Hamilton, while I appreciate your scathing and accurate critique of DEI, your larger point about "the next uprising" would be bolstered by additional examples of major social uprisings that actually gain and, especially, sustain power without becoming oligarchies. All of the major civil rights movements of the past half century have succeeded in gaining real power in the form of legal rights and protections - only to see them obliterated by an alternative uprising calling itself MAGA.
This has all become more and more apparent to me over time, as American corporations deemed 'successful' work first and foremost as ruthless amoebas, and other aspiring businesses try to mimic the behavior.
I've had the misfortune to stump for equity in a startup and a hollow victory of receiving a contract that seemed above-board. It stipulated that I complete one year of service for equity and ownership in the company to vest. To follow was a successful year of service and growth borne on the back of hard work and long hours of unpaid overtime. Then a small board of investors—fearing the loss of any potential dollar from their own pockets—voted to fire me under the guise of business reconstruction, 3 days before that year completed.
I learned the hard way that in modern American business is not the people who do the hard work in earnestness who are rewarded with power. Not when the already-capital-holders in charge do nothing (beyond already owning capital) but convene four times a year to make self-serving decisions in the interest of protecting every hundredth of a percent of their own exponential profits. After that experience, none of what has happened to DEI initiatives has been remotely surprising. This is how these companies have always been at their core.
My only solace is that the iteration of this particular start-up (against my advice and without my continued stewardship), folded less than a year after my removal as those owners missed the boat to cash out as their industry surged onward. I suspect they are still doing just fine, somewhere else, now riding the trend of trading exponential profits for the exponential suffering of their workforce.
The last two sentences of your piece are absolutely correct!
Time to REALLY fight the fascists!
CARTOON: MAGA, Go 'F' Yourself -- Trump Sings Praise For Terrorist Killer Of American Troops
It’s done, MAGA. Your whole Red-White-N-Blue ‘America First’ act is done. Toast. All your red MAGA hat childish playground bullying crap is over. A dried up dog turd in the gutter. ...
Off topic: Really enjoying your book! Your parents sound amazing. I had several great uncles that did in fact read books on the line when it was possible to do so. My grandmother worked at a potato chip factory and never liked potato chips much for the rest of her life. None of my relatives would have been brave enough to try to sell a Communist newspaper to their fellow workers, but as they were all staunch atheists, I hope they'd have purchased one.
"If there is anything positive to be gained from the ongoing racist murder of 'DEI,' let it be this: They are spending a lot of their time trying to smash something that was never that great to begin with."
The term? Sure. The concept? Absolutely not, and if anything it'd be exceedingly myopic to assume that Trump somehow unilaterally reversed 160+ years of civil rights evolution in the US.
I ran into an acquaintance last week who was legitimately under the impression that Trump had "cancelled" all of the civil rights legislation – and litigation! – in the 1950s & 1960s in particular. Remarkably, this person is educated and has a degree from a top university; unfortunately the problem is them shifting their news intake to all Fox News / OAN / Newsmax / right-wing podcasts all the time – and yet they STILL somehow "forgot" that no president can unilaterally "overrule" the other two branches of government.
Propaganda's a serious mother of a drug.
In any event, it is still 100% illegal to fire any given person solely for being female. Or Muslim. Or Hispanic. Or even trans: irony noted, but the SCOTUS justice who penned the landmark opinion adding transgender people to the list of others who can't be discriminated in the workplace against was none other than Trump's own pick, Neil Gorsuch.
The core absurdity of Trump's jihad on DEI is that there's somehow something "wrong" with having public environments of all sorts filled with diverse groups of people, not merely upper-middle-class white suburbanites. Or that including long-ostracized groups like queer Americans is "bad." Or even that it's "okay" for men to earn more than women. (One of the "equity" parts a lot of people haven't considered.") Even if you disagree with quota systems or something, America's diversity is one of its STRENGTHS. Not even Trump can change that.
"The other time that a nationwide uprising genuinely had corporate America and its political allies on their heels was in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd."
This was arguably the first event to truly unite most Americans since 9/11. Now that we're nearing the fifth anniversary of Floyd's murder, I would truly love to know how the AF we went from THAT to THIS insane overreaction, with Trump winning reelection and attempting to kill off DEI anything at the same rapid clip Hitler burned books.
