing Obama speaking at campaigns with people holding the “racists for Obama” signs. Thank you for reminding me of this part of 2008 I had forgotten.
If there is a union at your workplace his exactly are white and nonwhite workers being pitted against each other? No one's arguing marxism and unionism is by itself going to eliminate racist beliefs or attitudes. But unions are mechanisms where all workers attain equality in how they are treated by employers, with rules in place (grievance procedures) for when those rules are violated. I can hate and disagree with racist beliefs of a fellow worker, but as long as they ARE a fellow worker we are on the same side. In the same boat so to speak, so I will have solidarity with them. Sometimes whether they like it or not! I think this is one of the things that so many liberals, progressives, "leftists", etc cannot wrap their heads around in America. And I think that American individualism and exceptionalism is part of the reason why. I suppose we can TEACH solidarity to Americans. But it sure ain't easy.
A lot of left leaning online folks do not understand racism as having material impact on black workers in particular and as a barrier to solidarity overall. They see it as just a different POV, like wearing white after Labor Day - not to be done, but if you did it they won't be too hard on you.
Labor/Marxist historians like Laurence Levine and David Roediger have documented the centuries of labor history in which the owner class have cut inter-racial solidarity at its knees. And unions can be tools to protect of course, but the proof is always in the application - and the history of labor leadership not delivering regarding equality is loooonnng. This cycle the GOP went after the relatively small legal Haitian immigrants in Ohio, not the 30k legal Ukrainian legal immigrants in Chicago. Owner class know exactly what to do, meanwhile online leftists are sharing similar thoughts to the guys who hate having black people in the workplace.
The online left got caught up in distractions that the owner class threw out - "woke" "DEI" etc, so now they look like the Robin to Chris Rufo's Batman. They have no counter for LBJ's “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket...give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” No path to solidarity.
I don't know what connection you're trying to make about white workers historically or now easily being pitted against their nonwhite fellows. For one, I reject the premise that this is widespread or especially common. Another thing, where is the online left getting caught up in these distractions ? The largest problem as I see with anything considering itself the left, whether online or in real life, is that it almost entirely driven by DEI groupthink. Are you actually saying that there is no path to solidarity within the labor movement? Lifting up ALL workers, even the ones with odious ideas about sex and race, etc, lifts up ALL workers. Period.
While Starbucks, Nike, apple, Amazon, etc having mandatory dei trainings while at the same time spending a fortune to crush unionization efforts has real life negative consequences on the lives of workers. Working class people that is, who as you surely know are disproportionately nonwhite.
I don't think what you are describing are leftists, but rather liberals. The difference, which seems so obvious to those on the left, seems to have escaped the awareness of many who are not. I think that is due to the utter failure of the MSM to present any viewpoint to the left of a very narrow band that sits just barely to the left of center-right.
It would never be considered left in any European country, for example. But if that's all you are permitted to see, then it isn't surprising that this view of the "left" is so wide-spread, even as it is so wrong.
I would agree with this in part, except there were/are DSA chapters dedicated to fighting DEI, there are whole wings of “traditional” left thought who fell for the grift, in part because they don’t see intra-class working class battles as real.
Thanks for this refreshing viewpoint. It is my sincere hope that our national discourse will turn back to the purity of Dr King’s message.
In my experience over 50 plus years of being self-employed and working for both publicly owned companies and small privately held businesses, the general attitude of management towards any type of regulatory burden is that it is the cost of doing business.
To break it down further, the money spent to comply with regulations is basically a tax that the business is not able to write off against other federal or corporate taxes, making it that much more expensive than a direct tax. This is why it’s so galling to most small businesses owners.
As that is the case, what explains the flurry of DEI spending in the post George Floyd years? What benefit was American Airlines or any high profile company possibly gaining?
In a society where the legacy media still controlled the narrative, it was the cost of doing business.
