True but men are in power and have been for centuries here and around the world. And look at the state of the Planet and the potential of human and animal extinction because of the deficiency of Spiritual lack in many male “leaders” lost in the delusions of ego , power, wars and money worship.
I loved reading about the intersectional games playing out in your different roles and appreciate the evolution of your thinking as you came to realise that the DEI game has made things worse. Like so many risk mitigating initiatives, the hyperfocus on what's going wrong rather than what's going well for everybody, and capitalising on those for broader improvement was the wrong tactic. The assumption that everyone is so racially biased that it's the root cause of workplace inequality made things worse (except for the beneficiaries of the race grift).
I once photographed an event for women in tech. It was a panel of leaders in tech at various large enterprise tech companies with an engaging group of women who listened to presentations followed by a Q&A.
As a fly on the wall in this event, listening to the interaction between women, and also questions asked to the all female panel, it became clear that the the number two issue behind general sexism in tech companies was...ageism.
There were fully qualified women on staff that had all the shiz of their younger counterparts, but were denied growth opportunities by the directors/mgmt due to being 'older in tech'. I now see this for men and women in industry of all shapes/sizes.
The fascinating part of responses of how to overcome this by panel members was essentially to take care of yourself, workout, do things to look younger (hair dye, makeup, clothing styles, etc.).
I guess merit will only take you so far? I'd love to hear your take on the 'ageism' issue in another article. Thanks for your enlightening essays thus far.
Radha and I actually talked about ageism during our initial Zoom call about these DEI articles and I was going to handle it but it was too much to tackle M/F relations AND ageism in one post (just as she had to cut the eminently relevant caste discrimination discussion in hers). We'll put it on our 2-do list!
I think that the important point isn't that DEI has limits, is that it is fatally flawed for two reasons.
One - It admits that it derives from the fake scholarship of Critical Theory that manifests as woke, and practitioners admit that everything they believe in is about power. And because it is a rock-paper-scissors game of group identity grievance and power shuffling, everyone, including members of woke-sanctioned victim groups, can, and likely will, be harmed by its practice.
Two - Because it replaces merit with non-meritorious criteria for hiring and promotion, the net effect is lower productive capability of the organization. The net impact of that is lower job satisfaction for all employees, and more organizational failure in competition with those organizations that stick with meritorious hiring and promotion practices.
The irony lost on so many here is that these fatal flaws as the same with all collectivist revolutionary attempts and/or systems.
We almost wrote that it should belong in the dustbin of history but tried to strike a bargain. That said, I fully agree. I haven’t seen it lead to meritorious workplaces, and women who aren’t competent are the primary beneficiaries anyway.
My husband is a software engineer who once worked for a major computer corporation in the Austin area which embraced DEI principles. He was the only Caucasian on his team. His manager and most of his teammates were Indian, the other two Chinese. My husband experienced discrimination on his team based on his race. His manager once told him publicly in a meeting that he was NOT diverse. My response upon hearing that assertion was that his presence on the team MADE it diverse! This male manager was eventually promoted and replaced by an Indian woman on the team who treated my husband equitably. The company's DEI initiatives promoted discrimination and division in its practices rather than eliminate them.
That DEI was flawed ought to have been obvious from the very beginning.
It is all predicated on top of a massive representativeness fallacy.
For reference to those who are unfamiliar, a representativeness fallacy is the flawed belief that every member of a group must represent the qualities of the whole group.
An example being the belief that a woman can't be physically strong, because the average woman isn't.
The reverse example is that due to how pervasive the fallacy is, people assume that the leader chosen for a group must represent the average of that group. And so if the leader commits a crime, then the whole group must be criminals.
It is really so inanely stupid.
DEI commits the same logical fallacy that underpins the racism, sexism and unfair discrimination it's proponents allegedly want to end. Quite simply, it is actually perpetuating unreasonable discrimination itself.
Just because a group of powerful White and Jewish men control nearly everything in the world doesn't mean that ordinary white people have an invisible privilege derived therein.
It should be obvious that if those vested interests did not want DEI to happen, if they truly believed in protecting their imaginary racial group, they would vilify it and tear it down, not fund it, teach it to children and spread it everywhere on the media.
Moreover, it is obvious how predatory and conspiratorial the theory is if one replaces "White privilege" with "Jewish privilege". With a simple word change, the vitriol becomes clear. It's just the same bullshit from WW2 with a new target.
Furthermore, one of the major contributors to this theory, Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School, was a propagandist for the CIA/OSS during said WW2.
He studied both communist and nazi ideology and spent much of his career developing counter ideologies for nazism.
He authored "Repressive Tolerance", the idea that the left shouldn't tolerate anything from the right because the right are intolerant.
In other words, "until the right are destroyed everywhere, we won't have true freedom".
Compare with the idea that, "until capitalism is destroyed everywhere, we won't have true communism".
He proposed that outcasts, minority groups and misfits should band together to oppose the hegemony. Which is idiotic because as soon as they succeed, they become a new hegemon which others must then oppose by creating ever more extreme movements. In other words, continuous revolution and racial conflict.