Much like the far-right's propaganda machine rewrote Jan. 6 into "a day of love," it warped the murder of an innocent Black man by a racist cop into a mass conspiracy orchestrated by "ANTIFA," the newest & silliest edition to the list of terms weirdly demonized by the right. (The all-lowercase "antifascist" doesn't look as cool, I guess.)
Still, this is important: I vividly recall the Times's pop-up on my phone noting that the Floyd protests were, in fact, the largest in American history, and the first to include protests in all 50 states. Over 20 million people participated.
All that goodwill evaporated at stunning speed.
We have REALLY got to figure out how and why – and how to prevent anything of the sort from occurring again. And yet I know that that's a daunting, and potentially impossible, task to achieve.
So often even when we muster power in workplaces, commmunities, and broader movements we fall back inside the same limiting systems.
A coupe micro examples to go along with your union experience Hamilton- when I was a local UAW President bargaining contracts we would generate a certain amount of leverage to force employers to make some concessions. I remember when the light bulb lit up for me that some issues add material gain- always important- but other issues helped us build our power for the long term- ultimately leading to better material gains.
Small things like the right to do significant union orientation in work time. When I was with 1199, at one nursing home we bargained for a monthly work time union “information session.”
The UAW allowed an impressive system of negotiated union staff helping w EAP, benefits etc to slide into a certain level of political nepotism and demobilizing BUT using leverage to OWN our workplaces and our movements,
to build organization is a much appreciated critical distinction.
One last example from the community side. We had effectively elected a fully progressive local government only to realize how circumscribed we were by State and National laws and by our tax system. Passing lefty resolutions or making small incremental progressive change was ok, but using resources to seed and support
grassroots neighborhood and tenant organizing helped drive bigger change and imbed political progress.
Not only "The official “How Things Work” t-shirt makes you look like a badass, even if you can only lift five pounds.", it's alto the best quality T-shirt I have. Thank you for the good, quality work by union members.
I thought 8 Can't Wait fixed everything? You're telling me it didn't?
Lot of self described smart people were pretty confident defund was going all wrong and that was the way to go. Way I recall it the same smarmy fucks ended up with all the power 20-24. I'd imagine they tucked right in and put all eight inoffensive, useless reforms over right?
Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but if I were a company I'd get rid of "DEI" in outward-facing communications likely to be seen by the Powers, but continue on course internally. Maybe these companies are getting out of the "equity" business only to stealthily revert to the equality business that's already woven into the company culture.
My work career traversed the deep cultural transformations that occurred through feminism and civil rights (two decades? Pfft! How about five decades?). DEI was just a poorly-conceived addendum to decades of taking the EEO poster in the lunchroom for granted: which meant in many cases learning to get along with all sorts of colleagues and reporting to people Not Like You.
Of course all this depends on the internal culture of any company. The "homosexual reproduction" (managers hire people like them; therefore more white guys) discussed by Rosabeth Moss Kant is certainly a major force in the sociology of corpoorations. My own career was in public transit in a liberal city: another source of unbridled optimism (these days they hire anyone and everyone willing to eliminate cannabinoids from their lives, so the driver population continues being incredibly diverse.)
Nevertheless I appreciate the idea of boycotting major retail firms as a pushback to the racism that fuels the Trump's administration's blackmail program. We're all operating on many levels of society and so must act from hope while at the same time resisting.
All of this. We must stop believing that equality can be Corporate Memphis-ed into existence. All those bendy, smiley, primary-colored, multi-ethnic people, used by designers to help sell the idea that corporations were enlightened, inclusive, and empathetic… It was gaslighting - we need a new aesthetic with which to represent a just world.
Ah yes, the best way to atone for past discrimination based on skin color is… to discriminate against others based on their skin color. Makes perfect sense.
Hamilton, while I appreciate your scathing and accurate critique of DEI, your larger point about "the next uprising" would be bolstered by additional examples of major social uprisings that actually gain and, especially, sustain power without becoming oligarchies. All of the major civil rights movements of the past half century have succeeded in gaining real power in the form of legal rights and protections - only to see them obliterated by an alternative uprising calling itself MAGA.
