Can We Talk About the Failure of DEI (even before it started being dismantled) EDIT: video added

[BaggerofTea]

Black women and gay and lesbian blacks ate off DEI

Straight Black men are lumped in with white men at this point.

White men do not consider hetero black men to part of their in group

I work for a major news outlet you've probably heard of.

Some of the most "militant", "fukk Democrats. Both sides" type people on this bored have mocked me in the past as being part of the "liberal, pro-Dem party media."

I don't think I even need to tag the collective of people I'm talking about.

I always ask these people...why are you, as a black militant supposedly pushing for very leftist ideas like reparations, at all concerned how well represented conservatism is in the media? You are fighting for reparations without compromise. You cant stand seeing the media or politicians defend the humanity of immigrants and other minorities because that undermines reparations somehow. But at the same time you are deeply concerned with an alleged bias the media has against people who are ideologically anti-reparations and racist? What are you REALLY fighting for out here?



It makes all sense when you realize Uncle Tom black Republicans are inherent cowards, soulless ghouls, and straight up scumbags.

Self hating blacks are narcissists and sociopaths

 

[NinoBrown]

The group who probably ate the most off these programs were MAGA-loving Latinos... Definitely the least deserving group along with Asians who came up crazy

Alphabet gang doesn't help us build our community as they are unable to build a family naturally and swirlers marry white and erase their black genes with their children....

The program was a failure corporate side for actual Black Men....for a short while it was a nice little scam companies ran to exploit the deaths of Black men for more profit.

 

[Walt]

A lot of you guys are looking through DEI from a very narrow minded and somewhat ignorant perspective. You focus on Tech but ignore they’re plenty of DEI programs in college and universities that have helped plenty of Black men get their degrees/education which has greatly improved their/our quality of lives. Whether it’s EOP programs, MBA programs like the consortium there are plenty of DEI programs that have changed Black lives for the better

Just to clarify, I'm invested in equity and affirmative action programs. And there's no doubt that programs created on the backs of past social movements changed many black lives by providing/increasing access and mentoring and pathways where there had been few to none. But the recent DEI wave was not about that. And differentiating universities from corporations is - depressingly - not an effective way of framing the institutions at their core. Certainly not the private universities. And many of the public universities don't have the funding or resources to sustain the sort of programs that help the oppressed and disadvantaged.

Years ago on SOHH there was a thread on college admissions, and I weighed in with some insights. There were some impassioned responses, many of which made assertions they insisted were based on facts. I finally broke one of my messageboard rules and revealed some personal information: I'd been a Dean of college admissions at an elite university. I was giving a perspective from the inside. A poster then explained that actually he worked in college admissions too, and he went rattled off a bunch of details about college admissions that immediately clarified he was lying. My point in recounting this is I largely stopped participating in these discussions because that moment helped me realize they're usually about everything but the topic being discussed. They're about sides rather than principles; winning and losing rather than understanding.

At the height of DEI mania I served for a year on the Dean of the Humanities DEI Advisory Board at another university. It was an embarrassing endeavor. I also was on the exec committee of my department's DEI group. It was mostly busywork with meager funding for bringing speakers to campus. Within two years the black people on the committee were so disenchanted and disgusted by their white colleagues' lack of effort and investment they left the committee. It devolved into a glorified bookclub run by a white woman.

In place of funding a culture of reform, the university created more empty administrative positions. Special Provost of Diversity. Diversity and Equity Officer for the Sciences. Etc etc etc. One of them would show up from time to time at a faculty meeting with notecards to pass out, and run us through an exercise about bias and effective communication strategies. Cliche workshops and town halls increased in volume, mostly attended by white students and faculty. The black students aren't fools. They stayed home. The number of black students admitted did not increase - quite the opposite. We'd suggested an overhaul on how to approach college admissions - the sort of change and reform a meaningful social movement yields. Given my prior experience in college admissions, I was brought into meetings with the admissions staff. They never let us get close to seeing data, understanding their process, or suggesting meaningful changes. They did create new, giant placards next to a bunch of the campus bathrooms affirming the rights of anyone to use them regardless of gender. Administrations love signs, slogans, and acronyms - acquiescing to that sort of "change" costs them nothing, and yields very little change. Ask them to hire more black professors and admit more black students and suddenly you'll hear about how complicated and difficult that is.