The executives who were paying for DEI training knew it was a protection racket from the get go, pure grift. No different than what Jesse Jackson was doing to Wall Street in the 1980s. Whatever it took at the time to get a free pass from the media and race hucksters like Kendi and Diangelo. So the corporations lined up for DEI in order to continue doing business. No sane employee who has ever sat through mandatory DEI training believes that it was time or money well spent. Does any reasonable person believe that berating your white employees as irredeemably racist is a sustainable or constructive endeavor?
The reason DEI failed is because it was meant to fail.
Being based on CRT, the watered down Marxism of Critical Theory in which every institution is torn down, nothing is built.
The trainings are laughable and a big waste of time, but the hiring and promotion discrimination in the name of diversity are widespread and definitely real.
I sure wish I could be a fly on the wall in some National Endowment for the Arts meetings right about now. Here's hoping the Trump administrations executive order will start to turn this stuff around.
Neither do equity pushes in our public schools serve African American students as the net result of these programs is lessening rigor in the classroom. Most gap closures in our schools are matched by losses in academic achievement overall. That is telling and tragic.
We would be well served at this point by simply implementing the academic programs of the 1950s but ensuring all schools have these same academics taught and high standards for grading. However, so few young people even have the academic content knowledge to teach elementary school with the math, grammar, vocabulary, history and science content that teachers were expected to have mastered in order to teach back in 1950. That, in and of itself, says a lot.
Excuses are made about all the "new" knowledge we teach now...but I have found no one who can tell me what that is. We hardly teach more than "reading" and "math" and journal "writing" these days. Very rare science kit projects every now and again.
Imagine what children would say if they had monthly chapter tests in history, math, science and grammar, weekly spelling tests, and pop tests along with monthly book reports?
The howls of protest we would hear today from outraged students? The parents claiming that it is all too too hard for their darlings?
Yet that was my life as a child in the midwest in the 70s.
Too many people lie to themselves in this conversation. I don’t like DEI because I think it’s a bandaid for a much bigger societal/political problem. The reason folks hate DEI is because the idea of black/marginalized people working within these spaces is unsettling.
These programs were set up to fight hiring disparities, plus network failures (a lot of minorities do not have the networks to even get some jobs). The NFL has the Rooney rule for this reason. The DEI person I know set up breast-feeding/pumping rooms because in the past her bosses would lay off the women and say you know things are soft, before hiring one of their fishing bros. We do not live in a meritocracy, and I’m not sure going back to a 1950s vision of the workforce is a good idea.
But here we are hoping that the good graces of corporate America will try earnestly to tackle the black graduate unemployment rate crisis. Or will risk hiring women with kids. Maybe they’ll just hire folks they grew up with, or who they totally vibe with because of common backgrounds. Coz meritocracy is really not a thing and liberals need to read the room.
"But something is lost in this debate, where you have conservatives on one side railing against programs and practices they believe discriminate against white men"
They 'believe' discriminate against white men? Interesting choice of words, implying both that DEI's sexually and legally proven discrimination against white men is a false perception and that 'conservatives' are just a bunch of resentful white men (rather erasing non-white and female conservatives). This statement, more than any other in the article, suggests to me that you are not a conservative, nor even passingly familiar with conservatives, because you have just blindly repeated a progressive libel against conservatives without seemingly even noticing.
"But something is lost in this debate, where you have conservatives on one side railing against programs and practices THEY BELIEVE DISCRIMINATE." Period, full stop right there. It doesn't matter to conservatives which group is getting discriminated against for irrelevant reasons so much as it matters that they ARE irrelevant reasons. It was Asians who won the court case against Harvard over unfair admissions, not whites, and conservatives cheered, despite knowing full well that Asian students outperform white students and Asian workers are outearning white workers. Conservatives in American celebrate excellence and meritocracy, regardless of the race or sex or whatever else relevant demographic label, and it's badly inaccurate to write this in a way that presents the conflict over DEI as anything other than progressive neoracism and feminist sexism against conservative meritocracy.
