RUTHFULLY YOURS

So, is it RIP DEI? The boss class’s favourite ideology certainly seems to be in trouble. Big business everywhere is rethinking its devotion to ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’. As part of his coming out as a pretty standard tech bro who bristles at woke and loves Joe Rogan, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has said DEI might be for the chopping block. He even instructed his minions to take the tampons out of the men’s bathrooms at Meta HQ. Expecting people who menstruate to use the ladies’ loo? Guys, this is big.

The legacy media is noisily lamenting Zuck’s bonfire of the diversity initiatives. Meta is ‘eliminating’ DEI, weeps CNN. It quotes an internal Meta memo that basically says it’s game over for ‘equity and inclusion’. To these people, Zuckerberg is an apostate. To renounce the religion of DEI, the divisive ideology that holds such fierce sway on college campuses and in HR departments, is to make oneself an enemy of the new elite. I reckon we’re days away from a Vox piece calling Zuckerberg a fascist.

And the Rogan-pilled Facebook founder is not alone. Other corporations are likewise beating a retreat from DEI. Capitalist giants including McDonald’s, Walmart, Ford and Amazon have ‘pulled the plug’ on DEI, says a clearly emotional CBS. Cue meltdown among the woke. These once right-on capitalists are capitulating to MAGA, we’re told. They’re initiating a ‘rightward shift’ ahead of the inauguration of Donald Trump. We’re witnessing a ‘conservative backlash’ against diversity, cries business bible Forbes, and the repercussions could be dire.

Of course the cultural class will mourn the flailing regime of DEI. After all, they were its architects and enforcers. Both their social sway and personal wealth were boosted by this insidious ideology that empowered them to re-educate the great unwashed in the finer details of racial correct-think. But you know who won’t mourn it? The working class. For them, this poisonous dogma was never anything more than a patrician system of moral instruction that diminished their workplace clout and divided them from their fellow workers.

DEI is always presented as a nice, fair thing. It’s about ‘embracing the differences’ that ‘everyone brings to the table’, said CNN last year. It’s about making workplaces welcoming to all, regardless of their ‘race, age, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation [or] physical ability’. These knackered platitudes mask the grim truth about DEI, which is that it is divisive rather than unifying, and spectacularly intolerant of difference – especially political difference – rather than ‘welcoming to all’.

We should never forget how demeaning DEI was for working people. Remember when Coca-Cola instructed its employees to ‘be less white’? As part of a DEI training session, Coke’s underlings were told to be ‘less ignorant’ and ‘less oppressive’. Those are ‘white’ traits, said the re-educators, and you honkies must rid yourselves of them. Not content with exploiting its workers’ labour, Coca-Cola was emboldened by DEI to interrogate their moral constitutions, too. And it found them wanting. It judged them to be fallen beings in dire need of enlightenment by the priests of DEI.

Then there was Walmart. Its HR overlords instructed shopfloor employees that they were guilty of ‘internalised racial superiority’. They called on the lowly workers to cleanse themselves of their ‘white supremacy thinking’. You can call that ‘progressive’ if you like. But to me, the sight of well-paid graduates in critical race theory compelling minimum-wage workers to undergo such humiliating rituals, to confess to their supposed inner bigotries, is nothing short of dystopian.

Such gross practices were commonplace in companies, colleges and public bodies that embraced DEI. A corrections officer in the US prison system recalls being instructed on the folly of ‘white exceptionalism’, which left him and his colleagues with a pretty clear message: ‘All white people are racist.’ Armies of corporations initiated mandatory training on ‘white privilege’. Britain’s NHS became infected, too. One NHS trust pressured staff to ‘admit they have white privilege’. This isn’t ‘inclusion’ – it’s compulsion. Workers across the Anglo-American world were being compelled by their bosses to acknowledge their racial ‘privilege’ and promise to atone for it.

To see how widespread DEI is, get this: in the US, around $8 billion a year is spent on such meddling, patronising guff. Firms have been spending billions, as one writer says, on telling American workers that they are either ‘victims or oppressors’ and that their beloved homeland is riddled ‘with white supremacy’. This veritable industry of moral instruction reached its nadir with ‘unconscious-bias training’. This is when DEI trainers seek to ‘raise awareness’ among us riff-raff about the ‘snap judgements’ we supposedly make about people on the basis of their race or gender. The old priests wanted to save our souls, the new ones want to wash our brains.

The amount of power DEI gave to HR departments – the enforcers of the boss’s writ – was extraordinary. It was no longer enough to give our employers our physical and mental labour – we had to grant them access to our hearts and minds, too. We had to let them peruse the inner sanctum of our grey matter in search of hidden hatreds. DEI demanded the sacrifice of the entire self to the imperative of capital. Hence, the favoured slogan of this new priestly class that turned the workplace into a site of moral instruction – ‘Bring your whole self to work’. The old capitalists wanted your muscle for 12 hours a day – the new ones want your soul forever.

DEI is the old practice of divide and rule with a woke twist. Via the toxic belief system of ‘intersectionality’, which holds that ‘privileged’, ‘cishet’ men and women will never understand ‘oppressed’ groups like African Americans, Muslims and trans folk, DEI ensured there could never be a coming together around shared class interests. After all, why would black workers align with white workers if all white workers suffer from ‘internalised racism’ and ‘oppressive’ tendencies? DEI essentially hung a sign, Maoist style, around the necks of certain workers, marking them out as problematic. It was catastrophic for race relations – unconscious-bias training has been shown to increase racial animosity – and for workplace solidarity. But it was a boon for a fragile-feeling boss class that dreads pushback from the people it employs.

DEI is one of the greatest tricks capitalism has ever played on working people. In empowering the HR elites to lecture employees about their ‘privilege’ and ‘internalised supremacy’, it turned reality utterly on its head. The wage-earners were depicted as the ‘privileged’ ones, while the HR establishment was reimagined as the great defender of ‘the oppressed’. The worker became the despot, and his employer the radical. We ended up in the truly bizarre situation where female workers who stood up for their hard-won right to their own bathrooms and changing areas were rebranded by HR as ‘bigots’, and any white worker who claimed to have common cause with a black worker risked being told that he was arrogantly overlooking the other worker’s specific cultural experiences. Solidarity has long been frowned upon by certain bosses, but it is downright impossible under intersectionality.

So, will Zuck and the others save workers from the cruel diktats of DEI? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The DEI-abandoning elites are not doing this to help the working class but rather to burnish their own credentials among the cultural class as the West undergoes a pretty big ‘vibe shift’. And DEI hasn’t gone away – many workplaces still enforce this deathly creed. But even if it’s accidental, even if it’s just a byproduct of the elites reconsidering their priorities, the demise of DEI will benefit working people more than anyone else, and that’s good.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy