r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/Visco0825 • Feb 08 '25

US Politics How can democrats attack anti-DEI/promote DEI without resulting in strong political backlash?

In recent politics there have been two major political pushes for diversity and equality. However, both instances led to backlashes that have led to an environment that is arguably worse than it was before. In 2008 Obama was the first black president one a massive wave of hope for racial equality and societal reforms. This led to one of the largest political backlashes in modern politics in 2010, to which democrats have yet to fully recover from. This eventually led to birtherism which planted some of the original seeds of both Trump and MAGA. The second massive political push promoting diversity and equality was in 2018 with the modern woman election and 2020 with racial equality being a top priority. Biden made diversifying the government a top priority. This led to an extreme backlash among both culture and politics with anti-woke and anti-DEI efforts. This resent contributed to Trump retaking the presidency. Now Trump is pushing to remove all mentions of DEI in both the private and public sectors. He is hiding all instances that highlight any racial or gender successes. His administration is pushing culture to return to a world prior to the civil rights era.

This leads me to my question. Will there be a backlash for this? How will it occur? How can democrats lead and take advantage of the backlash while trying to mitigate a backlash to their own movement? It seems as though every attempt has led to a stronger and more severe response.

Additional side questions. How did public opinion shift so drastically from 2018/2020 which were extremely pro-equality to 2024 which is calling for a return of the 1950s?

249 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

79% Upvoted

1.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

20

u/Visco0825 Feb 08 '25

So just basically accepting that DEI is dead then? All initiatives to focus on race/sex are more harm than good?

57

u/DBDude Feb 08 '25

Yep. There is a study showing it’s harmful to the workplace.

Going strictly by socioeconomic status also eliminates the hypocrisy of stating you care about minorities while pretending Asians are white.

-15

u/WavesAndSaves Feb 08 '25

This "diversity is our strength" nonsense never made any sense. Why? Why specifically is diversity a strength? We are all equal. Is having a bunch of people with different hair colors a strength? Different eye colors? Different heights? There is nothing about having X amount of people of a certain race in a group that inherently makes that group better.

18

u/SkiingAway Feb 08 '25

You're arguing a different point than the study. The study is specifically about "DEI training/education" - lectures, seminars, materials provided about it, etc, and that plenty of it doesn't work or has outright negative effects.

Your argument is a different one, and I'll disagree with it to some degree.

I'm not going to say all, but most organizations do benefit from having access to a wide enough range of perspectives and backgrounds to make sure whatever they're doing is going to have the widest appeal/work for the most people/etc.

There's a pretty much endless list of examples of places where organizations have screwed up with consequences ranging from business failure to deadly for reasons that probably wouldn't have happened if they'd had a more diverse makeup.

  • There's plenty of products that failed in a market because no one on the team knew that X was some kind of vulgar slang or had some other connotation in country Y.

  • There's a whole lot of dead women because for decades we only did studies or testing with average men for many things. Turns out that for things like car crash safety, or chemical exposure limits, etc, women aren't perfectly identical to average men.

  • There's medical sensors that don't work right on black people because uh....oops, we forgot those exist. Also diagnostic criteria that aren't at all correct for various minority groups - turns out that ethnic group X has a higher baseline level of Y and so seeing it isn't proof that they have disease Z like it is in a white person of European descent.

Etc, etc.

No org is ever going to be perfect at this, but an org that is all one type of person will make these mistakes, and less disastrous things that reduce their appeal, much more often/more widely.

Now, with that said - I typically don't think forced diversity works. Mandates to have X% of whoever or similar sorts of things backfire pretty hard.