Zaid is not and has never claimed to be a conservative, though I can verify that he knows conservatives quite well and is just using neutral language to show the views of the various people discussed in the article.
It most certainly is neutral language, he is explaining their viewpoint while not taking a stance on it. When you say someone believes something it does not, in fact, imply that it isn't true.
"where you have conservatives on one side railing against programs and practices they believe discriminate against white men and promote mediocrity and liberals on the other side defending DEI as an extension of the civil rights movement that guarantees the rights of minorities."
He only uses "believe" to describe the conservative side. When you use "believe" to describe one side but not the other, you necessarily invoke a Dichotomy: perception versus reality, belief versus fact. It's like describing a debate about the shape of the Earth as being "you have those on one side who believe the earth isn't flat and those on the other side defending the flatness of the Earth". Still think that framing sounds 'neutral' regarding which side is actually right?
Then there's the unnecessary and misleading "against white men" suffix. DEI does in fact do that, but that's not the basis of the moral or practical arguments conservatives make against DEI. The conservative argument against DEI is that it's anti-meritocratic. The passage I quoted very clearly misrepresents the conservative argument against DEI, who the conservatives making that argument are, and their motive for making the argument. When you misrepresent what is said, by whom, and why, that's not 'neutral' in ANY sense.
I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt by at least assuming he didn't do it DELIBERATELY, just thoughtlessly, but I'm not seeing a correction or apology from him yet either.
conservatives argue that DEI discriminates against white men all the time, what are you talking about
also, "defending DEI as" means "they present their argument in this fashion" and in absolutely no way implies that the argument their making is factual or correct.
this is the worst part of writing on substack, is the people who want to obsessively focus on the fact that you didn't present some niche issue in the exact why they feel that you must. Incredibly annoying. I have no idea why I was dumb enough to bother responding to you.
Given that IQ is general, if you find that you're often acting dumb it's probably because you are generally dumb. To quote Forest Gump "Stupid is as stupid does".
Also maybe next time don't ask a question in your first sentence and then use your last paragraph to rant about how emotional, dumb, and uninterested in actually hearing a reply you are. It's rather oxymoronic.
1. Civil rights progress to end material institutional racism - (done)
2. Dismantle the racial equality industry - (not done)
3. Implement civil rights movement 2.0 to remedy class bias - (not done)
4. Reform civil rights class equality industry - (not done)
Because we failed to accomplish #2, the industry worked to protect itself by inventing and fomenting racial conflict. And as with the Shirky Principle, it perpetuated the very problem that it claimed to advocate for.
“There’s a reason that everyone from corporate CEOs to the leaders of elite school districts like Fairfax were so comfortable embracing Kendi and DiAngelo. Nothing these anti-racist writers said or did actually threatened the power structure in America. “
Spot on here. All these actions were merely a way for white people to feel like they were don’t something, but without making any tangible change. Well done.
Also, will have to look into Rustin more, don’t know too much about him but his ideas sound fascinating
" Many people criticize these programs because they have little positive impact on diversity, anyway, and there’s a bunch of evidence that diversity trainings can actually make people more prejudiced."
As ever, the left constantly speaks of "reactionaries" but then blatantly refuses to show any concern about causing reactions.
Also this reminds me of the old UCB show when they're trying to have the cultural performance with a troupe called the Saigon Suicide Squad to "fight prejudice" but they never show up and at the end he says, "We we done nothing to fight prejudice today, and in fact I think we may have invented some new ones"
It takes a special kind of white person to go to a training about how all the minorities need to combine against white people and come out wanting to help them instead of wanting to team up with the other whites and fight them. It doesn't take any great insight into human nature to understand it will go this way.
For the rest of my life I don’t know if I can ever forgive the people who made HR departments, drag performers, and racial grievance book writing millionaires the vanguard of the left now.
In the workplace I want more profit share for workers, better benefits, sick time, and maybe just maybe a piece of ownership of “means of production”. Being made a captive audience so capitalists and managers can preach morality to you, the unwashed worker pleb is not any form of leftism I ever ascribed to and it makes it much harder to identify with the label anymore.