Ultimately, the philosophy is neo-marxism.
Instead of class conflict, where poor people rise up to defeat rich people, it proposes ideological conflict where minority groups rise up to oppose and defeat the majority through ideological subversion.
It is a completely pointless distraction from the real issues in our world.
Just as the majority of Jews had nothing to do with the cruelty of powerful Jewish elites and bankers in WW2, yet suffered all the atrocities at the hands of an angry misguided public.
Similarly, the majority of white people are innocent bystanders who have nothing to do with the violence and depravity being conducted on a global scale by white elites and bankers.
Blaming and vilifying based on appearance helps those with the most power by shifting the responsibility for their actions onto an entire group.
While simultaneously discrediting the grievances of their victims which are perceived as madness by the falsely abused innocent who must then turn to the powerful for protection.
If we ask why would the elites fund and promote an ideology that paints them as the villains, remember that the zionists were one of the biggest contributors to antisemitism in Germany, because it suited their agenda of forcing citizens to move to Israel.
Also note that original Marxism blames all of societies ills on the rich capitalists, which is misguided in exactly the same way.
It neglects to recognise the fact that power need not be used for evil.
Power is a tool that can create enormous good or enormous suffering depending on who wields it.
All the communists achieved was to move power from the wealthy to the party. If the party is full of cruel people who carried out a massacre of unarmed civilians, then the outcome is systemic cruelty.
It's great to hear people's firsthand experiences in absurd systems and the negatvie incentives they create.
This is my favorite sentence: "We have to accept human nature for the solutions to be correctly aimed." Perhaps the core problem I have with many of my fellow liberals (perhaps including myself) is that they are naive about human nature.
One of the key insights from my Catholic upbringing that's stuck with me long after I left the faith is the truth of original sin (or whatever else a person calls it). We are all capable of being awful when we see a reason to do so.
You and Radha are right that we're not blank slates, and it IS a non-scientific on the left that still stubbornly clings. I just finished, this morning, a book on evil which is a bit outdated (published 1997) but still highly insightful and notes even then that the blank slate doesn't fly. The left just doesn't want to believe that evil is learned. The author of the book speculates that sadism an acquired taste that many of us could adopt under the right circumstances, esp societal, revolutionary, idealist, etc. The book examines the perps' perspectives rather than the victims, noting that all others focus only on the victims' POVs, and you can't understand evil without looking at both sides.
We have to fight the pernicious and supremely racist idea that you can tell who the 'oppressed' and 'oppressed' are merely by the colour of their skin. The ultimate privilege is class/economic and race, while still important, isn't as critical as it used to be.
And this is why you and I are usually on the same page; I appreciate that you also think about human nature when you reach your conclusions. I think people to our left are obsessed with the idea that humans are blank slates, especially women. The idea that we are socialized into bad behavior gives people comfort and an excuse to not change, and therein lies my issue. People should want to be better. We are all indeed capable of being terrible people. We all have some narcissism in us.
For my sins I am a social worker, working class , male and of white European ethnicity. For the last 25+ years I have been in work places where there are 10 female workers to 1 male (at least).
As you can imagine, the SJW/radical feminist environment has been inescapable.
I have been subjected to almost every kind of discrimination and harassment you can think of. Still am. Have I raised the issues? Yes. The reaction? Mostly laughter.
Thank you Radha 🙏 I think being working class has been one of the hardest challenges. As a profession we mostly work with people from my demographic. But I often feel surrounded by upper middle class people who have read about the working class in a text book before coming to the most discriminatory and condescending (down right insulting) conclusions.
Friday last week was almost the last straw. Two ‘seniors’ took it upon themselves to educate me on the existence of a certain social economic group, and the associated behaviours of people from that group.
They then (with straight faces) described people from a deprived area, with the poor outcomes expected of ‘these’ people, forced to live in areas characterised by drugs/unemployment/ crime etc.
I looked at them both and said “yes, I’m well aware. I’m one of them”. They simply turned to their desks and carried on with what they were doing……….
A poor person is a poor person is a poor person, to misquote Gertrude Stein. Even MLK recognized that; fix the poor, and you fix a lot of the racial problems in the country.
I just read the same. Hughes has been called a republican in my circles. I can see why they think that, but they call him tainted because right wing think tanks support him. It's bs.
Absolutely. He was on The View and they launched into him about being “co-opted” by the right. I’ve never seen anyone stay so calm against such provocation. Very impressive.
I'm saddened but unsurprised to read this. I imagine the fact that you are working class doesn't work in your favor. This is why all the concepts we wrote about need to be replaced with the goal of reducing elitism in white collar workplaces. Imagine if we made a concerted effort to hire people from public universities or who came from working class backgrounds. We'd have a different type of workforce. I'm just angry to hear about your experience.
