DEI Panic in a World of White Nepotism
Hand wringing about DEI hiring is a racist distraction from a system that's far from meritocratic.
So the newly selected Democratic Party nominee for president is a black lady and also the term “DEI” is trending again. This is about as surprising as night following day, the tides coming in, or Tesla missing a deadline. Anyone who claims at this point that “DEI” isn’t a euphemism for “not a white dude” is being willfully dishonest.
And I’m a guy who likes to give people the benefit of the doubt, which gets me in trouble with less charitable readers who often disagree with my views on who is or is not Hitler (surprisingly few people are, I believe). But DEI—ostensibly diversity, equity, and inclusion (the new affirmative action)—is a lot like “Woke” in the sense that it was a real term that meant something specific to the people who coined it, but has since been hijacked and repurposed by people who don’t feel emboldened to say the words they really want to say.
When people are slinging “DEI” around in reference to elected officials, black people in fiction, or just folks you see walking down the street, you know one hundred percent that this is just a placeholder for the N-word now.
These euphemistic games are played regularly by the right-wing tech oligarchs who sit upstream of online culture. The old world arch-conservatives who run the grand old political parties and think tanks borrow from this culture in a transparent effort to keep relevant with the voting youth, but they always lag behind and it never fails to make me cringe when some septuagenarian Heritage Foundation goblin starts calling things woke or based.
One thing I do sincerely believe is that nobody wants to think their prejudices are anything less than rational, so in one sense I think maybe they kind of think they’re being, to some extent, honest? Some of them? Maybe? By the same token, though, racists also think that anyone who isn’t racist is themselves an irrational agent pretending to be rational. And because the True Factual Nature of race realist hierarchical malarkey is blinding then they often view the anti-racist position as dishonest or insidious.
They think we’re playing games, in short, and so in order to defeat us they must also Play The Game. No tactics are off the table including flagrant deceit.
The pushback against DEI from an employment perspective is rooted in the creepy neo-phrenology movement pushed by “race science” proponents like Steve Sailer, Richard Hanania, Christopher Rufo, and Jordan Peterson, and favoured by white Silicon Valley billionaires who think black people in tech is disrespectful to Steve Jobs’ ghost.
The argument goes that meritocracy demands a level playing field with no special considerations so that effort, skill, and talent alone dictate employment opportunities and outcomes. On the face of it that’s difficult to argue with, but when applied via what the race science hucksters believe, as many on the right do (and certainly the most influential of the Silicon Valley set), then “the best person for the job” is very rarely going to be a black person.
Ipso facto—in a true meritocracy, they think, you’re just never going to see any black people around, and the fact that you do is what’s responsible for most of the problems in America. This “DEI” cancer is weakening the foundational structure of society by forcing key jobs to be taken up by an inferior class of people.
One way that you can tell a premise is disingenuous bullshit is when the people promoting it are ridiculously inconsistent. It’s absurd on the face of it for people to pretend their concern is with roles always going to the best person for the job in an environment where the favoured method of handing out jobs is overwhelmingly nepotism.
The most recent surge in anti-DEI rage is, of course, targeted at Kamala Harris. In the desperate eleventh hour scramble for them to slap together an attack campaign that doesn’t rely on their opponent being the only person in DC older and less articulate than Doanld Trump, several Republicans have blasted the presumptive nominee of lacking the credentials to be president. The only thing she’s ever done in her life is be black, and that’s the only reason Joe Biden selected this random lady to be his running mate, and later, his successor. Before that she might as well have just—forgive me—fallen out of a coconut tree.
But Kamala Harris has a phenomenal track record in the fields of both law and politics. She’s been a district attorney. She’s been a state attorney general. She’s been a senator. Most of these people wouldn’t work as hard as she has if they lived three lifetimes. And you can try to argue that it’s DEI all the way down and she’s just been riding the magic black elevator since birth, but it cannot possibly be emphasised enough that the last job the man she’s running against held was twelve years as a game show host.
Trump’s celebrity as the iconic 80s yuppie blinked out along with the decade that fostered it. He was installed as head of the real estate empire his father built and rode the wave of inherited extravagance though several bankruptcies and failed ventures. The Trump Organization was a family business and not a particularly phenomenal one.