Btw, nothing at all against drag performers, but it stopped being transgressive and “shocking” to the bourgeoisie once they started promoting it on VH1 and in libraries for the yard sign private kindergarten soccer mom crowd.
Yea. RuPaul's Drag Race is promoted on the Roku device every time you pause for more than a minute. It's been seared into my elderly parents' minds at this point.
Yes!
Yep. Relate.
I would say in my professional experience, the DEI efforts have had little positive impact on my workplace. I work in a very progressive company so it was already very diverse, accommodating to different needs, and they generally treat you well. One drawback is that there is no paid sick leave. You have to use your PTO, which is common in the private sector. There are constant complaints about this lack of benefit since it encourages people to work while sick (who wants to give up their vacation?).
The problem is that we are owned by a much larger firm that does not want sick leave. But that firm is ok with us having a bloated DEI team that does not produce much of anything except encouraging us not to use certain words and have yearly training sessions done by outside consultants for people that really don’t need it.
11
DEI as currently implemented is a full-employment program for bureaucrats, and also a way to give graduates of "Studies" programs jobs in corporate HR departments or government offices as DEI staffers. (Not saying this is the "intent", but this is the effect, and the effects are all that matter.)
One crucial aspect of DEI is it says absolutely nothing about wealth or poverty (other than pie-in-the-sky ideas like "reparations"), other than indirectly implying that "equity" will work it all out, with "equity" definitions created and implemented by DEI bureaucrats.
Corporate CEOs - particularly those with any "intersectionality identities" in their makeup - could be fully DEI-aware without actually doing anything other than establishing a DEI bureaucracy and staying out of its way. They certainly didn't have to concern themselves about wealth distribution or anything else.
I'm not much of a leftist (more of a somewhat libertarian-inclined centrist), but I do think a proper and mostly "economics-focused" left - and a healthy right - are needed to maintain a good level of political tension and turnover in a working democracy.
But an "identity-warfare" and bureaucrat-centric left that says next to nothing about class or distributional questions - and that ignores or dismisses basic competence in favor of filling out intersectional spreadsheets - is certainly not a healthy left.
It has the added "benefit" of being demoralizing and anti-solidaristic for worker organizing, too.
Tesla is being sued because white workers created a segregated workplace, lovingly called the Plantation. I would say that type of behavior in workplaces is what breaks solidarity.
And honestly the lefts failings is that beyond “unions” they’ve never solved the conundrum that it’s really easy for the owner class to pit white workers against their non-white class companions.
Not being racist would help in expressing solidarity with other workers. But having racist beliefs does not in itself preclude class solidarity.
Sure. I mean Obama had a demographic they identified called “racists for Obama”, extreme economic concerns can create alliances.
Ah yes, I remember seeing Obama speaking at campaigns with people holding the “racists for Obama” signs. Thank you for reminding me of this part of 2008 I had forgotten.
If there is a union at your workplace his exactly are white and nonwhite workers being pitted against each other? No one's arguing marxism and unionism is by itself going to eliminate racist beliefs or attitudes. But unions are mechanisms where all workers attain equality in how they are treated by employers, with rules in place (grievance procedures) for when those rules are violated. I can hate and disagree with racist beliefs of a fellow worker, but as long as they ARE a fellow worker we are on the same side. In the same boat so to speak, so I will have solidarity with them. Sometimes whether they like it or not! I think this is one of the things that so many liberals, progressives, "leftists", etc cannot wrap their heads around in America. And I think that American individualism and exceptionalism is part of the reason why. I suppose we can TEACH solidarity to Americans. But it sure ain't easy.
A lot of left leaning online folks do not understand racism as having material impact on black workers in particular and as a barrier to solidarity overall. They see it as just a different POV, like wearing white after Labor Day - not to be done, but if you did it they won't be too hard on you.
