Under mounting legal and political pressure, companies’ DEI tactics are evolving.

By Taylor Telford and Julian Mark
May 5, 2024 at 8:05 a.m. EDT

Last year, Eli Lilly’s annual shareholders letter referenced the acronym for
diversity, equity and inclusion 48 times. This year, “DEI” is nowhere to be found.

In March, Starbucks got shareholder approval to replace “representation” goals
with “talent” performance for executive bonus incentives. At Molson Coors,
“People & Planet” metrics have displaced environmental, social and governance
(ESG) goals, and the acronym DEI has disappeared altogether.

Amid growing legal, social and political backlash, American businesses, industry
groups and employment professionals are quietly scrubbing DEI from public view —
though not necessarily abandoning its practice. As they rebrand programs and
hot-button acronyms, they’re reassessing decades-old anti-discrimination
strategies and rewriting policies that once emphasized race and gender to
prioritize inclusion for all.

It’s a stark contrast to 2020, when the murder of George Floyd unleashed a
racial justice movement that prompted companies to double down on policies
aiming to increase opportunity for groups that have historically faced
discrimination. Less than a year after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative
action in colleges and universities — a landmark ruling that found
race-conscious admissions violated the right to equal treatment under the
Constitution — a growing contingent of critics is arguing that DEI creates
inequalities of its own. Some conservatives have blamed DEI for a variety of
problems, such as the Baltimore bridge collapse and Boeing’s safety woes,
without providing evidence [because there is *no* fucking evidence for it].
Dozens of anti-DEI bills are being considered by state legislatures across the
country, and DEI looks poised to become a wedge issue in this year’s
presidential election.

Johnny C. Taylor Jr., chief executive of the Society for Human Resource
Management, said that practitioners of DEI and its antecedents traditionally
have focused on improving representation for historically marginalized groups,
believing that “the magic bullet was diversity.”

“We underestimated that inclusion was the real challenge,” Taylor said. “Now
people are saying, ‘Not only should we probably call it something different, we
should probably evolve it.’”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/05/05/dei-affirmative-action-rebrand-evolution/

This is great news. First of all, the "old" DEI had become a cult. Actually
*doing* anything to attain DEI wasn't important; all that mattered was *talking*
about it, e.g. saying that you "celebrate diversity" and have a "commitment to
inclusion," blah blah blah.

But the second big point is what Mr. Taylor said at the end of the excerpt: "We
underestimated that inclusion was the real challenge." I have long said that
"diversity" is not a value, and is nothing to "celebrate." The U.S. *is* an
ethnically and racially and culturally diverse society, and that's just
something to be acknowledged, not "celebrated." Equity can simply be dismissed
out of hand, because what it means to the proggie left is equality of outcomes,
and that not only is not an American ideal, it is un-American. But inclusion is
important. If a company or a university has a diverse work force or student
body, it is imperative that everyone is, and feels himself to be, included.

So minimize the D, chuck out the E altogether, and focus on the I.