It’s interesting that corporations that used to brag about their commitment to diversity “are now tiptoeing away” from woke DEI practices, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal last week. Two, three, four years ago DEI was all the rage. Almost every business in the country was embracing it, including some of the most marquis brands in America: Disney, Johnson & Johnson, Kaiser Permanente, Cisco and Marriott. The latter’s mission statement was typical: “At Marriott, we create an inclusive environment that supports the recruitment, retention, and advancement of all employees, and actively engage in efforts to develop a diverse and inclusive workforce, owner, guest, and supplier base.”
Yet now, quietly, companies are dropping their DEI efforts in favor of a return to the meritocracy that for centuries spurred corporate America to lead the world. Tech Crunch, an online portal that reports on the tech sector, wrote that “The [DEI] acronym is near-poisonous now--a word that creates almost instant tension between those who embrace it and those who want it dead.” The article referenced an AI company CEO, Alexandr Wang, who tweeted, “Today we’ve formalized an important hiring policy at Scale [his company]. We hire for MEI: merit, excellence, and intelligence.” Wang explained: “That means we hire only the best person for the job, we seek out and demand excellence, and we unapologetically prefer people who are very smart.”
Intelligence over skin color! Imagine that.
Wang’s embrace of meritocracy has reverberated throughout the business world. I’m not a big fan of Elon Musk, but you have to admit he carries a lot of influence among corporate leaders. When Musk tweets, “DEI must DIE. The point was to end discrimination, not replace it with different discrimination,” a lot of CEOs agree. According to the Inc. newsletter, “a growing number of businesses are scaling [DEI departments] back in an apparent response [to the backlash]. Now new data indicates that the people responsible for creating and implementing those policies are themselves being laid off at double the rate of other employees.” The Inc. article cites a workplace analytics company, Revelio Labs, as reporting that companies are “walking back” their DEI programs, adding that the “attrition rate for DEI roles has been about double that of non-DEI jobs.” In other words, a DEI job isn’t as secure as it used to be. Inc. reported that “Zoom, Snap, Meta, Tesla, DoorDash, Lyft, Home Depot, and Wayfair” are among those who recently have “cut DEI teams,” while other companies--United Airlines, Kellogg's, Nike, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Football League, and Major League Baseball--are being sued for their diversity programs. Google the term “DEI backlash” and you’ll get at least 30 pages of hits.
DEI always has had political implications. From my perspective, it’s sad that Democrats rushed to support such a radically unfair, irresponsible and probably unconstitutional ideology, while allowing Republicans to seize the high ground of traditional meritocracy. DEI and its associated practices will, I predict, someday be viewed as a temporary aberration, an infection, that sickened the American system for a few years, until its falseness was perceived and the nation snapped out of it.
It can’t be emphasized enough that the pernicious ideology of “social equity” is directly responsible for the awful conditions Oakland finds itself in. Proponents of wokeism will disagree, but how can it be doubted that decades of “progressive” leadership have been responsible for our problems? Had meritocracy been adhered to, we wouldn’t have the incompetence that has plagued Oakland governance for decades. We wouldn’t have Carroll Fife or Nikki Bas or the spectacularly unhinged Sheng Thao running things. We would have had, and could have had, intelligent, smart leaders who would have hired other intelligent, smart people to conduct the business of Oakland. Instead, we handed over the keys to self-promoting, intellectually challenged ideologues, and got what we deserved.
Steve Heimoff