Labor/Marxist historians like Laurence Levine and David Roediger have documented the centuries of labor history in which the owner class have cut inter-racial solidarity at its knees. And unions can be tools to protect of course, but the proof is always in the application - and the history of labor leadership not delivering regarding equality is loooonnng. This cycle the GOP went after the relatively small legal Haitian immigrants in Ohio, not the 30k legal Ukrainian legal immigrants in Chicago. Owner class know exactly what to do, meanwhile online leftists are sharing similar thoughts to the guys who hate having black people in the workplace.
The online left got caught up in distractions that the owner class threw out - "woke" "DEI" etc, so now they look like the Robin to Chris Rufo's Batman. They have no counter for LBJ's “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket...give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” No path to solidarity.
I don't know what connection you're trying to make about white workers historically or now easily being pitted against their nonwhite fellows. For one, I reject the premise that this is widespread or especially common. Another thing, where is the online left getting caught up in these distractions ? The largest problem as I see with anything considering itself the left, whether online or in real life, is that it almost entirely driven by DEI groupthink. Are you actually saying that there is no path to solidarity within the labor movement? Lifting up ALL workers, even the ones with odious ideas about sex and race, etc, lifts up ALL workers. Period.
While Starbucks, Nike, apple, Amazon, etc having mandatory dei trainings while at the same time spending a fortune to crush unionization efforts has real life negative consequences on the lives of workers. Working class people that is, who as you surely know are disproportionately nonwhite.
I don't think what you are describing are leftists, but rather liberals. The difference, which seems so obvious to those on the left, seems to have escaped the awareness of many who are not. I think that is due to the utter failure of the MSM to present any viewpoint to the left of a very narrow band that sits just barely to the left of center-right.
It would never be considered left in any European country, for example. But if that's all you are permitted to see, then it isn't surprising that this view of the "left" is so wide-spread, even as it is so wrong.
I would agree with this in part, except there were/are DSA chapters dedicated to fighting DEI, there are whole wings of “traditional” left thought who fell for the grift, in part because they don’t see intra-class working class battles as real.
Glad you remember. I didn’t know about campaigns, I heard it from canvassers. https://www.politico.com/story/2008/10/racists-for-obama-014691
Old Leftie wisdom: We need a new set of people.
So the Bolsheviks used bayonets to manufacture "Soviet Man."
Western/US Lefties used lectures to create "woke people."
Both failed miserably. Human nature (with all its imperfections) prevailed and will always prevail.
Really weird that you didn’t bring up the Nazis’ little spiel…..but you threw in the “lefty” bullshit so you could spew your partisan horsecrap.
New Leftie wisdom:
Failing to bring up Nazis in every post is "partisan horsecrap." Boring . . .
Fuck off 😤
Thank you for writing this! I agree with all of it.
This is the best essay covering this issue I’ve read this far. Thank you for speaking up.
Thanks for this refreshing viewpoint. It is my sincere hope that our national discourse will turn back to the purity of Dr King’s message.
In my experience over 50 plus years of being self-employed and working for both publicly owned companies and small privately held businesses, the general attitude of management towards any type of regulatory burden is that it is the cost of doing business.
To break it down further, the money spent to comply with regulations is basically a tax that the business is not able to write off against other federal or corporate taxes, making it that much more expensive than a direct tax. This is why it’s so galling to most small businesses owners.
As that is the case, what explains the flurry of DEI spending in the post George Floyd years? What benefit was American Airlines or any high profile company possibly gaining?
In a society where the legacy media still controlled the narrative, it was the cost of doing business.
The executives who were paying for DEI training knew it was a protection racket from the get go, pure grift. No different than what Jesse Jackson was doing to Wall Street in the 1980s. Whatever it took at the time to get a free pass from the media and race hucksters like Kendi and Diangelo. So the corporations lined up for DEI in order to continue doing business. No sane employee who has ever sat through mandatory DEI training believes that it was time or money well spent. Does any reasonable person believe that berating your white employees as irredeemably racist is a sustainable or constructive endeavor?
