Diversity Training? or Discrimination by Another Name: Definitions & D.E.I.
Nice Sounding Words, Toxic Outcomes - NSFW
I'm a fortunate enough individual that I can speak openly without fear of cancellation. This is not the case for many these days where asking questions or speaking out against obvious abuses in schools, workplaces and online can lead to painful attacks, investigations and losses of jobs.
I have chosen to be outspoken about deeply troubling things happening in our workplaces because I believe strongly that we are living in censorious times and without the ability to speak openly and truthfully in our lives, we are submitting to the worst authoritarian impulses of those in leadership and authority without question. My open speech comes at a cost.
In the last year I was physically mobbed along with two others by a reported three-hundred activists chanting death; and more recently by an online troll who pointed her 100,000 followers at me legitimizing more than 17,000 openly hateful attacks, calls for violence against me as well as numerous credible threats leading me to add layers of security to our lives in a home we've always felt safe in.
I've been following this issue for almost a decade and watching the warning signs of which now there are a profusion in our public squares, in our workplaces and in our current government.
I spent five weeks this spring travelling across Canada talking to people who I would classify as the cancelled and the concerned and there are obvious patterns visible everywhere in our society that suggest that something is deeply amiss. I spoke with teachers, professors, government workers, politicians, business owners and entrepreneurs. The most concerned people I talk to are parents of children who are being taught these ideas in schools and who have been realizing through zoom school, just what kind of questionable ideas are being given to children by some of their activist teachers.
In spite of an ascendant orthodoxy preaching and enforcing tolerance, we are actually seeing intolerance and even open abuse and calls for violence exploding in our society - leveled against people like me, who question it. It's happening because of, not in spite of, the moral codes being brought into our workplaces that are presented and branded as anti-racism and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) trainings.
Human Resource Consultants and firms are selling this into our workplaces, and entrenching it within our HR departments virtually everywhere and if we do not speak up now, my fear is that soon we will not be able to.
We can see the impact of these policies and belief systems as they have played out in our major universities. They are the canaries in the coal mines and there are many examples of DEI/Social Justice activists openly abusing professors, administrators, disrupting campuses with struggle sessions and in the case of Evergreen State College in Washington State (2017), vigilantism, intimidation, forceful confinement and rioting. The riots erupted after the Social Justice/DEI activists demanded that white students and faculty be excluded from the entire campus for the "Black Day of Inclusion.(Video)"
There are several core beliefs behind "Critical Theory" which underpins DEI/Social Justice and Anti-Racism training programs and over the coming weeks I will illustrate some of these presuppositions that trainers who preach DEI bring to the workplace.
The first of those beliefs is called "Intersectionality" which arose as an idea in the 90's in the academy to describe how racism and discrimination affect different cohorts within society which has led to a a conceptual and hierarchical matrix of oppression by which to evaluate a persons victimization and level of marginalization.
This idea came out of and fueled radical feminism into it's third (and most toxic, abusive wave so far). It helped to establish an idea of a hierarchy of oppression within the school of thought. For example, a white feminist woman is less oppressed by the patriarchal system than a black woman because a black woman has the additional characteristic of her racial oppression. A black, disabled, trans woman then has even more additional categories of oppression and therefore more legitimacy within this culture to demand "Inclusion."
This ideology led to the very public hijacking of the Toronto Pride Parade in 2016 when BLM activists and Intersectionality/Diversity extremists shut down the parade; blackmailing organizers with demands for immediate representation on the leadership board of Toronto Pride as well as a public apology and the granting of Special Status. The group went on to demand the removal of police from the event and apologies from the organizers for their Anti-Blackness. It's notable that boards like this are always looking for people and the only thing that kept these "Marginalized" Intersectionals from participating in organizing the parade was them doing the actual work. Pride as an event has always demonstrated itself as the most open and inclusive organization of any that I can think of.
