The Big Lie about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

When my daughter was in high school, she sang in the school chorus, a group that included 80 students. After one town-wide performance, a woman wrote to both the school newsletter and the local newspaper, complaining that the chorus was “not sufficiently diverse.”

In a written reply, my daughter took exception to this view. She conveyed that students of Greek, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Malaysian ancestry, along with students of European ancestry, including Italian, Hungarian, Austrian, French, and Spanish, were among the chorus members.

Oh yeah, the chorus also had 12 African-Americans students and two Hispanic-American students, and a few students of mixed ancestry. Flash forward 16 years: diversity to the Left is now fully embraced as a euphemism for “black,” and the term as used today, has little relation to the original meaning of the word.

If you’re white, the Left has decided that you are an impediment to diversity. The wokesters among us, a highly prejudiced lot, regard all whites as one amorphous mass of people with no individuality, no distinct cultural backgrounds, and indelibly racist – especially prone to being anything but open to others. This supposition, of course, is balderdash, to put it politely.

Truthfully, it's kinda fun to be working nowadays.

The pit of the abyss was when the OSHA vaccine mandate was in play. This was on the heels of the 2020 riots, election, and a general open season in anyone who wasn't pro-CDC. Thankfully my employer (I'm a Shepard...) was very reasonable. That didn't stop the potential for fellow employees to be jackwagons about masking etc.

After the OSHA mandate was struck down, a funny thing happened...focus returned on delivering shareholder value and beating the competition. It also helped that virtually everyone who self-disclosed that they took the shots, got sick with covid...the soft hostility to the unvaxxed disappeared.

Today, the enemy is inflation and the downturn. While some wokey elements remain, HR is back to making the workplace hospitable and ensuring compensation is up to snuff. And while some FReepers may disagree, one small benefit of some of these HR changes is that I don't hear (as much) about guys making passes or creepy comments about female coworkers. I'd be in favor of women kicking such guys in the nutz, but I'm a frontier corporate justice kinda guy.

I can work from home and also come to the office (I prefer the latter but enjoy the former). The Great Resignation has required leaders to dig deep, to explain the value proposition to employees....that makes us better leaders. On top of all that, there are so many interesting things in the marketplace and exciting yet cautionary elements like generative AI and ways to make customers happy, that being "in the game" has never been better.

There is always stupid stuff at work. But the excitement in being a capitalist and employed in America today is better than any drink or drug.

The workplace experience is about the same for me. There was a time when co-workers would proudly exclaim their vaccination status but nobody even mentions it anymore. Masks are long gone. Social distancing a distant memory. The only remnants of that COVID era in my office are those silly arrows we had taped to the floor of the hallways so that employees could move about the building in a clockwise fashion without having to come face to face with each other.

Those arrows are almost impossible to remove so I guess they will go when the lease is up and the building contractors gut the place out for the next tenant.

When the vaccine mandates were in place and I had to request an exemption, I thought the nonsense would never end. When granted the exemption, my employer told me I would need to stay masked in the office and be subject to periodic COVID testing. I figured I was going to be a black sheep. But none of that ever came to pass. Ironically it was only the unvaccinated coming into the office at that time and we didn't care about masks. By the time the vaccinated started streaming in, the whole thing had blown over. To this day, I have never been asked about my vaccination status at work.

It's pretty much back to regular business now.

As for your comments about sexual harassment, that has not been a problem in my company. At least not since the 1980s or so. Women are treated respectfully at work and it is actually them that might sometimes poke a little fun at us men (but we don't mind).

Biggest change that doesn't seem to be going away soon is that Mondays and Fridays are most "remote" days in my company. The offices are pretty full Tuesday-Thursday but we have somehow blended to soft four-day weekends with no apparent loss to productivity. If I'm backed up at work, I go in on Friday and have a mostly empty office to focus on getting caught up. By 2 or 3 pm, I'm on the commuter train back home with a cold one in my hands. Actually a pretty nice routine.

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