A huge round of virtual applause for you and Grow Some Labia! You knocked it out of the park again! DEI most certainly oversimplifies workplace or societal power dynamics by reducing it to being about identity rather than power and class. The examples you gave from your own lived experiences were quite illuminating and eye-opening, Radha! Whether it be Cindy the white liberal mistreating Shelly the white conservative because she criticized her for her unclear and unreasonable expectations on employees and daring to have a family and children or your Indian-American boss who exploited Indian workers here in the country on H1B visas. Not to mention your black female boss the head of the DEI department telling a white employee who complained about you blaming "whiteness" for empty meeting rooms. The DEI czar told them that blatantly racist statement was okay because you had been the victim of "accumulated micro-aggressions", so it was okay and waved off. When people of color do it, racism is okay. When white people do it, it's not okay. That's woke logic for you! I LOVE the overall point you're making here! It's not about race or color or any other identity marker, it's about abuse of power. Anyone from any identity group can abuse their power and anyone from any identity group can be on the receiving end of that. People of color can do it to white people, white people can do it to other white people and people of color can do it to other people of color. Allow me to use some examples from history. The Native Americans enslaved members of other tribes, white settlers and African-Americans. Women from other tribes and white women were taken as sex slaves. The caste system in India which has existed since ancient times and still exists today is another great example. How about the Armenian Genocide during World War I and the Greek Genocide of 1919-23 or the expulsion of the Greeks of Anatolia of 1915 by the Ottoman Empire? How about the Moors' conquest of Hispania (modern-day Spain) in 711? Oh, by the way, the Moors imported white Christian slaves from the 8th Century until the Reconquista in the late 15th Century. By 1780, it was estimated the number of white slaves in Moorish servitude reached 1.2 million. In a poll taken in Detroit in 1951, 20% of native white Northerners said they would not want poor white Southerners as a neighbor as compared to 16% who said the same about African-Americans. How about Serfdom in Russia which lasted from the 12th Century until Tsar Alexander II finally emancipated the serfs in 1861? How about the English conquest of Ireland from the 12th Century to the 16th Century? How about all the Irish slaves and indentured servants brought to colonial America by the English? Not to mention the indentured servants from England itself, Scotland, Wales, and Germany as well as Frenchman who were accidentally kidnapped and homeless and vagrant orphaned boys and girls from England who were kidnapped off the street by the police and bounty hunters, chained neck to neck and shipped to the Virginia colony and forced to work as servants in the homes of well-off and wealthy English colonists. Lastly, I'd use the example of the war crimes the Egyptians committed against the people of Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-70. Egyptian pilots indiscriminately bombed Biafran civilians including schools, hospitals and private homes. I can't wait to hear what your ladies' solutions to these pressing issues in the workplace will be! Thank you for this most important, timely and insightful article!
I'm hoping Radha will write about the role of the Indian caste system in discrimination at Indian-predominant companies. She had written about it in an earlier draft but we agreed it needed its own article, that it was too much for this one.
Are you a history teacher? I always get a history lesson when you comment (not complaining!!! :) ) Got any good recommendations for books on the African slave trade both before and after the Europeans? And esp how much the Euros relied on the slave traders to round up other blacks and sell them? Was glancing at what Wikipedia had to say about it this morning and I was surprised there was anything about it at all, it's so damn wokenized. But I'd like to read a good book about it...yanno, the shit they DON'T teach in Critical Race Theory???
Thank you much Grow Some Labia! I am a history major and amateur historian. Here are some book recommendations on African, non-Western slavery and white slavery:
-Where the Negroes Are Masters by Randy J. Sparks
-White Cargo by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh
-Proclamation 1625 by Herbert L. Byrd
-To Hell or Barbados by Sean O'Callaghan
-Slavery in Africa by Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff
-Slavery and Slaving in African History by Sean Stilwell
-Slavery in Indian Country by Christina Synder
-Black Slaves, Indian Masters by Barbara Krauthamer
-White Gold by Giles Milton
-Chrisitan Slaves, Muslim Masters by Robert C. Davis
I can add "Bound Over" which is about the Indentured Servitude in (almost pre-) Colonial America. "Mere" servant, right? Except if they could either work you to death a day before your 7 OR could treat you badly enough you'd run away they'd get more years.
As I recall, that's what predated black slavery in the colonies - indentured servants taken primarily from poor countries like Ireland and Scotland - and they dropped dead from malaria within a year or two. According to '1493', the comprehensive book on, well, a lot of history, the Colonies began importing African slaves because they'd built up a tolerance to malaria and weren't as badly affected by it.
Don’t know how that worked. Not criticizing you though. The woke bureaucracy was formed very rapidly by narrow-minded zealots. Still, if I can suggest some reading am happy to.
"DEI frameworks oversimplify workplace power dynamics by creating false binaries between oppressor and oppressed groups, leading to moral licensing that can enable discriminatory behavior from any identity group."
Maybe we should start talking about the intersectionality of *power*, rather than of 'marginalization'. I suspect this will lead to far more productive paths for the future of DEI (if it even has one).