The reason DEI failed is because it was meant to fail.
Being based on CRT, the watered down Marxism of Critical Theory in which every institution is torn down, nothing is built.
The trainings are laughable and a big waste of time, but the hiring and promotion discrimination in the name of diversity are widespread and definitely real.
If you want to see the this sort of discrimination in what's likely its most unmitigated form, you need only look to the nonprofit arts sector:
https://cinematimshel.substack.com/p/ideologically-out-of-line-and-insufficiently
I sure wish I could be a fly on the wall in some National Endowment for the Arts meetings right about now. Here's hoping the Trump administrations executive order will start to turn this stuff around.
Neither do equity pushes in our public schools serve African American students as the net result of these programs is lessening rigor in the classroom. Most gap closures in our schools are matched by losses in academic achievement overall. That is telling and tragic.
We would be well served at this point by simply implementing the academic programs of the 1950s but ensuring all schools have these same academics taught and high standards for grading. However, so few young people even have the academic content knowledge to teach elementary school with the math, grammar, vocabulary, history and science content that teachers were expected to have mastered in order to teach back in 1950. That, in and of itself, says a lot.
Excuses are made about all the "new" knowledge we teach now...but I have found no one who can tell me what that is. We hardly teach more than "reading" and "math" and journal "writing" these days. Very rare science kit projects every now and again.
Imagine what children would say if they had monthly chapter tests in history, math, science and grammar, weekly spelling tests, and pop tests along with monthly book reports?
The howls of protest we would hear today from outraged students? The parents claiming that it is all too too hard for their darlings?
Yet that was my life as a child in the midwest in the 70s.
This is one of the best and most meaningful essays that I've ever read. Thanks, Zaid.
Too many people lie to themselves in this conversation. I don’t like DEI because I think it’s a bandaid for a much bigger societal/political problem. The reason folks hate DEI is because the idea of black/marginalized people working within these spaces is unsettling.
These programs were set up to fight hiring disparities, plus network failures (a lot of minorities do not have the networks to even get some jobs). The NFL has the Rooney rule for this reason. The DEI person I know set up breast-feeding/pumping rooms because in the past her bosses would lay off the women and say you know things are soft, before hiring one of their fishing bros. We do not live in a meritocracy, and I’m not sure going back to a 1950s vision of the workforce is a good idea.
But here we are hoping that the good graces of corporate America will try earnestly to tackle the black graduate unemployment rate crisis. Or will risk hiring women with kids. Maybe they’ll just hire folks they grew up with, or who they totally vibe with because of common backgrounds. Coz meritocracy is really not a thing and liberals need to read the room.
An excellent critique of DEI. I have written in a similar vein with respect to Dr. King.
Please see “Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: Economic justice for all, in the nation and the world,” January 20, 2025
https://charlesmckelvey.substack.com/p/honoring-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-4a8
Thanks for the link to the essay. The discussion of Nixon and the "Republican ascendancy" would be a good read for members of The Resistance ™.
"But something is lost in this debate, where you have conservatives on one side railing against programs and practices they believe discriminate against white men"
They 'believe' discriminate against white men? Interesting choice of words, implying both that DEI's sexually and legally proven discrimination against white men is a false perception and that 'conservatives' are just a bunch of resentful white men (rather erasing non-white and female conservatives). This statement, more than any other in the article, suggests to me that you are not a conservative, nor even passingly familiar with conservatives, because you have just blindly repeated a progressive libel against conservatives without seemingly even noticing.
"But something is lost in this debate, where you have conservatives on one side railing against programs and practices THEY BELIEVE DISCRIMINATE." Period, full stop right there. It doesn't matter to conservatives which group is getting discriminated against for irrelevant reasons so much as it matters that they ARE irrelevant reasons. It was Asians who won the court case against Harvard over unfair admissions, not whites, and conservatives cheered, despite knowing full well that Asian students outperform white students and Asian workers are outearning white workers. Conservatives in American celebrate excellence and meritocracy, regardless of the race or sex or whatever else relevant demographic label, and it's badly inaccurate to write this in a way that presents the conflict over DEI as anything other than progressive neoracism and feminist sexism against conservative meritocracy.
