DEI has been created to uphold civil rights violations, only to be removed as a tool to disable operating negotiation perks, during hostile takeovers of business.
The Cause of Distraction
During the COVID Shutdowns, the American public had a lot of personal time to reflect and decide who they wanted to be once things got back to normal. During this self reflection the shutdown began to expose workplace sustainability and highlighted that some employees were more integral to assisting in office success that others.
Top Black employees noticed the gaslighting of not being qualified enough to get a raised or promotions prior to the shutdown proved to be lies. These quality Black employees, especially in university settings noticed many of their Non Black peers were incapable of keeping up in a work from home environment. Some Zoom meeting exposed that their behavior towards Black workers weren’t rooted in high standards not being met, but simply flat our racist workplace bullying.
For many it would be hard to believe universities that were in the forefront of Anti Trump protesting and Liberal stances would the main violators of civil rights. The result of this discovery became a massive hastag that exposed these seemingly safe spaces with White, Hispanic, and Gays were actually hostile and economically debilitating towards its Black workers.
By mid May Black workers started sharing hundreds of horror stories of the supposed Not racist Whites and White aligned in academia, publishing, and industries that were big on calling Trump racist. This all led to an attempt to create a civil lawsuit of Black professors and professionals that would learn they all were victims of this White Liberal Racist take of Me-Too.
George Floyd Distraction
By the end of May, it was clear there was an agenda to deflect this growing snowball of workplace harassment, shown in the hashtag search, switching the narrative back to the real racists, simply to get these Black folks off their back. This rare and evolved unity of what the Black community looked like during the pandemic, isolated away from Whites was becoming a problem and a movement of community reflection, showing hope there was still a chance for Black unity and dollar.
Now this is conjecture but it’s oddly ironic that the George Floyd story became viral and leaked and pushed and overly promoted by mainstream media and comericalized by indie journalism, once the “#PublishingPaidMe” hashtag started to gain legal inquiry. Not even the Ahmad Aubrey incident was this publicized which was a legitimate story of Black concern and no protest yet to justify the habital line stepping of Whites against Blacks in worksites. It also seems the timing was convenient to distract from the broad attempt of cooling off the movement by these Black workers and completely upended that healing energy that was occuring in the Black community during COVID shutdown.
A stark contrast from helping Black elderly, virtual DJ parties, and family reconnecting online to seeing hoards of White people and unemployed Black youth jumping on police cars and looting grocery stores. It was a like seeing the end of what Black America was trying to build over the last 70 years, now on fire.
There are extensive stories of Black neighborhood businesses and homes being targeted during the 2020 riots. Being set on fire, looted, and hoardes of protests with a White BLM protester in the front and back of Black people, sandwiched in the middle, angered of over police brutality.
Suddenly DEI was brought up and who led the charge? Universities. And the university culture became the head of a Police engagement based on, brutality of Floyd that didn’t even happen on a college campus.
DEI is Everywhere & NoWhere
There is no documented person or organization that definitively “coined” the term DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), and major histories of DEI do not attribute the acronym to a single inventor.
Before the end of 2020, large employers, universities, and nonprofits issued public statements, set new diversity goals, and hired or elevated chief diversity officers, which rapidly expanded formal DEI programs.
Read – https://hbr.org/2020/06/do-your-employees-know-why-you-believe-in-diversity
Read – https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/01/organizations-impactful-corporate-dei-initiatives/
Media outlets, consulting firms, and research organizations started producing dedicated DEI reports and explainers, helping cement “DEI” as the common label for these efforts in 2020.
Read – https://direct.mit.edu/edfp/article/19/2/187/114797/Hate-Crimes-and-Black-College-Student-Enrollment
To date, no one knows who, when, and how DEI became the new civil rights, but the disturbing part was that it was used to erase the set definitive plan and policy clearly defined by the Civil Rights Act to respect fellow citizens (Black people).
DEI was now THE Civil Rights Act and many Black people began conflating DEI agreements as an acknowledgement of Blackness rather than it’s real purpose, performative narratives that celebrate the existence without the financial compensation.
DEI would then be coded to remove any gains of the Civil Rights Act in work places and equitable fairness in housing and other gains created since 1965. And now civil rights gains were out of touch, no vote, anti tangible, and then DEI was the real face of Black American advancements true “action”.
And the 2025 Came
When the Trump Administration came and dissolved the 5 year old DEI agreements, firing it’s DEI based employees, removing companies statements, and universities suddenly going to the bathroom to avoid conversations, leaving Black people in an empty room confused about what just happened. They had placed all of their prior gains in the DEI basket, now tossed.
Read – https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2025/02/10/president-trump-acts-to-roll-back-dei-initiatives/
In the end, DEI did what it was supposed to do, remove the Black employees that exposed performative unity, weed out the customers who really want to engage with products and businesses for needs over emotions, castrate the conversation about realistic racial equity, and use Trump as a scapegoat to get the American economy back to “outrage” to distract for the real goal, mindless, unsustainable consumerism. Was there collaboration between the seemingly liberal factions and conservative plans? Hard to say.
Read – https://defendernetwork.com/news/naacp-boycott-discrimination-corporations/
And yes university and political culture is apart of that consumerism.