You illuminated one giant mother of a problem with DEI: The ridiculously flawed oppressed/oppressor binary (for anyone!) but esp coupled with the racial binary of white/black (we do know not everyone in North America is black or white, right?)
I hadn't known about the intra-discrimination in Indian groups, organizations, departments, etc., and esp not HI-B exploitation. You should email Vinay Ramaswamy and Sriran Krishnan about this. Like it or not, Indians are exceptionally talented entrepreneurs and unicorn-birthers and have demonstrated it with their numbers in Silicon Valley. Yet they possess human brains like the rest of us and they're just as flawed, in exactly the same ways.
(I'm serious about emailing them.)
Also, you made a great point about female-on-female discrimination and tied in politics as well. We shouldn't conclude that *all* liberal women and *all* conservative women are like these two examples (which you didn't do) but it does sort of feed the anecdotal 'lived experiences' of many of us, post-election, noting that conservatives sometimes treat liberals better than vice versa. Goddess knows I've never been defriended on Facebook by a conservative friend, but I have from several so-called 'liberal' friends. (Read: Regressive Left, or 'woke' as they're more commonly known)
Thanks for, I hope, opening up a new conversation about the INTERSECTIONALITY OF POWER.
Ha! I hadn't considered that but perhaps I will. The example of the conservative manager perhaps is the most impactful here. I never saw conservatives the same way again.
If you had adopted techniques from cross-cultural management ( there is a whole bibliography out there) you would have avoided all these beginners’ mistakes. Instead you adopted theory from a field totally divorced from management theory. How should Foucault and Crenshaw teach you to manage? Their purpose is to divide and foster conflict.
She was taught what she was taught. Today, with 20/20 hindsight, we see how flawed the framework is, but sixty years ago, when Foucault spread his ideas, and 35-ish years ago, when Crenshaw spread hers, it wasn't as obvious.
Just as, right now, it's not terribly obvious to Dem progs why they lost the election so badly. We can be very blind to our own flaws while clearly seeing them in others.
"I began to wonder if I had misunderstood conservatives because Shelly treated me better than any woman had professionally up until that point." This sentence stands out to me in this fascinating and enlightening piece. If we are to discard the failures of DEI and undo its indoctrination of complex social animals (us) into absurdly rigid categories, it will happen by rediscovering each other as individuals. Thank you so much for your example of humility and grace.
Thank you so much for this; I try to write about myself unsparingly to illustrate the limits of this kind of thinking and why it’s so messed up. I have strived to do exactly what you say and I’m happier for it.
According to current DEI discourse, once the accusation of bias is made, the burden of proof falls on the accused to prove that they aren't racist, sexist, filled with hate towards persons who personally identify as three-headed lesbians, etc..
Since there is no easy way to prove a negative, the accused can never win, and even if they do "win", all they get is their name sort of cleared.
This gives grievance groups extraordinary power.
The career of Jeremy Corbyn is most instructive here, even though the accusations were ridiculous on their face.
Not always true, as Radha expressed in the story of how white women complaining about *her* was dismissed by the black DEI manager, with whom she was friends.
I had an interesting pre-DEI experience years ago in a large company that today we know as Ceridian. I worked with a working-class black woman around my age (twenties) and she was friendly with the black manager of her department (not mine). I began getting crap from her, I forget why...I remember I upset her once with a joke I'd made on a birthday card with her that fell flat; I apologized to her but she didn't accept it. I no longer remember what she did in response but I remember I wound up in her boss's office when Teri wasn't around (which she often wasn't, and her manager let her get away with this because they were friends), nervous as hell but wanting to stand up for myself. I complained about the way Teri was treating me and added some additional unprofessional behavior from her in general (including some really disgusting phone conversations I heard because I sat in front of her) and stated I knew why Teri had a chip on her shoulder (unwed mother, and yeah, she got 'microaggressions' from others about that little stereotype) and that I'd apologized for my now-ancient comment and just wanted to be left alone. To put it further in context, i noted that I had taken a lot of crap from black bullies in school so she's not the only one who's ever dealt with racism and that I was done taking shit from black girls. The manager was kind and understanding and I saw Teri in her office later being talked to and whatever bad behaviour she was doing against me stopped.
That was an excellent manager who handled a difficult racial situation--not a traditional one either--with grace and sensitivity.
When the layoffs began about a year later, Teri was the FIRST to go...for many reasons, none of which had to do with me.
True but men are in power and have been for centuries here and around the world. And look at the state of the Planet and the potential of human and animal extinction because of the deficiency of Spiritual lack in many male “leaders” lost in the delusions of ego , power, wars and money worship.
I loved reading about the intersectional games playing out in your different roles and appreciate the evolution of your thinking as you came to realise that the DEI game has made things worse. Like so many risk mitigating initiatives, the hyperfocus on what's going wrong rather than what's going well for everybody, and capitalising on those for broader improvement was the wrong tactic. The assumption that everyone is so racially biased that it's the root cause of workplace inequality made things worse (except for the beneficiaries of the race grift).
