Is DEI Dying and Woke Going Back to Sleep?

It is so much easier to slaughter, disenfranchise, marginalize or subjugate an easily identified class of people by defining “them” as less than “us,” dehumanizing “them,” imbuing “them” with uniformly nasty personal traits and blaming “them” and blaming them for as much as you possibly can. Some Israelis have thus blurred “Hamas” and “Palestinians” resulting in the death of over 40,000 human beings. Police departments in many parts of the United States have policies that consistently subject people of color to more harassment, more arrests, more convictions and longer sentences and more sustaining stigma, compared to white residents, that prevents their getting sustainable employment at a viable level of pay to break the cycles the incumbent majority have imposed on them. Add truly inferior inner-city schools and ultra-dangerous neighborhoods where gangs have replaced the “jobs” that should have been available… but for the reasons above, are not. The Tulsa massacre and the Trail of Tears represent historical low-lights that have found parallels in contemporary America.

The current polarization has rendered the United States dysfunctional at a grassroots level (too many hate anyone who disagrees with them), shoved Congress into “complete inability to govern” gridlock, pushed political appointments of biased judges and justices (literally appointed to implement their biases onto the general public), legitimized political violence and has effectively imposed a white Christian nationalist mandate across the country, shoving blue constituencies face down into rightwing populist muck and mire.

“Woke” originally was about awakening to self-examining awareness. Unfortunately, the meaning shifted into pretending bad stuff never happens, and if it did, it’s not white folks who are at fault. If we are not willing to examine these self-destructive habits ourselves, the British The Economist (September 19th edition) – noting that MAGA pressure has shown, via “our statistical analysis,” that “woke opinions and practices are on the decline,” explains:

“Republicans love to blame everything they consider wrong with America on an epidemic of ‘wokeness’, by which they tend to mean anything that smacks of virtue-signaling or political correctness. Thus a bridge over Baltimore harbour collapsed earlier this year not, as it might have seemed, because it was hit by a wayward cargo ship, but because one of the nearby port’s six commissioners is a black woman whose human-resources firm helps companies assess how diverse their workforces are, among other things—or so a Republican candidate for governor of Utah asserted. Donald Trump, when accepting the Republican nomination for president in July, blamed ‘woke’ leadership for the failings of America’s armed forces. The party’s official platform this year complains of ‘woke…government’ spurring politically motivated prosecutions. The implication is that woke attitudes are proliferating, and that only Republicans can stem their rise.

“In fact, discussion and espousal of woke views peaked in America in the early 2020s and have declined markedly since. The Economist has attempted to quantify the prominence of woke ideas in four domains: public opinion, the media, higher education and business. Almost everywhere we looked a similar trend emerged: wokeness grew sharply in 2015, as Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, continued to spread during the subsequent efflorescence of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, peaked in 2021-22 and has been declining ever since [as illustrated by charts reflecting The Economist’s extensive surveys and content analyses]. The only exception is corporate wokeness, which took off only after Mr Floyd’s murder, but has also retreated in the past year or two…

“Our analysis subsumes both the advocates and the denigrators of woke thinking, by looking at ideas and actions associated with this sort of activism, for good or for ill. It measures, for example, talk of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ (DEI) in the corporate world, regardless of whether it is being invoked as a way to correct the under-representation of women and racial minorities or as an example of pious window-dressing. Some of the yardsticks we use apply only to the more doctrinaire form of woke activism, such as the number of drives to censure academics for views deemed offensive. Others capture only the more positive aspects of the movement, such as polling data on the proportion of Americans who worry about racial injustice. Either way, the results are consistent: America has passed “peak woke”.

“The simplest way to measure the spread of woke views is through polling. We examined responses over the past 25 years to polls conducted by Gallup, General Social Survey (GSS), Pew and YouGov. Woke opinions on racial discrimination began to grow around 2015 and peaked around 2021. In the most recent Gallup data, from earlier this year, 35% of people said they worried ‘a great deal’ about race relations, down from a peak of 48% in 2021 but up from 17% in 2014. According to Pew, the share of Americans who agree that white people enjoy advantages in life that black people do not (‘white privilege’, in the jargon) peaked in 2020. In GSS’s data the view that discrimination is the main reason for differences in outcomes between races peaked in 2021 and fell in the most recent version of the survey, in 2022. Some of the biggest leaps and subsequent declines in woke thinking have been among young people and those on the left.”

The Trump reconfigured Supreme Court ruled against university affirmative action programs (DEI), many corporations followed suit, ESG (environmentally and socially responsible) investing came under fire and books, lesson plans (schools, public libraries) found their way to the exits. “We’re not banning books; we’re just making different selections.” Voting restrictions, unambiguously linked to race, reared their ugly heads, usually with Supreme Court approval… while the most egregious police aggression (conveniently caught on camera) produced a few “blue” convictions, courts and juries almost always continued to find ways to find cops “not guilty” in those “blue on black” assaults.

We seldom talk about that segment of voters who just will not vote for a woman president, and called into question both her “blackness” is and her qualifications challenged as a “DEI candidate.” Like China and Japan, we rewrite ugliness out of our recollection of history. Our latest classroom history books tell us slavery had benefits for the slaves, no mention of the harm is made in these revised texts, which eschew the reality of slavery and the continuation of discrimination, today expanded into religious, gender and ethnic attacks. Only German education seems to embrace the mandatory teaching of a historical horrible: teaching about the Holocaust to all public students in texts that do not hold back.

I have been dealing with these issues over many blogs, but for the most salient efforts, so I do not repeat myself here, please see the details in my September 17th The Disengagement of the Rich, the Role of "Woke" in Education and Lawyers vs Voters, September 3rd When the Supreme Court is Repulsed by Equality and Begins to Rewrite the Constitution, and my very recent Is DEI the New N-Word, Pretending to Be the New Equality Standard? blogs.  What’s so hard about living with the truth and trying to make the world a better place?

I’m Peter Dekom, and for integrity’s sake, we must prevent a repetition of past horribles, adjust for the wrongs that have not been righted, and assert the cherished American value set: diversity, equity/equality and inclusion.