Now, don't get me wrong, universities did have to perform some forms of reckoning. I personally wrote something in a major academic publication that got 70 college presidents on an emergency zoom meeting, and the result at a lot of those institutions was a push for targeted hires of faculty of color. Want to guess the problem with that? Given the unserious and flimsy culture of DEI, which was steeped in acronyms and identitarianism, the term POC gave search committees a loophole. I watched in bemusement as we hired upper middle class Indians, Egyptians, and trans white women and men with only the occasional Black professor. White women who brought nothing to the table, looked like every other white woman, came from privilege, but had a short haircut and had recently changed names from Patricia to Chaz. They distorted the historical context of the principles of DEI to simply hire even more people who were spiritually and socially aligned with the same old bullshyt.

The campuses across our country are increasingly apolitical. The student bodies back in the early 2000s were already struggling with attracting, admitting, and supporting Black men (another topic entirely, one for another discussion). The administrations are increasingly conservative. The Board of Trustees has gained more administrative and policy control across the vast majority of universities. Things are so fukking regressive and bleak. The period post-George Floyd was so crucial because it represented a moment of genuine opportunity to create cultural change in institutions - the sort of change you can't root out so easily. We let them get away with throwing money at empty admin positions, funding dinners and parties for POC faculty and students, hiring more admin (who work to serve the interests of the institution and will never be "agents of change" as they like to claim) and not more faculty. So, when they decided to pivot away from DEI, all they had to do was halt the cashflow and everything disappeared. There wasn't much to clean up.

Someone in this thread said they think there's something good about DEI because white people were against it. That's such faulty, reactionary thinking. First of all, the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion are - for me - unassailable. But the DEI culture of the past 6 years or so is a very different thing from the principles. And plenty of white people loved that. Conservative white people aren't the only white people. I'd also argue one of the insidious things about DEI culture and Kendi X's anti-racism is it did very little for the oppressed while giving the Right a convenient foil to use to galvanize its base. A lot of DEI culture was silly. And by amplifying the silliest aspects of DEI culture, the right made the actual principles of DEI seem warped. And because we've been so trained by social media to want empty calorie "wins" against "the other side" we were more than happy to support buffoonery and grift if we saw "the other side" didn't like it. It was conservative media that first reported on BLM being a scumbag organization. Many of us rejected the evidence and defended Cullors and her ilk because we reflexively oppose "the other side." I want to be clear here that BLM as a movement was remarkable in its beginning stages. Political and social organizing is awesome. We need that. But BLM the organization was something totally different and similar to DEI as a culture vs. DEI the principles, and Kendi X's shameful Anti-Racism vs Critical Race Theory (which predates Kendi X): legitimate social and intellectual movements got gaffled by opportunistic girfters on "our side." They associated themselves with principles we defend, and effectively turned us into their security while they grifted right in our faces.

 

[#BOTHSIDES]

A lot of you guys are looking through DEI from a very narrow minded and somewhat ignorant perspective. You focus on Tech but ignore they’re plenty of DEI programs in college and universities that have helped plenty of Black men get their degrees/education which has greatly improved their/our quality of lives. Whether it’s EOP programs, MBA programs like the consortium there are plenty of DEI programs that have changed Black lives for the better

Breh I can’t find any proof of this You mind sharing?

 

[2 Up 2 Down]

The problem with the discourse of DEI is that it completely ignores that white mediocrity was allowed to rise to the top just because they had the right connections for decades.

 

[#BOTHSIDES]

Just to clarify, I'm invested in equity and affirmative action programs. And there's no doubt that programs created on the backs of past social movements changed many black lives by providing/increasing access and mentoring and pathways where there had been few to none. But the recent DEI wave was not about that. And differentiating universities from corporations is - depressingly - not an effective way of framing the institutions at their core. Certainly not the private universities. And many of the public universities don't have the funding or resources to sustain the sort of programs that help the oppressed and disadvantaged.