I once photographed an event for women in tech. It was a panel of leaders in tech at various large enterprise tech companies with an engaging group of women who listened to presentations followed by a Q&A.
As a fly on the wall in this event, listening to the interaction between women, and also questions asked to the all female panel, it became clear that the the number two issue behind general sexism in tech companies was...ageism.
There were fully qualified women on staff that had all the shiz of their younger counterparts, but were denied growth opportunities by the directors/mgmt due to being 'older in tech'. I now see this for men and women in industry of all shapes/sizes.
The fascinating part of responses of how to overcome this by panel members was essentially to take care of yourself, workout, do things to look younger (hair dye, makeup, clothing styles, etc.).
I guess merit will only take you so far? I'd love to hear your take on the 'ageism' issue in another article. Thanks for your enlightening essays thus far.
Radha and I actually talked about ageism during our initial Zoom call about these DEI articles and I was going to handle it but it was too much to tackle M/F relations AND ageism in one post (just as she had to cut the eminently relevant caste discrimination discussion in hers). We'll put it on our 2-do list!
Highly recommend reading all three parts of this to further your work on this. Holly is a disabled female who has gone into some of the insanity.
https://open.substack.com/pub/hollymathnerd/p/part-3-our-collective-order-keeping?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=b7l5e
I follow her! And I was actually inspired to write about my experience as a woman in stem as well because of her. Thanks for sharing and reading.
I think that the important point isn't that DEI has limits, is that it is fatally flawed for two reasons.
One - It admits that it derives from the fake scholarship of Critical Theory that manifests as woke, and practitioners admit that everything they believe in is about power. And because it is a rock-paper-scissors game of group identity grievance and power shuffling, everyone, including members of woke-sanctioned victim groups, can, and likely will, be harmed by its practice.
Two - Because it replaces merit with non-meritorious criteria for hiring and promotion, the net effect is lower productive capability of the organization. The net impact of that is lower job satisfaction for all employees, and more organizational failure in competition with those organizations that stick with meritorious hiring and promotion practices.
The irony lost on so many here is that these fatal flaws as the same with all collectivist revolutionary attempts and/or systems.
We almost wrote that it should belong in the dustbin of history but tried to strike a bargain. That said, I fully agree. I haven’t seen it lead to meritorious workplaces, and women who aren’t competent are the primary beneficiaries anyway.
My husband is a software engineer who once worked for a major computer corporation in the Austin area which embraced DEI principles. He was the only Caucasian on his team. His manager and most of his teammates were Indian, the other two Chinese. My husband experienced discrimination on his team based on his race. His manager once told him publicly in a meeting that he was NOT diverse. My response upon hearing that assertion was that his presence on the team MADE it diverse! This male manager was eventually promoted and replaced by an Indian woman on the team who treated my husband equitably. The company's DEI initiatives promoted discrimination and division in its practices rather than eliminate them.
That DEI was flawed ought to have been obvious from the very beginning.
It is all predicated on top of a massive representativeness fallacy.
For reference to those who are unfamiliar, a representativeness fallacy is the flawed belief that every member of a group must represent the qualities of the whole group.
An example being the belief that a woman can't be physically strong, because the average woman isn't.
The reverse example is that due to how pervasive the fallacy is, people assume that the leader chosen for a group must represent the average of that group. And so if the leader commits a crime, then the whole group must be criminals.
It is really so inanely stupid.
DEI commits the same logical fallacy that underpins the racism, sexism and unfair discrimination it's proponents allegedly want to end. Quite simply, it is actually perpetuating unreasonable discrimination itself.
Just because a group of powerful White and Jewish men control nearly everything in the world doesn't mean that ordinary white people have an invisible privilege derived therein.
It should be obvious that if those vested interests did not want DEI to happen, if they truly believed in protecting their imaginary racial group, they would vilify it and tear it down, not fund it, teach it to children and spread it everywhere on the media.
Moreover, it is obvious how predatory and conspiratorial the theory is if one replaces "White privilege" with "Jewish privilege". With a simple word change, the vitriol becomes clear. It's just the same bullshit from WW2 with a new target.
Furthermore, one of the major contributors to this theory, Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School, was a propagandist for the CIA/OSS during said WW2.
He studied both communist and nazi ideology and spent much of his career developing counter ideologies for nazism.
He authored "Repressive Tolerance", the idea that the left shouldn't tolerate anything from the right because the right are intolerant.
In other words, "until the right are destroyed everywhere, we won't have true freedom".
Compare with the idea that, "until capitalism is destroyed everywhere, we won't have true communism".
He proposed that outcasts, minority groups and misfits should band together to oppose the hegemony. Which is idiotic because as soon as they succeed, they become a new hegemon which others must then oppose by creating ever more extreme movements. In other words, continuous revolution and racial conflict.
Ultimately, the philosophy is neo-marxism.
Instead of class conflict, where poor people rise up to defeat rich people, it proposes ideological conflict where minority groups rise up to oppose and defeat the majority through ideological subversion.
