All you have to do is stop pretending it's definitive or emblematic of DEI.
Except it is, and I'll get there in a second.
Yes-- but if we use the same line of logic you're using for DEI ("X bad thing has sometimes been done in the name of Y, so therefore Y is bad"), where does that take us...?
Bad stuff has been done in the name of almost everything. That's the point.
DEI has been around for quite the while. Present-day DEI has its origins in the '90s -- precisely when corporations and universities started coming under fire for discriminatory admissions, hiring, labor/student relations, stagnant wages, and exponentially-increasing tuition costs. This also happened to be around the time college diversity in student body and graduation rates, employer diversity in labor pools and pay, and corporate social responsibility (the precursor to ESG) were being tracked and indexed by third parties, and the subsequent performance metrics were readily available online for all to see.
In other words, universities and corporations started employing it when there was profit motive to do so -- and not to improve diversity and treatment of diverse student and worker groups. They did it for PR -- to nominally improve outward-facing diversity and social responsibility scoring, and to launder their reputations, without having to do the more costly groundwork for actually
fixing anything. And, it fed an entire cottage industry of consultants and speakers (AKA, grifters) to supplement PR departments. Present-day DEI is a smokescreen, was designed to be a smokescreen, has never been anything but a smokescreen, and will never be anything but a smokescreen in the defense of late-stage capitalism.
Especially so long as people defend it on some hope it will yield positive returns in areas in which it was never intended to yield positive returns, someday, somehow...because the stated intent is "good". Just never mind how process and outcome differ, nor that those stating intent are inherently untrustworthy and conflicted in interest by merit of their positions. And
how dare you for questioning the trustworthiness and interest in the first place!
DEI this, DEI that. Where are women or BIPOC executives in positions without heavily-restricted policy influence or autonomy? Have universities started tackling the issue of legacy or pay-for-play admissions? How do we explain discrepancies in student debt burden between race and gender (imaginary wage gaps alone don't)? Speaking
of wage gaps -- at least, those that actually exist as opposed to the ones widely spoken about -- why do they persist, or at least have not improved in the last thirty years?
Present-day DEI has not only done shockingly little to alleviate that since its inception in the '90s, but in most areas -- student debt, pay, labor/student relations
after point of hire or admission -- it's
backslid. It hasn't, because it was never intended to; what it has done, is delude the public into thinking corporations and universities are more equitable than they were thirty years ago. Outcome was never the intent, propaganda was.