Years ago on SOHH there was a thread on college admissions, and I weighed in with some insights. There were some impassioned responses, many of which made assertions they insisted were based on facts. I finally broke one of my messageboard rules and revealed some personal information: I'd been a Dean of college admissions at an elite university. I was giving a perspective from the inside. A poster then explained that actually he worked in college admissions too, and he went rattled off a bunch of details about college admissions that immediately clarified he was lying. My point in recounting this is I largely stopped participating in these discussions because that moment helped me realize they're usually about everything but the topic being discussed. They're about sides rather than principles; winning and losing rather than understanding.

At the height of DEI mania I served for a year on the Dean of the Humanities DEI Advisory Board at another university. It was an embarrassing endeavor. I also was on the exec committee of my department's DEI group. It was mostly busywork with meager funding for bringing speakers to campus. Within two years the black people on the committee were so disenchanted and disgusted by their white colleagues' lack of effort and investment they left the committee. It devolved into a glorified bookclub run by a white woman.

In place of funding a culture of reform, the university created more empty administrative positions. Special Provost of Diversity. Diversity and Equity Officer for the Sciences. Etc etc etc. One of them would show up from time to time at a faculty meeting with notecards to pass out, and run us through an exercise about bias and effective communication strategies. Cliche workshops and town halls increased in volume, mostly attended by white students and faculty. The black students aren't fools. They stayed home. The number of black students admitted did not increase - quite the opposite. We'd suggested an overhaul on how to approach college admissions - the sort of change and reform a meaningful social movement yields. Given my prior experience in college admissions, I was brought into meetings with the admissions staff. They never let us get close to seeing data, understanding their process, or suggesting meaningful changes. They did create new, giant placards next to a bunch of the campus bathrooms affirming the rights of anyone to use them regardless of gender. Administrations love signs, slogans, and acronyms - acquiescing to that sort of "change" costs them nothing, and yields very little change. Ask them to hire more black professors and admit more black students and suddenly you'll hear about how complicated and difficult that is.

Now, don't get me wrong, universities did have to perform some forms of reckoning. I personally wrote something in a major academic publication that got 70 college presidents on an emergency zoom meeting, and the result at a lot of those institutions was a push for targeted hires of faculty of color. Want to guess the problem with that? Given the unserious and flimsy culture of DEI, which was steeped in acronyms and identitarianism, the term POC gave search committees a loophole. I watched in bemusement as we hired upper middle class Indians, Egyptians, and trans white women and men with only the occasional Black professor. White women who brought nothing to the table, looked like every other white woman, came from privilege, but had a short haircut and had recently changed names from Patricia to Chaz. They distorted the historical context of the principles of DEI to simply hire even more people who were spiritually and socially aligned with the same old bullshyt.

The campuses across our country are increasingly apolitical. The student bodies back in the early 2000s were already struggling with attracting, admitting, and supporting Black men (another topic entirely, one for another discussion). The administrations are increasingly conservative. The Board of Trustees has gained more administrative and policy control across the vast majority of universities. Things are so fukking regressive and bleak. The period post-George Floyd was so crucial because it represented a moment of genuine opportunity to create cultural change in institutions - the sort of change you can't root out so easily. We let them get away with throwing money at empty admin positions, funding dinners and parties for POC faculty and students, hiring more admin (who work to serve the interests of the institution and will never be "agents of change" as they like to claim) and not more faculty. So, when they decided to pivot away from DEI, all they had to do was halt the cashflow and everything disappeared. There wasn't much to clean up.

Someone in this thread said they think there's something good about DEI because white people were against it. That's such faulty, reactionary thinking. First of all, the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion are - for me - unassailable. But the DEI culture of the past 6 years or so is a very different thing from the principles. And plenty of white people loved that. Conservative white people aren't the only white people. I'd also argue one of the insidious things about DEI culture and Kendi X's anti-racism is it did very little for the oppressed while giving the Right a convenient foil to use to galvanize its base. A lot of DEI culture was silly. And by amplifying the silliest aspects of DEI culture, the right made the actual principles of DEI seem warped. And because we've been so trained by social media to want empty calorie "wins" against "the other side" we were more than happy to support buffoonery and grift if we saw "the other side" didn't like it. It was conservative media that first reported on BLM being a scumbag organization. Many of us rejected the evidence and defended Cullors and her ilk because we reflexively oppose "the other side." I want to be clear here that BLM as a movement was remarkable in its beginning stages. Political and social organizing is awesome. We need that. But BLM the organization was something totally different and similar to DEI as a culture vs. DEI the principles, and Kendi X's shameful Anti-Racism vs Critical Race Theory (which predates Kendi X): legitimate social and intellectual movements got gaffled by opportunistic girfters on "our side." They associated themselves with principles we defend, and effectively turned us into their security while they grifted right in our faces.