It is a completely pointless distraction from the real issues in our world.
Just as the majority of Jews had nothing to do with the cruelty of powerful Jewish elites and bankers in WW2, yet suffered all the atrocities at the hands of an angry misguided public.
Similarly, the majority of white people are innocent bystanders who have nothing to do with the violence and depravity being conducted on a global scale by white elites and bankers.
Blaming and vilifying based on appearance helps those with the most power by shifting the responsibility for their actions onto an entire group.
While simultaneously discrediting the grievances of their victims which are perceived as madness by the falsely abused innocent who must then turn to the powerful for protection.
If we ask why would the elites fund and promote an ideology that paints them as the villains, remember that the zionists were one of the biggest contributors to antisemitism in Germany, because it suited their agenda of forcing citizens to move to Israel.
Also note that original Marxism blames all of societies ills on the rich capitalists, which is misguided in exactly the same way.
It neglects to recognise the fact that power need not be used for evil.
Power is a tool that can create enormous good or enormous suffering depending on who wields it.
All the communists achieved was to move power from the wealthy to the party. If the party is full of cruel people who carried out a massacre of unarmed civilians, then the outcome is systemic cruelty.
It's great to hear people's firsthand experiences in absurd systems and the negatvie incentives they create.
This is my favorite sentence: "We have to accept human nature for the solutions to be correctly aimed." Perhaps the core problem I have with many of my fellow liberals (perhaps including myself) is that they are naive about human nature.
One of the key insights from my Catholic upbringing that's stuck with me long after I left the faith is the truth of original sin (or whatever else a person calls it). We are all capable of being awful when we see a reason to do so.
You and Radha are right that we're not blank slates, and it IS a non-scientific on the left that still stubbornly clings. I just finished, this morning, a book on evil which is a bit outdated (published 1997) but still highly insightful and notes even then that the blank slate doesn't fly. The left just doesn't want to believe that evil is learned. The author of the book speculates that sadism an acquired taste that many of us could adopt under the right circumstances, esp societal, revolutionary, idealist, etc. The book examines the perps' perspectives rather than the victims, noting that all others focus only on the victims' POVs, and you can't understand evil without looking at both sides.
We have to fight the pernicious and supremely racist idea that you can tell who the 'oppressed' and 'oppressed' are merely by the colour of their skin. The ultimate privilege is class/economic and race, while still important, isn't as critical as it used to be.
And this is why you and I are usually on the same page; I appreciate that you also think about human nature when you reach your conclusions. I think people to our left are obsessed with the idea that humans are blank slates, especially women. The idea that we are socialized into bad behavior gives people comfort and an excuse to not change, and therein lies my issue. People should want to be better. We are all indeed capable of being terrible people. We all have some narcissism in us.
For my sins I am a social worker, working class , male and of white European ethnicity. For the last 25+ years I have been in work places where there are 10 female workers to 1 male (at least).
As you can imagine, the SJW/radical feminist environment has been inescapable.
I have been subjected to almost every kind of discrimination and harassment you can think of. Still am. Have I raised the issues? Yes. The reaction? Mostly laughter.
Thank you Radha 🙏 I think being working class has been one of the hardest challenges. As a profession we mostly work with people from my demographic. But I often feel surrounded by upper middle class people who have read about the working class in a text book before coming to the most discriminatory and condescending (down right insulting) conclusions.
Friday last week was almost the last straw. Two ‘seniors’ took it upon themselves to educate me on the existence of a certain social economic group, and the associated behaviours of people from that group.
They then (with straight faces) described people from a deprived area, with the poor outcomes expected of ‘these’ people, forced to live in areas characterised by drugs/unemployment/ crime etc.
I looked at them both and said “yes, I’m well aware. I’m one of them”. They simply turned to their desks and carried on with what they were doing……….
A poor person is a poor person is a poor person, to misquote Gertrude Stein. Even MLK recognized that; fix the poor, and you fix a lot of the racial problems in the country.
Was reading Coleman Hughes say the same this morning about MLK and AA/DEI, spot on!
I just read the same. Hughes has been called a republican in my circles. I can see why they think that, but they call him tainted because right wing think tanks support him. It's bs.
Absolutely. He was on The View and they launched into him about being “co-opted” by the right. I’ve never seen anyone stay so calm against such provocation. Very impressive.
His debate with Jamelle Bouie was epic, highly recommend.
I'm saddened but unsurprised to read this. I imagine the fact that you are working class doesn't work in your favor. This is why all the concepts we wrote about need to be replaced with the goal of reducing elitism in white collar workplaces. Imagine if we made a concerted effort to hire people from public universities or who came from working class backgrounds. We'd have a different type of workforce. I'm just angry to hear about your experience.