I spoke this spring with a gay man from Winnipeg who had worked with the local Pride organization for years. In case anyone has not been on a board of directors for events like Pride, the work is often thankless and a few people do most of the heavy lifting. Over a period of months a few years ago, as the Winnipeg Pride event was taken over by the same ideological forces, he was subtly excluded from conversations and the discrimination escalated over time to where he was explicitly told to shut up and told that he didn't have the right to speak within the Pride organization because he was a Cis White Male. His objections to this categorization led to open hostility and abuse. All because his intersectional categories as a gay white man were not sufficient to afford him status as an organizer within the local Pride movement.
This bullying, intimidation and discrimination is justified in this school of thought because of Intersectional Oppression - since the combined factors of trans and minority racial status are more oppressive than simply being a gay man, anyone lower down on the oppression matrix is more privileged and is subject to being told to hand power over to the more oppressed categories of people in the name of Social Justice - which is another name for the philosophy behind DEI..
Why am I talking about organizations like Pride in a post about workplace DEI? Because it is the same sets of ideological beliefs that underpin these events and what is being brought into our workplaces under cover of the nice-sounding words: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: It is giving legitimacy to the same kinds of open racism and discrimination my friend experienced on the board of Winnipeg Pride.
We are seeing the same kinds of abuse tactics in more and more mainstream organizations like school boards, parents groups, municipal and government workplaces and corporations. Those abuse tactics result in summary dismissals, the destruction of careers and professional reputations, the corruption of cultures of trust, and we are seeing once strong organizations imploding under the weight of multiple investigations of speech codes, racism, unconscious bias, micro-aggressions and even under accusations of white supremacy.
Pride, by the way, is now widely panned by the incredible, committed and brave gays and lesbians who fought for Gays Rights and against abuses like the Toronto Bathhouse Raids and overt homophobia in the media and within institutions during the AIDS crisis of the 80s. Parallel institutions are forming to once again advocate for Gay and Lesbian rights because the DEI/Social Justice philosophy of intersectionality has completely co-opted the original mission of Pride, centering the "more oppressed" categories of Trans-Identities over the LGB communities.
The word Discriminate has several layers of definition. The first meaning is to focus on differences or to make distinctions between things. It means to divide and to separate. The second meaning, also applicable here, is to make value, character and social-status judgements against other people based on their differences and to act against them; mobilizing social, employment or organizational authority against someone based on their immutable characteristics - or lack of sufficient characteristics that plug into the oppression matrix.
The word "Diversity" in D.E.I. functionally results in discrimination against the people who are deemed by the color of their skins, their cis-heteronormative status, their biological sex and their ancestors. On the surface of course, that's not the intention, but DEI gives a certain type of person, an abusive and controlling personality, all the leverage they need to justify their abuse of others - in the name of virtue.
We can see the wake of corrosion and destruction caused by this toxic ideology when looking at our universities, where recent major news outlets (WaPo and NYT) report more than 60% of students on campus are afraid to speak openly and to ask questions within academic spaces out of fear of abuse over not meeting the politically correct definitions and standards of thought established by hyper-vigilant and punitive Diversity and Inclusion police.
Structurally, these PC Police, The Social Justice Authoritarians, behave in exactly the same way as Spanish and French Inquisitors.
This is what DEI is bringing to our institutions and workplaces.
Diversity Training? or Discrimination by Another Name: Definitions & D.E.I.
Spot on. This has been and continues to be terrifying to watch ... like watching the Khmer Rouge take root, or the Shining Path, or Nazi Germany. Our governments, our media, our universities are all behaving as if it is not just acceptable but admirable to cancel, harass, ostracize, silence, suppress, marginalize, and strip livelihoods from people for their immutable characteristics, failure to score enough recognized oppression points, and/or desire to exercise their rights to speak and think freely. Even physical attacks and intimidation are largely ignored, or even praised. I never expected to see such a wholescale, Orwellian degeneration of intellectual freedom in the U.S. in the 21st century.