Great post

 

[Bryan Danielson]

So were their no qualified diverse candidates for Trump?

 

[Soldier]

This is precisely it. Nothing about this world is strictly merit based except the Olympics. All these billionaires have a story based on privilege or outright crime. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban, all of them either got handed an opportunity or ripped someone off.

I bet Warren Buffet has dirt on him too, just got his comeup so long ago everyone he did dirty is dead

EDIT: not even the Olympics

Professional sports, physiotherapy, plumbing , law, teaching and medicine/surgery are merit based. That’s it after that.

 

[Walt]

This is not an inaccurate read:



I hate that people conflate DEI with Affirmative Action and the Civil Rights Movement. The CAC opposition to it on the right and the CAC embrace of it on the left are different strands of the same contempt.

This is why I despise that absolute cocksucker Kendi X. His greatest successes were enriching himself and a gang of grifters AND handing the right a boogeyman to galvanize their base of hateful imbeciles.

 

[5thbornpowerseed]

On average, people are stupid and have no desire to change the fact.

 

[Bryan Danielson]

welp

 

[bnew]

npr.org

Is planting trees 'DEI'? Trump administration cuts nationwide tree-planting effort​

By Eva Tesfaye

10–13 minutes

---

Volunteers Olly De Almeida (left), Jordan Bordenave (right) and Rosemary White (far right) plant a tree in front of Tribble Condor's (center) house in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward. The project was funded by a federal grant terminated in February. Arbor Day Foundation hide caption

toggle caption

Arbor Day Foundation

The Trump administration's efforts to end federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs has hit an unexpected target: In February, communities around the country learned that funding was canceled for a nationwide tree-planting program aimed at making neighborhoods cooler, healthier and more resilient to climate change.

The urban forestry initiative, administered by the nonprofit Arbor Day Foundation, was supposed to distribute $75 million in grant funding to about 100 different cities, nonprofit organizations and tribes to plant shade trees in neighborhoods that need them the most. The program was funded by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which included big investments in climate initiatives.

In a letter terminating the contract, the U.S. Forest Service stated the program "no longer aligns with agency priorities regarding diversity, equity and inclusion." The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which houses the Forest Service, said in an emailed statement that the agency was complying with President Trump's executive orders.

The Arbor Day Foundation was surprised by the sudden cancelation, said Executive Director Dan Lambe.

"This was hugely disappointing," Lambe said. "It was an exciting opportunity for us to work with organizations and communities all across the country to plant trees in communities, to create jobs, to create economic benefits, to create conservation benefits, to help create cooler, safer, and healthier communities."

Rebuilding the canopy lost to Katrina​

Driving around the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans, Arthur Johnson pointed out the abundance of concrete and vacant lots. The whole city gets hot in the summer, he said, but in this neighborhood, there's hardly any tree shade to provide relief.

"Last summer was bad, worse than normal, but the summer before that was extremely bad, where we had no rain and extreme heat, " said Johnson, CEO of the Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development. "Without trees to filter some of that heat, it's just unbearable."

Trees are proven to reduce heat in cities, take up stormwater when it rains and improve air quality – all important needs in New Orleans as climate change intensifies storms and raises temperatures.

Volunteers planted trees in January in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans. Trees can help protect neighborhoods from extreme heat and air pollution. Arbor Day Foundation hide caption

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Arbor Day Foundation

The city still hasn't recovered the estimated 200,000 trees lost to Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago. That lack of canopy is visible in the Lower 9th Ward, a majority Black neighborhood and one of the areas hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina.

Johnson's organization was helping plant some 1,600 trees in the neighborhood when the funding was suddenly canceled. The project was managed by the New Orleans nonprofit Sustaining Our Urban Landscape, or SOUL, which had been awarded a $1 million grant from the Forest Service.

SOUL's executive director, Susannah Burley, said she found it absurd to cancel the funding as an equity program.