So lucid and impressive. Thank you.
This has all become more and more apparent to me over time, as American corporations deemed 'successful' work first and foremost as ruthless amoebas, and other aspiring businesses try to mimic the behavior.
I've had the misfortune to stump for equity in a startup and a hollow victory of receiving a contract that seemed above-board. It stipulated that I complete one year of service for equity and ownership in the company to vest. To follow was a successful year of service and growth borne on the back of hard work and long hours of unpaid overtime. Then a small board of investors—fearing the loss of any potential dollar from their own pockets—voted to fire me under the guise of business reconstruction, 3 days before that year completed.
I learned the hard way that in modern American business is not the people who do the hard work in earnestness who are rewarded with power. Not when the already-capital-holders in charge do nothing (beyond already owning capital) but convene four times a year to make self-serving decisions in the interest of protecting every hundredth of a percent of their own exponential profits. After that experience, none of what has happened to DEI initiatives has been remotely surprising. This is how these companies have always been at their core.
My only solace is that the iteration of this particular start-up (against my advice and without my continued stewardship), folded less than a year after my removal as those owners missed the boat to cash out as their industry surged onward. I suspect they are still doing just fine, somewhere else, now riding the trend of trading exponential profits for the exponential suffering of their workforce.
The last two sentences of your piece are absolutely correct!
Time to REALLY fight the fascists!
CARTOON: MAGA, Go 'F' Yourself -- Trump Sings Praise For Terrorist Killer Of American Troops
It’s done, MAGA. Your whole Red-White-N-Blue ‘America First’ act is done. Toast. All your red MAGA hat childish playground bullying crap is over. A dried up dog turd in the gutter. ...
https://mark192.substack.com/p/cartoon-maga-go-f-yourself-trump
Off topic: Really enjoying your book! Your parents sound amazing. I had several great uncles that did in fact read books on the line when it was possible to do so. My grandmother worked at a potato chip factory and never liked potato chips much for the rest of her life. None of my relatives would have been brave enough to try to sell a Communist newspaper to their fellow workers, but as they were all staunch atheists, I hope they'd have purchased one.
>The right loathed it because they are racists."
Of course, what other reason could there be for that? 🙄
Seems rather narrow-minded and dogmatic. Y'all might try looking at the other side of the ledger:
"The Downsides of DEI";
https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/the-downsides-of-dei?triedRedirect=true
"If there is anything positive to be gained from the ongoing racist murder of 'DEI,' let it be this: They are spending a lot of their time trying to smash something that was never that great to begin with."
The term? Sure. The concept? Absolutely not, and if anything it'd be exceedingly myopic to assume that Trump somehow unilaterally reversed 160+ years of civil rights evolution in the US.
I ran into an acquaintance last week who was legitimately under the impression that Trump had "cancelled" all of the civil rights legislation – and litigation! – in the 1950s & 1960s in particular. Remarkably, this person is educated and has a degree from a top university; unfortunately the problem is them shifting their news intake to all Fox News / OAN / Newsmax / right-wing podcasts all the time – and yet they STILL somehow "forgot" that no president can unilaterally "overrule" the other two branches of government.
Propaganda's a serious mother of a drug.
In any event, it is still 100% illegal to fire any given person solely for being female. Or Muslim. Or Hispanic. Or even trans: irony noted, but the SCOTUS justice who penned the landmark opinion adding transgender people to the list of others who can't be discriminated in the workplace against was none other than Trump's own pick, Neil Gorsuch.
The core absurdity of Trump's jihad on DEI is that there's somehow something "wrong" with having public environments of all sorts filled with diverse groups of people, not merely upper-middle-class white suburbanites. Or that including long-ostracized groups like queer Americans is "bad." Or even that it's "okay" for men to earn more than women. (One of the "equity" parts a lot of people haven't considered.") Even if you disagree with quota systems or something, America's diversity is one of its STRENGTHS. Not even Trump can change that.
"The other time that a nationwide uprising genuinely had corporate America and its political allies on their heels was in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd."
This was arguably the first event to truly unite most Americans since 9/11. Now that we're nearing the fifth anniversary of Floyd's murder, I would truly love to know how the AF we went from THAT to THIS insane overreaction, with Trump winning reelection and attempting to kill off DEI anything at the same rapid clip Hitler burned books.
