By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2024-11-26 23:56:48 | Updated at 2024-11-27 02:34:55
2 hours ago
DEI is dying, as big companies wake up to an obvious truth: dividing people divides people.
Walmart is just the latest company to hop on the trend of slashing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, joining Ford, Google, Meta, and Tesla, among others.
The company confirmed to Fox Business Monday that it will pump the breaks on its Racial Equity Center, which it launched in 2020 for a five year trial period, and is ditching the term “Latinx” (which only 4% of Hispanics use themselves) in corporate messaging.
The company is even cutting mention of “DEI” altogether. Rather than “diversity,” they will emphasize “belonging.” The megastore chain is the largest company to ditch DEI practices so far.
Meanwhile, research out of Rutgers University found that DEI initiatives actually cause the racial hostility and tension that they’re nominally meant to dispel, by purposely elevating members of minority groups.
Research subjects who were shown divisive material about race and religion — including readings by authors hot during the racial moral panic of 2020 like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo — ultimately showed significant increases in “hostility” and “punitive attitudes” towards other groups.
Subjects were also more likely to detect prejudice where there wasn’t any and to desire punishment for supposed offenders.
The Rutgers researchers claim both the New York Times and Bloomberg initially jumped at the idea of writing about their study, before the stories were pulled “at the highest editorial levels,” according to reporting by the National Review.
Their findings aren’t all new. A 2016 article from the Harvard Business Review already foresaw that “the positive effects of diversity training rarely last beyond a day or two, and a number of studies suggest that it can activate bias or spark a backlash.”
Sounds like just the sort of thing you want to introduce to the workplace, at a hefty price… right?
The capitalists in corporate America are waking up to the fact that DEI is neither cheap nor effective. After companies shelled out $7.5 billion on DEI in 2020, and have continued to burn their money on it ever since.
That is a business miscalculation made possible only by the mass hysteria of that summer, when the murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the country sent corporations into a tizzy to avoid Twitter mobs and employee walkouts.
DEI consultants promised companies a solution to it all: Hire us, and we’ll assure your company is officially antiracist.
Their training sessions — which 52% of American workers are still subject to, per a 2023 Pew survey — have backfired spectacularly, as the Rutgers researchers have most recently proven.
Workplaces have become more divided, more race conscious, and less cohesive. In retrospect, there’s no worse way to develop a team than to point out everyone’s differences and accuse certain members of harboring “implicit biases” or “microagressing” other members.
Finally, companies like Walmart are cutting back on what was clear moral blackmailing during an anti-racist arms-race.
While adult coworkers shouldn’t be pitted against each other in this way, DEI is even worse when applied to children. Schools have also become hotspots for divisive “diversity” training.
I know this firsthand, as a Gen Zer. When I was a 14-year-old at boarding school in New Jersey, my freshman class was segregated into separate buildings by race to discuss our racial experiences with “affinity groups” — on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
What ever happened to seeing one another for the content of their character?
Over the course of our four years on campus where DEI was constantly emphasized, the friend groups in my class of 200 became notably more segregated by race as the adults at our school consistently emphasized our differences rather than our commonalities.
Racializing teens is wrong, but we haven’t stopped there.
Antiracist messiah Ibram X. Kendi ascended to the number one spot of the New York Times bestseller list with his book “Antiracist Baby,” which “empowers parents and children to uproot racism in our society and in ourselves,” according to his website.
Because the antiracists will have you know that even infants harbor racism in their hearts that needs to be eradicated — which can be accomplished at the price of a $10.99 book.
Our nation has made massive strides towards equality, but now, thanks to DEI, we’re raising the next generation to see their fellow Americans for their immutable characteristics rather than their shared values.
Young people of all races, genders, and sexualities today enjoy more rights than ever before. And yet they are being taught by DEI quacks masquerading as champions of “inclusion” that they are victims of rampant exclusion.
Though it masquerades as a progressive movement, DEI is remarkably regressive. It’s time corporations and our schools ditch it once and for all.