"That has nothing to do with this grant funding. The word 'equity' is pervasive in the grants that were funded by this, but in a totally different context," Burley said, adding that in this context, equity meant planting trees in neighborhoods without them.

"Funding would have allowed us to finish planting the Lower 9th Ward, which is a really big deal," Burley said. "That'll be the third neighborhood that we've planted every street."

That would have made significant progress towards a citywide goal to reach 10% tree canopy coverage in every neighborhood, as part of an effort to combat the urban heat island effect, reduce flooding, take up carbon and slow down subsidence.

As CEO of the Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development, Arthur Johnson is trying to get the community to see the value in tree planting. Arthur Johnson hide caption

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Arthur Johnson

For Johnson, the sudden reversal has been frustrating. It undermines the trust his organization has built over years in a community that has historically been left behind, he said.

"You try to get people to have some confidence into what's going on in the environment and what's going on in the community and government," Johnson said.

Anti-DEI push hits environmental justice programs​

On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at ending federal programs and grants related to diversity, equity and inclusion, which it called discriminatory and wasteful.

The order required agencies to provide a list of all DEI programs, including programs related to environmental justice. And it ordered agencies to terminate "'equity' actions, initiatives, or programs" and "'equity-related' grants or contracts."

The $75 million tree-planting program was part of the Biden administration's Justice40 initiative, which aimed to direct more resources to "disadvantaged communities." The administration defined those as areas that were generally lower-income and faced more pollution, based on factors such as health, housing, transportation and workforce development.

Susannah Burley, executive director of the New Orleans nonprofit Saving Our Urban Landscape, spoke to volunteers helping plant trees in the Lower 9th Ward on January 20, 2025. Soon after that, the U.S. Forest Service canceled funding for the program. Arbor Day Foundation hide caption

 

[bnew]

Arbor Day Foundation

Ladd Keith, director of the Heat Resilience Initiative at the University of Arizona, said trees are a worthy investment. Research shows they can return more financially than their cost, through lower energy bills, lower health costs and higher property values.

"Not everything can be couched under a DEIA language kind of lens," Keith said. "Grants like this are part of the responsibility of the federal government to help communities advance their interests and their progress."

He argued there are good reasons to focus planting in specific areas.

"Our governments historically have disinvested in low-income communities, and so it's our responsibility to make that right now," Keith said. "These grants allocated to these lower-income communities to plant trees would have done a little bit of justice, in bringing that urban canopy back up to more on par with higher-income neighborhoods."

Cuts felt from Louisiana to Oregon

The cancellation hit communities across the country, from Oregon and California to Montana and Tennessee.

In Talent, Oregon, Mike Oxendine runs Our Community Forestry. The tiny nonprofit was promised $600,000 to replace canopy lost to the Almeda Wildfire in 2020.

"We spent a year of our time as volunteers writing this grant proposal to do this work here that nobody else is doing," Oxendine said.

Volunteer James Herman gets ready to plant a tree in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward in January. The project was one of about a hundred nationwide chosen by the U.S. Forest Service and the Arbor Day Foundation to receive funding under a $75 million federal grant. Arbor Day Foundation hide caption

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Arbor Day Foundation

The nonprofit planned to focus much of its planting in mobile home parks, which were some of the areas slowest to recover after the fire.

Oxedine said he doesn't understand why the program was cut.

"As an all-volunteer organization, we're putting those dollars to the highest possible use, and the return on investment is so big," he said.

In Butte, Montana, the city was expecting nearly $800,000 from the program, said Trevor Peterson, the town's sole urban forester. The grant would have allowed Butte to replace hazardous dead trees, while also staffing up the urban forestry department.

"If I died tomorrow, I want to know that the urban forest is going to continue to survive and thrive," Peterson said. "This grant would have made a huge impact in that regard."

Peterson said he's looking for other funding, and working with local organizations to get a few trees removed for free.

In New Orleans, Arthur Johnson said the loss of federal grant money might slow down the work, but won't stop it. His organization will work with SOUL to find other sources of funding and plant just a few trees at a time.

"We've gone through Katrina 20 years ago now, amazingly, where people felt hopeless, but they didn't give up," Johnson said. "The people who came here, who lived here, who came back, who didn't leave, who had losses, but they still feel like it was worth it."

"And so that's what we want to do, and that's what we're going to continue to build," he said.