A huge round of virtual applause for you and Grow Some Labia! You knocked it out of the park again! DEI most certainly oversimplifies workplace or societal power dynamics by reducing it to being about identity rather than power and class. The examples you gave from your own lived experiences were quite illuminating and eye-opening, Radha! Whether it be Cindy the white liberal mistreating Shelly the white conservative because she criticized her for her unclear and unreasonable expectations on employees and daring to have a family and children or your Indian-American boss who exploited Indian workers here in the country on H1B visas. Not to mention your black female boss the head of the DEI department telling a white employee who complained about you blaming "whiteness" for empty meeting rooms. The DEI czar told them that blatantly racist statement was okay because you had been the victim of "accumulated micro-aggressions", so it was okay and waved off. When people of color do it, racism is okay. When white people do it, it's not okay. That's woke logic for you! I LOVE the overall point you're making here! It's not about race or color or any other identity marker, it's about abuse of power. Anyone from any identity group can abuse their power and anyone from any identity group can be on the receiving end of that. People of color can do it to white people, white people can do it to other white people and people of color can do it to other people of color. Allow me to use some examples from history. The Native Americans enslaved members of other tribes, white settlers and African-Americans. Women from other tribes and white women were taken as sex slaves. The caste system in India which has existed since ancient times and still exists today is another great example. How about the Armenian Genocide during World War I and the Greek Genocide of 1919-23 or the expulsion of the Greeks of Anatolia of 1915 by the Ottoman Empire? How about the Moors' conquest of Hispania (modern-day Spain) in 711? Oh, by the way, the Moors imported white Christian slaves from the 8th Century until the Reconquista in the late 15th Century. By 1780, it was estimated the number of white slaves in Moorish servitude reached 1.2 million. In a poll taken in Detroit in 1951, 20% of native white Northerners said they would not want poor white Southerners as a neighbor as compared to 16% who said the same about African-Americans. How about Serfdom in Russia which lasted from the 12th Century until Tsar Alexander II finally emancipated the serfs in 1861? How about the English conquest of Ireland from the 12th Century to the 16th Century? How about all the Irish slaves and indentured servants brought to colonial America by the English? Not to mention the indentured servants from England itself, Scotland, Wales, and Germany as well as Frenchman who were accidentally kidnapped and homeless and vagrant orphaned boys and girls from England who were kidnapped off the street by the police and bounty hunters, chained neck to neck and shipped to the Virginia colony and forced to work as servants in the homes of well-off and wealthy English colonists. Lastly, I'd use the example of the war crimes the Egyptians committed against the people of Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-70. Egyptian pilots indiscriminately bombed Biafran civilians including schools, hospitals and private homes. I can't wait to hear what your ladies' solutions to these pressing issues in the workplace will be! Thank you for this most important, timely and insightful article!
I'm hoping Radha will write about the role of the Indian caste system in discrimination at Indian-predominant companies. She had written about it in an earlier draft but we agreed it needed its own article, that it was too much for this one.
Are you a history teacher? I always get a history lesson when you comment (not complaining!!! :) ) Got any good recommendations for books on the African slave trade both before and after the Europeans? And esp how much the Euros relied on the slave traders to round up other blacks and sell them? Was glancing at what Wikipedia had to say about it this morning and I was surprised there was anything about it at all, it's so damn wokenized. But I'd like to read a good book about it...yanno, the shit they DON'T teach in Critical Race Theory???
Oh it's happening.
You can call it 'Casteaways'! :)
Thank you much Grow Some Labia! I am a history major and amateur historian. Here are some book recommendations on African, non-Western slavery and white slavery:
-Where the Negroes Are Masters by Randy J. Sparks
-White Cargo by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh
-Proclamation 1625 by Herbert L. Byrd
-To Hell or Barbados by Sean O'Callaghan
-Slavery in Africa by Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff
-Slavery and Slaving in African History by Sean Stilwell
-Slavery in Indian Country by Christina Synder
-Black Slaves, Indian Masters by Barbara Krauthamer
-White Gold by Giles Milton
-Chrisitan Slaves, Muslim Masters by Robert C. Davis
Duly noted and screenshotted! Thank you, Noah.
I can add "Bound Over" which is about the Indentured Servitude in (almost pre-) Colonial America. "Mere" servant, right? Except if they could either work you to death a day before your 7 OR could treat you badly enough you'd run away they'd get more years.
As I recall, that's what predated black slavery in the colonies - indentured servants taken primarily from poor countries like Ireland and Scotland - and they dropped dead from malaria within a year or two. According to '1493', the comprehensive book on, well, a lot of history, the Colonies began importing African slaves because they'd built up a tolerance to malaria and weren't as badly affected by it.
Don’t know how that worked. Not criticizing you though. The woke bureaucracy was formed very rapidly by narrow-minded zealots. Still, if I can suggest some reading am happy to.
Sure glad to get recs
"DEI frameworks oversimplify workplace power dynamics by creating false binaries between oppressor and oppressed groups, leading to moral licensing that can enable discriminatory behavior from any identity group."
Maybe we should start talking about the intersectionality of *power*, rather than of 'marginalization'. I suspect this will lead to far more productive paths for the future of DEI (if it even has one).
