Did you read the article? Yes, plenty of right-wingers have completely distorted what DEI means. But the author recounts an experience in which the DEI functioned in pretty much the same way. Whether or not he's actually right in a larger sense is unclear -- he certainly didn't prove that case if he was making it. I would be skeptical, for sure. But that doesn't negate his own experience, which matters.
If we can't resolve it, we can at least acknowledge it. Every policy has winners and losers. Slavery was the ultimate "white people win; black people lose" policy. Jim Crow and segregation had that same binary, though the effect was weaker (but still really strong!). Subtle workplace discrimination is closer to balance than those two forms (note: I am choosing extreme examples for illustration), but still favors white people.
DEI is a flip of the script on the subtle forms. It's the idea that, if we're going to err, let's do so on the side of inclusion. How about extending the benefit of the doubt to minorities for the first time in centuries. I mean, this is only a first-order approximation and I'm not going to defend it as any precise description, but I think you could do a lot worse for a single sentence.
And that is perhaps a salutary development. In my view, its dominant property is its limited applicability. In most cases, it doesn't make a difference.
But when there are cases in which it does make a difference, we ought to be honest about that. We ought to be able to accept that DEI has some losers to it. That doesn't mean it should be ended any more than free trade should be ended because it closed the textile mills. It does seem wrong to me, though, to scoff at the losers' experience. When we say that DEI only hurts mediocre white men -- well, what does that prove, exactly? Mediocrity is a universal human condition that has existed in all societies at all times -- indeed, it's definitional. You can't have a great basketball player unless there are a bunch of mediocre ones. And so the mediocre matter too.
One thing that has happened, perhaps at the margins of MAGA, is that the mediocre have decided that liberals don't give a shit about them. Which isn't true, in my view -- in fact, liberals are way better about caring about people in general, of all stripes, than fascists. But the language and the attitudes can give that impression. And when you glom that onto the traditional in-group/out-group set of biases, amplified by social media, you get the monstrous exaggerated forms like Trump.
I'm not going to be holier than thou -- I'm sure I have used that rhetoric before. I surely contributed to the problem. I'm trying to do better, to live up to a pretty good mantra: have empathy for everyone -- the folk version of which is close to "don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes."
