humanodon and I were having a great discussion prompted by his post:

it was entirely private and will say so because, in my experience, DEI has been pretty much 100% weaponized.

And not by a minority employee saying "I don't like you therefore you are racist." We've skated around this a couple times already and in both cases we were saved by another member of that minority telling the complainant "quit your bitching, stop sucking and don't pretend that your failure to perform is due to the racism of others." No, the real problem is White People Witch Hunts.

My wife's professional community is currently tearing itself apart two or three different ways around this right now. It's almost entirely white women whose livelihood is largely provided by their husbands or partners. They are all profoundly driven, most of them having taken on six figures of debt to work in a profession that will pay them $40k a year if they are apex practitioners. The community is small, so everyone knows everyone else, and of course they largely organize through Facebook groups. They also have effectively zero minority participation, which means the ones on top are racists, which is an allegation leveled and battled to scorched earth by other white women.

It's basically another Red Scare - white people have culturally appropriated racism as an acceptable thoughtcrime to accuse other white people of for purposes of internecine warfare and palace intrigue. Joe didn't give you a raise? And you're white? Surrounded by white people? Well guess what, white people, if you band together and say "hey we're all white must be because Joe is a racist" then everyone gets to tear into Joe for racism. Defend Joe, defend racism. Object to the fact that no actual minorities were involved in this witch hunt and you, too, will go on trial. Should Joe let a couple people go to hire minorities, Joe is practicing retaliation and will be fired. Should Joe hire any minorities they're obviously "tokens" and all the white people will treat them as such. We're at the point with one of these civil wars where the white women have banded together and accused one of the only African American woman in the community of being a racist because she isn't properly allying herself with the "minority struggle." We're at the point with another one of these civil wars where the only other African American woman's pleas for calm are falling on deaf ears.

There's no real way to get ahead of it, either. You can bring in a DEI consultant, pay them a lot of money, and be pilloried for being performative. You can change "master" to "main" because cops are racist pigs but nine months later racism still exists and it's obviously your fault. We had

One

HUNDRED

percent

minority hires and we still lucked out. The angry white women were definitely summoning a tribunal.

McCarthy gave his targets a choice: either help root out Communism or be a Communist. No actual Communists were required, it was all a lateral power move.

This is an anonymous post by a moose. It has even less accountability than the white women accusing a black woman of being a tool of oppression against her own race. I have no doubt there are thousands of minority tech workers out there dealing with institutional racism quietly, resentfully, peacefully because they have no choice. But we're also definitely at the stage where white people pretend to be black people so that they can steal credibility while they call out other white people.

We've got seven employees. Six of them are minority women. And there are whisperings that we're all racist. Most of it coming from a school that doesn't say "Seattle, WA" in its email headers, it says "occupied Salish land" despite legitimately building their new dorms on top of a Native American burial ground.