So many of the best, most thoughtful, most caring and talented people I’ve collaborated with in my career have had a focus on inclusion and equity as either the primary role or the supporting and enabling context of their work. But thanks to a well-funded, decades-long concerted effort, the reasonable and moral consensus that we should care for one another and offer opportunities to those who haven’t had them has become a vulnerability that those in political power right now are using to target anyone who is trying to empower or uplift the marginalized.

It’s a war on DEI, and it’s left good people feeling afraid to make basic statements of plainly human dignity, like “we should work to undo the harmful effects of decades of racist exclusion”, or “we should fix the pay inequities that have kept women from being paid fairly when they do the same work as men”. These were uncontroversial statements for decades even amongst the most conservative segments of America and the extremist takeover of both social media and conventional media has quickly normalized such a radical shift that people are now often afraid to plainly state these kinds of fundamental truths in public, especially in the workplace.

But there are so many good people who care about this work, whose values have not been corrupted just because the authoritarians currently in power have decided to persecute others, or to strip funding from organizations, if they dare to use “forbidden” language when describing the way they’re going to take care of people. The MAGA extremists aren’t content just to take television shows off the air, or to ban books in schools — they’ve also provided lists of words that can cause organizations to lose federal funding, and now have escalated their attack on empathy and kindness to include firing people who have expressed sympathy or solidarity for communities through demonstrations such as kneeling in a gesture of support.

The Mother of Invention

The net result is a situation I’ve come to describe as the “**Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era of DEI. Much of the work of inclusion and support is still going on, because the spirit of kindness and justice is an unstoppable one. But just as there have always been LGBTQ+ people in the military, and the DADT legal framework just allowed institutions to continue to be in denial about reality, many pragmatic organizations have begun evolving to say “fine, we won’t call it DEI if these delicate MAGA crybabies can’t hear those words — but we can still do the work”.

Because the truth is, communities focused on justice and community care have always been able to provide for each other, even when persecution or circumstance required that they be clandestine about it. It was never easy, but there was indeed a railroad that did run underground. And it has always been communities on the margins that invent and evolve language anyway; when the right decided to demonize the word “woke” after belatedly (mis-)appropriating it from Black and queer cultures, I was angry about the injustice of the intellectual dishonesty of that campaign. But I’ve never worried about whether these communities would find even more expressive and joyful ways to communicate the vibrant and vital ideas that vexed these soulless fascists so completely.

And there’s some shedding of the old that might even be a small silver lining to the cloud. Within our communities of practice, many of us have felt some degree of fatigue or burnout at the cynicism and ineffectiveness with which many organizations embraced their DEI efforts, especially those that tried to engage at a superficial level in 2020 and then only maintained a cosmetic embrace of the work without proper resourcing or structural support in the years since. In truth, I think a lot of the institutions whose leaders have followed that pattern were just waiting for this excuse to drop the pretense, and at least now we can all stop the charade.

Back Into The Light

Not being able to speak plainly about the vital work of inclusion is, to be clear, a grave injustice. But the fact that the petulant children in this administration are desperately hoping that a network of quislings will tattle on their coworkers for using the forbidden word “diversity” reveals just how fragile – and importantly, how unpopular this attack on equity really is.

Though the right wing has been able to game the refs in media for the last decade enough that many people feel “this woke thing has gone too far!”, in reality, most people also really do like the idea that things should be fair. They really do like the feeling that they’re being good to those who’ve been mistreated, and they liked when The Muppets taught them how to be nice to people who were different from them. It’s not fair that we have to endure these indignities and attacks but there is also some solace and comfort in knowing that so many people also know intrinsically what is good and right, even when they may be afraid about how and when they can say it.

So the specific wording we have been using may be dormant for a while, and many people who used to use these descriptions may have to refrain from doing so. Maybe these particular names for these concepts will even slip from popular vernacular, replaced by updated names that reflect a new generation’s sensibilities. I’ll never stop being furious about these liars having misrepresented the work of good people and twisted acts of kindness and love into something that is vilified.

But I’m also heartened to remember past eras of resilience and adaptability when an imperfect and inelegant compromise helped navigate through a tumultuous time until everyone in a community could come out stronger on the other side. If the cruelty of this moment forces all of us to again face a situation where there are no good choices, at least we’ve seen that there are ways we can help preserve the progress that’s been made so far, by any name.