Is DEI About to Die?

Another victory against woke was won this week, as ‘Big Four’ accounting firm PwC, which employs 46,000 people in the U.S., was forced to tone down (though not completely scrap) its racist ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ (DEI) policies.

The Financial Times explains:

PwC has dropped some of its diversity targets in the U.S. and opened up previously off-limits scholarships to white students after pressure from Right-wing activists and a Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action.

There is something insane about the way such open discrimination has become little more than a banal fact, widely and timidly accepted.

But after years of policies overtly and aggressively discriminating against white people (and sometimes Asians) the pushback is now gaining momentum. And, crucially, it is not just coming from (presumably evil) “Right-wing activists”.

We’ve seen the firing of Claudine Gay – widely seen as a diversity hire, woefully unqualified for her former role as Harvard President – and now billionaire Bill Ackman has taken against DEI with an almost missionary zeal, publishing a long essay in which he calls it “inherently a racist and illegal movement”.

Elon Musk was, of course, already on board, stating, “DEI is just another word for racism. Shame on anyone who uses it”, amongst many other anti-DEI statements.

Mark Cuban launched a long, but unconvincing, defence of DEI, broadly amounting to the claim that DEI merely gives you a wider pool of people to choose from, but is in no way discriminatory. Musk’s reply, asking when we’d see a short Asian woman playing for Cuban’s basketball team, ratio’d Cuban into oblivion with a single post.

This led, in case you missed it, to a series of hilarious memes from parody account Wei Wu, demanding her rightful place in the team…

Those of us on the side of sanity are clearly winning the meme wars. And we have Musk on our team, which was probably to be expected, but now also Ackman, which seems a more significant development.

Pressure is also being applied to politicians. Dean Phillips – who is set to receive $1 million from Ackman for his presidential campaign – has dropped all mention of DEI from his website.

Of course, no one is suggesting Ackman forced him to do this. Phillips has simply become “educated” by – *checks notes* – Bill Ackman, who gently suggests “Let’s listen to what he has to say after he gets educated”. Lol.

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to get at least a sliver of enjoyment from the use of the now woke trope ‘Educate yourself’ against a proponent of DEI. Backed, almost irresistibly, by a million dollar incentive to stop the madness.

Returning to PwC, the FT points out the company has “dropped a pledge to award 40% of its procurement spending to minority-owned suppliers”. The FT also claims changes “included ending race-based eligibility criteria for a student internship programme”.

Sounds good. Though if one visits the actual webpage for the programme, the changes are less emphatic than one might hope. X account End Wokeness has provided a handy comparison of PwC’s language before and after this change:

Note they still insist that “Students who have demonstrated a commitment to DEI principles”, whatever that means, “will be preferred”. While the requirement that students “must self-identify” as one of a long list of oppressed minorities has been replaced with “we further encourage” said victim groups.

It feels like these changes have been made through gritted teeth, with a keen eye on not getting sued. PwC’s own statement appears to confirm this:

PwC’s DEI report named the Supreme Court ruling among the challenges to progress in 2023, along with economic uncertainty and social unrest. “We’ve also reflected on the Supreme Court ruling and applied rigour to advance our diversity commitment in a way that fully accords with the changing legal landscape,” the report said.

It’s still a win, but perhaps not a slam dunk of the kind we’d all like to see Wei Wu delivering for the Dallas Mavericks.

DEI needs to end. Its goals are as impossible as Wei Wu playing for a pro basketball team, and as undesirable as Claudine Gay becoming president of pretty much anything. It is also clearly racist, as made plain by Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, and one’s own common sense.

But this will not stop major companies and institutions clinging to demented communist ideas like DEI for dear life.

However, I personally do not believe DEI can survive this relentless assault by the twin forces of inherent truth and billionaire donors.

It will wriggle, it will squirm, but DEI will eventually DIE.

This article was first published on Nick Dixon’s Substack. To Subscribe, click here.

Stop Press: Corey Brooks has written a good piece for the Tablet about why DEI isn’t working.