On Not Letting DEI Get Coopted and Watered Down

kalanggam, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Liberals, including some POC, white allies, and white “allies,” are quite keen on representation as diversity. At the end of the day, representation can be superficial and only partially satisfies the goals of social justice. Yes, we — ‘we’ being people of color, women, queer people, and other marginalized people — should receive the same opportunities as our privileged counterparts. That’s representation.

But putting us at the helm of oppressive systems doesn’t end those systems. The point isn’t to have a Black police chief, or a woman CEO, or a queer head of state, etc… I liken this to putting a Pride flag on a nuclear warhead. It’s a symbolic action which, alone, isn’t entirely subversive of the system’s destructive nature. Such representation allows oppressive systems to flourish. We can’t obtain freedom by becoming oppressors ourselves. Justice shouldn’t be the cession of oppressive power to marginalized hands, but the cessation of such power.

When people see such simple representation as the means to an end, they show their reverence for oppressive power, that:

• they still have some measure of respect for it and its legitimacy,
• dismantling power isn’t that important of a mission for them, and
• they’re fine living with an oppressive system as long as they can go on living their life, have their sensibilities appeased, and still benefit from it

I’ve gotten a lot of guidance from this quote by Audre Lorde:

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

— Audre Lorde

These are just my personal feelings, so others may have conflicting thoughts or may want to provide their own insights. I’m not an authority on this or anything, but the main point for me is that I’m against how DEI as a framework is being appropriated to, as Angela Davis said, “guarantee a more efficient operation of oppressive systems.” I see this happening in academia as well as in Hollywood, US politics, and so on, where DEI is being deployed as a smokescreen to give new life to oppression and make it look less harmful.