You illuminated one giant mother of a problem with DEI: The ridiculously flawed oppressed/oppressor binary (for anyone!) but esp coupled with the racial binary of white/black (we do know not everyone in North America is black or white, right?)
I hadn't known about the intra-discrimination in Indian groups, organizations, departments, etc., and esp not HI-B exploitation. You should email Vinay Ramaswamy and Sriran Krishnan about this. Like it or not, Indians are exceptionally talented entrepreneurs and unicorn-birthers and have demonstrated it with their numbers in Silicon Valley. Yet they possess human brains like the rest of us and they're just as flawed, in exactly the same ways.
(I'm serious about emailing them.)
Also, you made a great point about female-on-female discrimination and tied in politics as well. We shouldn't conclude that *all* liberal women and *all* conservative women are like these two examples (which you didn't do) but it does sort of feed the anecdotal 'lived experiences' of many of us, post-election, noting that conservatives sometimes treat liberals better than vice versa. Goddess knows I've never been defriended on Facebook by a conservative friend, but I have from several so-called 'liberal' friends. (Read: Regressive Left, or 'woke' as they're more commonly known)
Thanks for, I hope, opening up a new conversation about the INTERSECTIONALITY OF POWER.
Ha! I hadn't considered that but perhaps I will. The example of the conservative manager perhaps is the most impactful here. I never saw conservatives the same way again.
If they respond, you might get an article out of it!!! Or invited to speak on Fox News :)
If you had adopted techniques from cross-cultural management ( there is a whole bibliography out there) you would have avoided all these beginners’ mistakes. Instead you adopted theory from a field totally divorced from management theory. How should Foucault and Crenshaw teach you to manage? Their purpose is to divide and foster conflict.
She was taught what she was taught. Today, with 20/20 hindsight, we see how flawed the framework is, but sixty years ago, when Foucault spread his ideas, and 35-ish years ago, when Crenshaw spread hers, it wasn't as obvious.
Just as, right now, it's not terribly obvious to Dem progs why they lost the election so badly. We can be very blind to our own flaws while clearly seeing them in others.
Are you referring to me personally or the general 'you'? I didn't adopt it, it's embedded in the system I was in. But I agree.
"I began to wonder if I had misunderstood conservatives because Shelly treated me better than any woman had professionally up until that point." This sentence stands out to me in this fascinating and enlightening piece. If we are to discard the failures of DEI and undo its indoctrination of complex social animals (us) into absurdly rigid categories, it will happen by rediscovering each other as individuals. Thank you so much for your example of humility and grace.
Thank you so much for this; I try to write about myself unsparingly to illustrate the limits of this kind of thinking and why it’s so messed up. I have strived to do exactly what you say and I’m happier for it.
The Bible's insistence that everyone sins seems a much more accurate hypothesis than the formalized tribalism of DEI.
...Although it sure excused a lot more sins committed by the Israelites than it did it's neighbours :)
For a more balanced view of the Israelites in the OT, I suggest Robert Wright's The Evolution of God, which is stellar!!!
A great point. And we learn these lessons in texts from most philosophical traditions. For me, Hindu texts.
According to current DEI discourse, once the accusation of bias is made, the burden of proof falls on the accused to prove that they aren't racist, sexist, filled with hate towards persons who personally identify as three-headed lesbians, etc..
Since there is no easy way to prove a negative, the accused can never win, and even if they do "win", all they get is their name sort of cleared.
This gives grievance groups extraordinary power.
The career of Jeremy Corbyn is most instructive here, even though the accusations were ridiculous on their face.
Not always true, as Radha expressed in the story of how white women complaining about *her* was dismissed by the black DEI manager, with whom she was friends.
I had an interesting pre-DEI experience years ago in a large company that today we know as Ceridian. I worked with a working-class black woman around my age (twenties) and she was friendly with the black manager of her department (not mine). I began getting crap from her, I forget why...I remember I upset her once with a joke I'd made on a birthday card with her that fell flat; I apologized to her but she didn't accept it. I no longer remember what she did in response but I remember I wound up in her boss's office when Teri wasn't around (which she often wasn't, and her manager let her get away with this because they were friends), nervous as hell but wanting to stand up for myself. I complained about the way Teri was treating me and added some additional unprofessional behavior from her in general (including some really disgusting phone conversations I heard because I sat in front of her) and stated I knew why Teri had a chip on her shoulder (unwed mother, and yeah, she got 'microaggressions' from others about that little stereotype) and that I'd apologized for my now-ancient comment and just wanted to be left alone. To put it further in context, i noted that I had taken a lot of crap from black bullies in school so she's not the only one who's ever dealt with racism and that I was done taking shit from black girls. The manager was kind and understanding and I saw Teri in her office later being talked to and whatever bad behaviour she was doing against me stopped.
That was an excellent manager who handled a difficult racial situation--not a traditional one either--with grace and sensitivity.
When the layoffs began about a year later, Teri was the FIRST to go...for many reasons, none of which had to do with me.
And as we see from how I abused my own power, even the best intentioned people can deceive themselves.