DEI Is Dead -- The Atlantic -- January 16, 2025

Locator: 44694DEI.

One of the major themes for 2025.

Woke

DEI and ESG: both dead.

DEI is dead: the definitive article (added January 16, 2025). 

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The Atlantic

Link here.

It’s often hard to discern, definitively, when one societal trend ends and a new one begins. But right now across the United States, one change couldn’t be clearer: Many DEI programs are sputtering or dying, and the anti-DEI movement is ascendant.

Some people, especially but not limited to those on the right, have long viewed contemporary efforts to strengthen DEI practices as performative, meddlesome, or ineffective. In the past several weeks, though, with Donald Trump’s return drawing closer, the DEI opposition has been growing louder. What’s more, this newly emboldened anti-DEI bloc has also gained powerful allies.

Many Americans might not have even been familiar with the concept of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) until the latter half of 2020, when, following the murder of George Floyd and subsequent nationwide protests against racism and police brutality, many corporations and universities scrambled to bolster their diversity efforts. DEI programs can involve hiring practices, but they also refer to company culture and everyday corporate decisions about how an organization is run. During the final months of the first Trump administration, some people in mainstream circles saw attacking DEI as akin to publicly displaying prejudice. Now, not even five years later, for a large swath of the country, the idea of DEI has become a catchall insult. DEI is part bogeyman, part always-there scapegoat for some combination of bureaucracy, overreach, or mediocrity.

Blah, blah, blah, then this:

Whether or not you agree with Meta’s decisions about how to run the company, Gale is correct that the landscape is shifting. At the start of the year, McDonald’s announced that it was scrapping its “aspirational representational goals.” Shortly after Trump’s electoral victory, Walmart said that it planned to end its racial-equity training programs for staff and was reevaluating DEI goals around suppliers. But it’s not just the tech bros or corporate behemoths. Last month, the University of Michigan announced that it would end the practice of requiring diversity statements as a component of faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. The change came following an extensive New York Times Magazine investigation that argued that the school’s costly investment (roughly a quarter of a billion dollars) in DEI initiatives had all but failed.

Why is this political? Why would anyone (right, left, liberal, progressive, conservative, libertarian) want to spend a quarter of a billion dollars on a failing "initiative"? But somehow those in favor of DEI seem to have a moral compass; the rest of us don't. 

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The Anti-Social Century

Later.