DEI and Woke Culture: Where Do We Go From Here?

Welcome to the next installment of my “What the Hell is Going On?” collection drawn from my first book and various new essays that I have been sitting on and am now ready to publish. You can read the whole collection.

If there is anything that has changed the cultural dialogue in the US and much of the Western world, it’s the so-called woke culture. It’s when people put their pronouns in their bio to make trans people more comfortable. It’s the prevalence of the conversation on race, immigration, and much more. Most importantly, it’s a coded language for an in-group of people with certain opinions about the world. 

Has America had it with woke culture? Is there going to be a backlash? I saw a YouTube comment that said “woke culture” would be my generation’s disco. What happens when we attempt to balance making society fairer and more equitable with the seemingly endless social requirements on speech and actions?

We answered this question in 2024 with the re-election of Donald Trump. The most often cited thing in his election was people voting against DEI and Woke. It’s a catch-all term for things people have seen heard and certain agendas from certain groups. While some might view these changes as positive, the electorate certainly does not. The most cited problem? Language policing and who gets to say what.

The new “woke” language includes things that seem unnecessary to most, and often, people confront this for the first time at work. This is not your father’s or mother’s diversity training. Putting pronouns in email signatures is a daily reminder of the new standards. The benefits for people are not well explained to the average person, and it seems incredibly tedious for many.

It’s also about how institutions and society try to make their first cautious steps toward diversity, equality, and a future that includes everyone. News stories about organizations making radical changes to seem more inclusive and diverse intentionally seem nonsense to some. Diversity used to be just a concept, and woke culture has done more than training and some HR policies. Woke culture has gone to the next level. Woke culture is attempting to solve the problem. Thanks to social media, companies can’t just proclaim platitudes and ignore structural issues. Transparency is regularly leading to real progress. At least, it seems that way. I have my doubts. Is all this shifting around doing any good? Is society beginning to make the shift?

As you can imagine, there has been no shortage of backlash. This is another front where the cultural narrative is changing and moving away from the white, heteronormative ideal to a different idea that is more inclusive. This is not to say that “woke” culture isn’t without its faults. The term belies a certain restful ignorance of experience that many people find annoying at best and offensive at worst. 

Identity Politics 

Republicans often complain about identity politics while being the progenitor of the identity politics fights we see today. Identity politics is the outgrowth of the cultural desire to know about people to decide how much respect we can afford them. Much like redlining, there is a hierarchy, and much of ID politics is trying to uproot that social hierarchy. We fight over identity because of abuse absent ethnic homogeneity; it’s all we have in a nation that is bound together by ideas and values. 

Who Gets to Be?

In this country, we must return to the question of who gets to be an American. Throughout the country’s history, this question has plagued us. This happens when a country is founded not on ethnicity but shared geographic location and ideas. America is a nation founded on ideas, values, and principles. For much of our history, as people have arrived, it has taken titanic shifts in social policy for new people to be included in what was considered American. The Irish and Italians fought for their American-ness. Jewish people have had their turn as well. Eastern Europeans and Asians have also fought for their inclusion into the definition of American. The LGBTQIA+ community has only just begun their fight for Americanhood. The group that has fought the longest, the hardest, and arguably won the least in the battle to be American are African Americans. 

Good Strategy, Bad Tactics

 

The Docents and Diversity

The Right has taken on this fight as its primary culture war fight. Twitter handles for those who find all this woke culture business has shifted from “no snowflakes” and “not a snowflake” to “anti-woke.” An entire online ecosystem is devoted to criticizing the latest from woke culture. In a recent story from Chicago Now, the Art Institute of Chicago let go of its team of volunteer docents because the group was not incredibly diverse. The docents were older, white, upper middle class, and typically female.

The docents in the museum guide visitors and discuss the art. There is a lengthy training process, and the docents often work nearly full-time hours. These folks love art and have worked hard to be effective at their jobs. However, the Art Institute of Chicago wanted a more diverse group of docents but couldn’t recruit volunteers from minority or lower-income backgrounds. Instead, they let the volunteers go and opened three paying positions for museum guides so that they could hire and pay more diverse people to guide people through the museum. On the bright side of this story, new paid positions are open, but with only three, it will not make up for the 82 volunteer docents leading visitors through the museum.

