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this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
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It’s been said better by other people but the general understanding of the right’s use of “DEI” is as a convenient blanket slur.
It’s typically used against Black and Hispanic people the most, followed by trans people, but any/all women are convenient extra padding under the bus tires of their bigotry and insecurity.
Remember that their fascism is based in feelings of superiority in addition to fear. Use that against the cowardly bastards. They can’t stand to see someone “undeserving” do as well as or better than them, so they try to mow it down.
Fuck ‘em.
EDIT: It seems like Rose Ferreira is of Hispanic descent, hailing initially from the Dominican Republic then moved to NY and eventually secured an internship at NASA, and is now an astronomer and aerospace engineer. It seems like her NASA page got reinstated, maybe after backlash. She’s awesome. Hell yeah for the Streisand effect.
Oh absolutely. Anyone who rails against "DEI" is by definition a white supremacist.
Not necessarily. They might be a misogynist, a militant christian or some other form of bigot as well. That's the beauty of it, you can be "against DEI" as well as a woman or someone with more melanin than the "default" and you get to imagine they don't hate you, just all those other people.
Just because you're not white doesn't mean you can't be a white supremacist.
just like women can be enforcers of patriarchy, and the poor engines of capitalism
Case in point: Mark Robinson
See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Lee_Peterson
Wonder what ol' Dooky Chute is up to these days.
Also just fucking stupid ignorant assholes who know absolutely nothing other than the TV and their pastor and their radio tell them everyday that DEI is bad.
This is such a backwards take. "DEI" could always only end in misery, because it pulls people ahead of the line in a time when the working people are already having a hard time. "Is that person hired because of the colour of their skin or the sex of their body, or have they been hired because they're actually good?". It could only make a large part of the population feeling left behind because of their sex or race. What do you think that does to the social foundation of a nation?
Alas, I have no idea what a good alternative would be, but I always recognized "DEI" as a bad idea. I don't have to be a chef to be able to tell that this dish tastes like ass, even if I can't cook for shit myself.
That does not make me (or anyone else who thinks DEI is ass) a white supremacist "by definition".
At the end of the day, it's the ultrarich hoarding all the money that's the actual issue - an economy that's not fair to the citizens of the nation. The top 3 wealthiest persons in the USA have the same amount of money as the bottom 50%.
Careful now thats a nuanced opinion that doesn't stroke my victim complex or reductively imply anyone who disagrees with me on complex systemic social issues is a nazi supremacist.
Prepare to be downvoted and hit with five paragraph essay replies picking apart everything you just said. You racist, mysoginistic, hateful, privileged, homophobic, transphobic, double checks progressive slurs & insults 101 field guide uhh third Reich bringing supremacist scum.
Everyone seems to forget that DEI as a name for these programs started during the first Trump admin.
DEI has always been a ruse.
They "embraced" these concepts to get all of the existing programs to label themselves as such.
They let Biden "extend" these programs so that anything supporting non-white-males would group together under the same banner.
Now they are "extinguishing" the whole lot of them now that it's nice and easy and their targets have huddled together and identified themselves.
There was a complex network of programs doing these jobs before DEI existed. DEI was a ruse to centralize them so they could be extinguished.
They built the barrel, then used fascist rhetoric to get all the fish to group together in the barrel. Now they're shooting the fish in the barrel.
I'd love to believe it.
I can't find anything backing this up.
The has become a wall of text. Sorry.
1st half of this post is refuting "trump defined DEI". I would live to be proved wrong on this, but it seems like something that happened during trump and was defined by Biden.
2nd half is more positive.
1st half...
Mostly sourced from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity,_equity,_and_inclusion (
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity,_equity,_and_inclusionincase the commas fuck up formatting).I don't know when DEI actually became the official term. Probably during the Biden administration .
According to wiki, however, DEI has been around since the 60s, in principle.
Executive Orders that first mention "equity" along side diversity and inclusion seems to be https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13583 an Obama EO.
The best I can find relating to what you say is along the lines of this:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/diversity-equity-and-inclusion-programs
Basically, government bodies using their autonomy to enact DEI policies in response to #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, George Floyd, and lots of other public sentiment & unrest. However nothing official at the government level of "DEI".
Essentially, trump was asleep at the wheel with COVID and civil unrest, did fuck all (or encouraged civil unrest), and government bodies (which still had autonomy) enacted policies inline with the population.
So, what constitutes DEI?
What the right is defining it as? What it has been since the 60s? What Biden enacted? What the government bodies enacted during sleepy trump?