MAGA fans will say “So what? Kamala Harris doesn’t have a building with her name on the side of it!” But the flip side of that is… well… all Trump has is a building with his name on the side of it. He would have been practically destitute by 2016 if a reality TV producer hadn’t hand picked an affordable D list celebrity from yesteryear to play a businessman on a corporate themed game show.
The first thing Trump did when he took power was populate his administration with his family and friends. There’s not a human being alive who can credibly suggest that Ivanka Trump was qualified to be a Senior Advisor to the President. What could she possibly be advising him about? Fashion? If so then he clearly wasn’t taking her fucking advice. Donald Trump invented something called the “Office of Economic Initiatives and Entrepreneurship” for her to run. Nobody in history has ever done less for a paycheck, and I say that knowing full well that landlords exist.
Ironically, one of the selling points for Trump in the first place was that he was a departure from political dynasties. He came in right after two Bushs and was competing against a third Bush and another Clinton. Right now there’s another Kennedy pretending to run against him.
Trump’s running mate for his second shot at the White House is a guy named JD Vance, an utterly bonkers choice that only makes sense in the context of a game show host president. Vance has one year’s experience in politics as a junior senator and before that he was the author of one book and besides that was a “venture capitalist” which is the job title they made up to pretend that having a lot of money you don’t work for is a job.
Vance was practically installed in the running mate position by Peter Thiel and Elon Musk who bought the slot for him in exchange for a shit ton of money they donate to Trump’s campaign. Vance hates women almost as much as Trump, Thiel and Musk do, but that’s just a bonus—as a made man in the Silicon Valley Mafia he can do a lot of good for them as their puppet in the highest ranks of government.
Elon Musk, I believe, legitimately knows what hard work means, but wouldn’t have got his start without a hefty inheritance from Apartheid, which donated to him a whole bunch of money and an entire ideology. It’s unclear how much work he actually does now—he ostensibly runs six companies, which is 6 simultaneous full time jobs or approximately 216 hours per week, more hours than exist in the space/time continuum. He spends between 40-60% of that time reading and tweeting about black crime statistics, transgender hate articles, and entire episodes of Tucker Carlson doing back to back Andrew Tate interviews.
The vast bulk of Musk’s capital comes from Tesla, a substandard car company that runs in a perpetual bubble propped up by personality cult mythology. Although it’s his one public company and thus ostensibly beholden to shareholders and its board of directors, said board of directors is staffed almost entirely by close friends of Elon Musk, a fact that was a major factor in the Delaware Court of Chancery’s decision to strike down a comically large pay package that Musk demanded earlier this year. The board includes Kimbal Musk, Elon’s dumb as a bag of hammers brother, and James Murdoch. Neither of these people know anything about electric cars. Kimbal is a chef and Murdoch is a corporate plant.
James Murdoch you might know as one of the sons of Rupert Murdoch who for some reason has been permitted to own and wholly control a baffling percentage of the news media of Planet Earth, which is engaged in the eternal project to keep all of the other people I’ve just mentioned in their positions of power. James is also currently embroiled in a legal battle against several other nepo babies and his father for control over the nepotist corporation, a situation that the show Succession was both retroactively based on and also predicted somehow.
Let’s not even get into the fascinating world of conservative power movers with fake degrees, a subject too big for this article. Like Christopher Rufo the Harvard graduate who didn’t get a Harvard degree, or Jack Posobiec the University of Pennsylvania graduate who they’ve never heard of.
This complex interconnected web of installed politicians and corporatists and brothers and sons and informants and golf buddies and people opening entire government departments to give power jobs to whoever they’re having sex with is just an incomprehensibly vast knot that a thousand investigative journalists on a thousand typewriters couldn’t unravel, but the one thing reliably connecting everybody is that the majority of these people are white as the driven snow.
The phenomenon of undeserved jobs in high and influential places is demonstrably not a product of racial diversity. If you think it does, you might want to consider how much of that opinion you derived from some white guy who spends 70% of his work day tweeting.
"Heritage Americans"... wanting a country "back" that their ancestors stole from brown people, to kick out brown people that their ancestors kidnapped and enslaved, or otherwise exploited. 🙃
The idea of an elected official like a mayor being "DEI" is literal nonsense anyway. They don't have bosses or answer to HR. You get the job by winning the election and you lose the job by losing the next one.