Separately: we should be careful of carrying the right wing's water and adopting terms like "DEI" as negatives without thinking critically about it.
This is straight out of the Chris Rufo playbook; identify a well-intentioned but possibly flawed concept, create a caricature of it, and make that strawman the punching bag of every anti-inclusive political voice. Then, because it's a term liberals were already using, turn around and use it to attack existing institutions.
This is his explicit strategy for kneecapping "CRT" (formerly an academic subfield), "woke" (a social concept among American Blacks), and you can see it unfolding in real time against "DEI" (formerly the way HR departments tried to comply with the Civil Rights act, but now a catch-all negative term.)
Yes thanks, that's a good thing to keep in mind. I actually didn't intend it in a negative way when I used it, but probably more people perceive it that way than not so it's good to keep in mind. You're right, there are lots of opportunists and people with agendas going the opposite way that will absolutely try to get us to throw out the baby with the bathwater. It also doesn't help that we humans tend to be pendulum swingers (and also have a tendency to over-correct) which then leads to backlash and backtracking, and it's not hard to hijack those natural motions to get people to react emotionally.
Reading commentary from 18th century religious leaders for example after Franklin invented the lightning rod, is quite illuminating. It's far enough in the past that there aren't really (serious at least) people making the case that we are tampering with God's methods for punishing the wicked anymore, so there isn't a personal/emotional connectino to the arguments for most people. Seeing people of the day seize on parts of the science that were slightly wrong and using it to enflame the passions of people to wholly abandon the Lightning Rods (including some cases where people actually mobbed and tore them off of buildings) is very much in my mind.
This is straight out of the Chris Rufo playbook; identify a well-intentioned but possibly flawed concept, create a caricature of it, and make that strawman the punching bag of every anti-inclusive political voice. Then, because it's a term liberals were already using, turn around and use it to attack existing institutions.
This is his explicit strategy for kneecapping "CRT" (formerly an academic subfield), "woke" (a social concept among American Blacks), and you can see it unfolding in real time against "DEI" (formerly the way HR departments tried to comply with the Civil Rights act, but now a catch-all negative term.)