The 2nd half:
Being against DEI is like being against Antifa, or declaring Antifa a terrorist organisation. It's not really a thing.
DEI is the awareness that previous centuries of discrimination no longer applies.
DEI isn't a tangible thing. It's humanity.
It didn't happen during trump's first term. But it did progress.
It didn't happen during Bidens term. But it did progress.
That is humanity. Humanity progresses. Humanity is love, equality and freedom for all.
And a bit more ideologically....
Progress in the next 4 years is gonna be slow.
But everyone has worked on this before. It's a hiatus. It will come back, and will be easier and more streamlined than before. Loads of people are backing up data, so it can be (relatively) easily restored. None of this has to be worked out again, nothing shared on the internet can truly die, ideas can't be killed.
It's gonna be 4 years of shit.
Hopefully Americans learn, and don't vote in more conservatives.
...
...
Hopefully Americans get a chance to vote in another party.
Edit: typo, equality not equity
Thank you so much for your work on this.
My post that you are replying to is mostly a tongue-in-cheek commentary on how programs that have existed for decades self-labeled as something that the right was able to rally against, thereby making themselves a single large target instead of a decentralized force distributed across agencies.
I just know that I first started seeing "DEI" as a label pop up in the first Trump admin. Frankly, in 2018, it was called "Climate and Diversity" in my local environment. Shortly thereafter it got relabeled.
Yup! Remember how I said that before it was labeled there was a complex network of programs doing this job? DEI is more of a label than a program. I fully agree.
It's not well defined! It's a scare word. It's a label that we lined up behind that unintentionally made it easy for antiracist programs to be identified and targeted.
I can't agree more! The label of DEI just makes these programs easier to find. This us true both for people seeking assistance from these programs and for people seeking to dismantle them. Such identification is a double-edged sword, and that's what my depressed brain was trying to communicate.
I love you. Thank you for this message of hope. I'm sorry to qualify it by saying: just because data can be restored, doesn't mean that people or careers can be.
Nice.
With the tongue in cheek context, I understand your comment more: DEI (as an idea & movement) blossomed under trumps first term, because of the bullshit he caused and the reaction of the public.
The government had actual civil servants (as opposed to appointed oppressors or whatever), and reacted in a sensible way.
But yeh, the damage being done to people is unimaginable. People's entire careers are being deleted from public records because they are a woman in STEM, or because they are the wrong colour, or because they don't fit Christians opinion of normal. It's fucked up
I don't have to imagine it. Part of why I'm grumpy and bitching on the internet is that I've found myself unemployed with a deleted career and an almost-finished phd. I'm kind of at a loss for what to do or what comes next or how I'll pay rent in two weeks. I'm scared and I was victim blaming myself. Thanks for helping to contextualize my pain and pull me back to reality. I'm doing a lot better now after talking to people on lemmy than I was last night or even this morning.
You mentioned space science, right? I’m an engineer at an aerospace company, feel free to message me if you want to chat about the industry, I’d love to help if I can.
Yeh, venting on the internet helps. And it's always great when you actually connect with someone.
I always wish I'd learned a trade. Electrician, plumber or tiler. Get an apprenticeship, learn a trade, be a sole trader, do something physical that's always in demand.
Plenty out there to do, and it's ok to mourn your last job (being a student/doctorate is a job).
Connect with old friends and family. Meet some new people. Somebody will be looking for someone smart and compassionate
As I keep telling people, they keep saying "DEI" because even most Bible belt folks get uncomfortable when you drop the hard R they really want to say.
in australia and new zealand we have a concept called “tall poppy syndrome” (people who stand out from the crowd, who promote themselves excessively and publicly) and the reaction to that: “cutting down the tall poppy”. cutting down the tall poppy originally meant just bringing them back down to earth, but kinda morphed into simply criticising anyone that does well
we tend to have a relatively strong egalitarian streak, and perhaps that change was tearing people down rather than distributing their success to equalise
anyway, related: tearing down the tall poppy, ie pulling down anyone that stands out
Hi, it's me, I'm the "well akshuslly" guy today. Fascism (and the whole right-wing mindset) is based on fear, primarily fear that they, personally and individually, are interior. That's why they need the constant and over-the-top demonstrations of dominance and claims of superiority—to drown out those fears.
I appreciate where you’re coming from. I said it the way I did because for some, at least from my observation, there is a sick sadism to it rather than fear alone.
Academic definitions would agree with you and it does hold true for the general populace; however I wanted to add the caveat so as not to mistakenly give the impression that fascists should be pitied, in any capacity.