Much like the far-right's propaganda machine rewrote Jan. 6 into "a day of love," it warped the murder of an innocent Black man by a racist cop into a mass conspiracy orchestrated by "ANTIFA," the newest & silliest edition to the list of terms weirdly demonized by the right. (The all-lowercase "antifascist" doesn't look as cool, I guess.)
Still, this is important: I vividly recall the Times's pop-up on my phone noting that the Floyd protests were, in fact, the largest in American history, and the first to include protests in all 50 states. Over 20 million people participated.
All that goodwill evaporated at stunning speed.
We have REALLY got to figure out how and why – and how to prevent anything of the sort from occurring again. And yet I know that that's a daunting, and potentially impossible, task to achieve.
Yes!
So often even when we muster power in workplaces, commmunities, and broader movements we fall back inside the same limiting systems.
A coupe micro examples to go along with your union experience Hamilton- when I was a local UAW President bargaining contracts we would generate a certain amount of leverage to force employers to make some concessions. I remember when the light bulb lit up for me that some issues add material gain- always important- but other issues helped us build our power for the long term- ultimately leading to better material gains.
Small things like the right to do significant union orientation in work time. When I was with 1199, at one nursing home we bargained for a monthly work time union “information session.”
The UAW allowed an impressive system of negotiated union staff helping w EAP, benefits etc to slide into a certain level of political nepotism and demobilizing BUT using leverage to OWN our workplaces and our movements,
to build organization is a much appreciated critical distinction.
One last example from the community side. We had effectively elected a fully progressive local government only to realize how circumscribed we were by State and National laws and by our tax system. Passing lefty resolutions or making small incremental progressive change was ok, but using resources to seed and support
grassroots neighborhood and tenant organizing helped drive bigger change and imbed political progress.
Not only "The official “How Things Work” t-shirt makes you look like a badass, even if you can only lift five pounds.", it's alto the best quality T-shirt I have. Thank you for the good, quality work by union members.
Carol--thank you for your taste in t shirts.
You can never go wrong keeping your focus on power.
https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/methods/studying_power.html#axioms
I thought 8 Can't Wait fixed everything? You're telling me it didn't?
Lot of self described smart people were pretty confident defund was going all wrong and that was the way to go. Way I recall it the same smarmy fucks ended up with all the power 20-24. I'd imagine they tucked right in and put all eight inoffensive, useless reforms over right?
Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but if I were a company I'd get rid of "DEI" in outward-facing communications likely to be seen by the Powers, but continue on course internally. Maybe these companies are getting out of the "equity" business only to stealthily revert to the equality business that's already woven into the company culture.
My work career traversed the deep cultural transformations that occurred through feminism and civil rights (two decades? Pfft! How about five decades?). DEI was just a poorly-conceived addendum to decades of taking the EEO poster in the lunchroom for granted: which meant in many cases learning to get along with all sorts of colleagues and reporting to people Not Like You.
Of course all this depends on the internal culture of any company. The "homosexual reproduction" (managers hire people like them; therefore more white guys) discussed by Rosabeth Moss Kant is certainly a major force in the sociology of corpoorations. My own career was in public transit in a liberal city: another source of unbridled optimism (these days they hire anyone and everyone willing to eliminate cannabinoids from their lives, so the driver population continues being incredibly diverse.)
Nevertheless I appreciate the idea of boycotting major retail firms as a pushback to the racism that fuels the Trump's administration's blackmail program. We're all operating on many levels of society and so must act from hope while at the same time resisting.
All of this. We must stop believing that equality can be Corporate Memphis-ed into existence. All those bendy, smiley, primary-colored, multi-ethnic people, used by designers to help sell the idea that corporations were enlightened, inclusive, and empathetic… It was gaslighting - we need a new aesthetic with which to represent a just world.
A thousand times yes.
I'm having trouble upgrading. I go to Substack website and it says go to Substack website!
Ah yes, the best way to atone for past discrimination based on skin color is… to discriminate against others based on their skin color. Makes perfect sense.
Fuck off🤡
Did we read the same article or where did that come from?
Roots of BLM
Another racist wolf in Christ’s clothing.