The writer in the article above lambasts the idea. Rather than focus on those who could complete the program and do the job, the museum wants more diversity and eliminates volunteers to achieve it. Is this an example of woke culture run amok or a genuine quest for better equity in the arts? The arts tend not to involve people from working-class backgrounds or people of color (plenty of intersections there. On the one hand, it’s difficult to say that three paid positions (part-time, no less) are better than 82 volunteers. Slate had this article on the matter. How does one train a group of white women of a certain amount of privilege to talk about race competently? It is no easy thing, as the article in Slate illustrates. Having more diverse voices is valuable, but is it worth upturning volunteer programs?

No Woke Work

During the pandemic, primarily due to vaccine mandates, a new job site called “RedBalloon” was launched, offering employers and employees a chance to match based on the idea that companies and employees have no obligation to agree with each other politically and that politics of all stripes should stay out of the workplace. Their website claims, “We connect employers who value freedom with employees who value it too. We envision a world beyond cancel culture, where employees are free to work… without fear that they will find themselves on the wrong side of their employer’s politics. That’s it. No agendas, politics, or drama. Just work. Interested? Let’s create that world together.” The main concern is that people want to go to work and make money to pay their bills without worrying that the company will take a political position that might put anyone in danger of losing their job because of the ever-changing political winds of the country.

On the face of it, this might seem like a good idea. That’s what most people would like from their workplace. However, the problem is whether these companies are willing to take steps to make their workplaces welcoming for people who might have a different background (class, race, sexuality, gender, etc.) than the dominant group. Companies, for too long, haven’t bothered with this (despite legal protections for some), and now it appears that some companies want to do even less. Does the “No agendas, politics, or drama” include racist remarks? Does it include discriminatory hiring practices? Does it mean that a company will seek to hire the most qualified people or those who fit in the best?

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

College campuses have been the front lines of the new culture. As the Left seeks to make the world more inclusive of more types than just a precious few, people have pushed back for “freedom” and “openness,” but the line where freedom and openness end and making a space unsafe for certain people seems blurry. The firing of the Weinstein brothers from Evergreen College in Washington State was a hot-button issue. That happened when the school told white students to stay home so students of color could have the campus to themselves. I will have to admit, having gone to a campus where there were only 450 black students and perhaps a couple of thousand others, I find this idea to be a bit daft. That said, universities are attempting to create environments where diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the core and are actively setting out to admit more diverse students, hire diverse faculty, and work on historical inequalities around income, etc. This is a good idea, but the execution can often fall flat. It has always been difficult for people of color to navigate academia. Students of color, especially those whose parents did not attend college, need additional support and funding to study. These reforms are a good idea. People are asking if DEI, as currently practiced, is not violating the rights of all parties involved. In this Newsweek opinion piece, Dorian Abbot and Ivan Marinovic propose a different idea called Merit, Fairness, and Equity. They propose universities go into public schools and help students achieve in high school to achieve at college. They also propose an end to legacy and athletic admissions. I can’t argue with them on the last point. Legacy and athletic admissions need to go. Athletics costs far too much money that is better used elsewhere to achieve academics. I can see a situation where this would be a good idea, but I worry that this idea will serve neither the institution nor the students well. Their model of MFE makes some sense. It could be a helpful innovation.

The Goals of Woke Culture

One thing becomes apparent on this journey through the idea of a woke culture gone amok: many people do not see a reason to overturn the existing state of affairs to solve an issue brought up by an “intransigent” minority. This cultural war occurs on social media, in workplaces, and elsewhere. I am reminded of a Facebook comment I read once where a young man said something interesting, “I don’t mind trans people; I just don’t want to be told what to think about it.” I think that is emblematic of most people’s ideas about transgenderism and all the other social problems. When the Civil Rights Act was passed, the racists did not disappear overnight. The same goes for the integration of schools and the ending of public segregation. However, in time, things changed, and people changed. Changing culture to accept people of different identities and backgrounds is the kind of progress that takes decades. People with old ideas will either change or take their prejudice to their grave. In time, these opinions will change and move on. The goal is to attempt to make our present institutions, culture, and language more inclusive of people who have been historically excluded. The reality is that this kind of work is the tree that one must plant and under whose shade one will never sit. I admire the work being done, but while making things more inclusive, it is essential not to make things exclusionary to others inadvertently. Everyone deserves an education dignified work, and to do so with the kind of psychological safety that has only been enjoyed by a privileged few in the past. That is the kind of goal that “woke” culture is haphazardly moving toward. Will every initiative work well? No. Is it essential work, nonetheless? Absolutely.