The New York Times is the Democrat Party’s “paper of record.”
But every once in a while The Times cuts against the Left’s narrative.
And everything Ron DeSantis said about the “woke” Left was just confirmed by this New York Times piece.
Upon winning re-election by nearly 20 points, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis decreed that “Florida is where ‘woke’ goes to die.”
One of the main staples of contemporary “wokeness” is the relentless pushing of DEI (diversity, equity, inclusivity).
DEI is academic jargon for socialistic bean counting, and as a result, a cottage industry for DEI “experts” has emerged.
Left-wing activists are getting paid obscene amounts of money – often from the pockets of taxpayers – to conduct DEI seminars in order to supposedly improve work environments.
There’s just one problem – it doesn’t work.
And Jesse Singal, a liberal journalist who has resisted many of the excesses of “wokeness,” laid out the argument in an opinion piece for The New York Times.
“Any psychological intervention may turn out to do more harm than good,” Singal wrote. “The psychologist Scott Lilienfeld made this point in an influential 2007 article in which he argued that certain interventions — including ones geared at fighting youth substance use, youth delinquency and PTSD — most likely fell into that category.”
In other words, browbeating people into being more “diverse” and “inclusive” can — and often does — have the opposite effect.
“In the case of D.E.I., Dr. Dobbin and Dr. Kalev warn that diversity trainings that are mandatory or that threaten dominant groups’ sense of belonging or make them feel blamed may elicit negative backlash or exacerbate biases,” Singal added. “Many popular contemporary D.E.I. approaches meet these criteria. They often seem geared more toward sparking a revolutionary reunderstanding of race relations than solving organizations’ specific problems.”
This is completely correct.
In fact, many of these organizations do not have a problem – they are simply going through the motions of DEI in order to appease shakedown artists.
Singal added that if organizations do not correctly diagnose internal problems, then eventually “organizations will grow tired of throwing time and money at trainings where the upside is mostly theoretical and the potential downsides include unhappy employees, public embarrassment and even lawsuits.”
The backlash to DEI is already coming.
Radical left-wing activists bit off more than they could chew, and they have turned DEI into a four-letter word.
Non-woke human resource companies are already popping up, and they will surely multiply if the “woke” counterparts are no longer useful.