Zaid is not and has never claimed to be a conservative, though I can verify that he knows conservatives quite well and is just using neutral language to show the views of the various people discussed in the article.
That is not neutral language, which is my point.
It most certainly is neutral language, he is explaining their viewpoint while not taking a stance on it. When you say someone believes something it does not, in fact, imply that it isn't true.
"where you have conservatives on one side railing against programs and practices they believe discriminate against white men and promote mediocrity and liberals on the other side defending DEI as an extension of the civil rights movement that guarantees the rights of minorities."
He only uses "believe" to describe the conservative side. When you use "believe" to describe one side but not the other, you necessarily invoke a Dichotomy: perception versus reality, belief versus fact. It's like describing a debate about the shape of the Earth as being "you have those on one side who believe the earth isn't flat and those on the other side defending the flatness of the Earth". Still think that framing sounds 'neutral' regarding which side is actually right?
Then there's the unnecessary and misleading "against white men" suffix. DEI does in fact do that, but that's not the basis of the moral or practical arguments conservatives make against DEI. The conservative argument against DEI is that it's anti-meritocratic. The passage I quoted very clearly misrepresents the conservative argument against DEI, who the conservatives making that argument are, and their motive for making the argument. When you misrepresent what is said, by whom, and why, that's not 'neutral' in ANY sense.
I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt by at least assuming he didn't do it DELIBERATELY, just thoughtlessly, but I'm not seeing a correction or apology from him yet either.
conservatives argue that DEI discriminates against white men all the time, what are you talking about
also, "defending DEI as" means "they present their argument in this fashion" and in absolutely no way implies that the argument their making is factual or correct.
this is the worst part of writing on substack, is the people who want to obsessively focus on the fact that you didn't present some niche issue in the exact why they feel that you must. Incredibly annoying. I have no idea why I was dumb enough to bother responding to you.
Given that IQ is general, if you find that you're often acting dumb it's probably because you are generally dumb. To quote Forest Gump "Stupid is as stupid does".
Also maybe next time don't ask a question in your first sentence and then use your last paragraph to rant about how emotional, dumb, and uninterested in actually hearing a reply you are. It's rather oxymoronic.
🤣🤡🤣
Here is the way it should have worked.
1. Civil rights progress to end material institutional racism - (done)
2. Dismantle the racial equality industry - (not done)
3. Implement civil rights movement 2.0 to remedy class bias - (not done)
4. Reform civil rights class equality industry - (not done)
Because we failed to accomplish #2, the industry worked to protect itself by inventing and fomenting racial conflict. And as with the Shirky Principle, it perpetuated the very problem that it claimed to advocate for.
“There’s a reason that everyone from corporate CEOs to the leaders of elite school districts like Fairfax were so comfortable embracing Kendi and DiAngelo. Nothing these anti-racist writers said or did actually threatened the power structure in America. “
Spot on here. All these actions were merely a way for white people to feel like they were don’t something, but without making any tangible change. Well done.
Also, will have to look into Rustin more, don’t know too much about him but his ideas sound fascinating
" Many people criticize these programs because they have little positive impact on diversity, anyway, and there’s a bunch of evidence that diversity trainings can actually make people more prejudiced."
As ever, the left constantly speaks of "reactionaries" but then blatantly refuses to show any concern about causing reactions.
Also this reminds me of the old UCB show when they're trying to have the cultural performance with a troupe called the Saigon Suicide Squad to "fight prejudice" but they never show up and at the end he says, "We we done nothing to fight prejudice today, and in fact I think we may have invented some new ones"
It takes a special kind of white person to go to a training about how all the minorities need to combine against white people and come out wanting to help them instead of wanting to team up with the other whites and fight them. It doesn't take any great insight into human nature to understand it will go this way.