Skip to main content

Toxic Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Co-option and Perpetuation of Power


Elsewhere I have argued that the hegemonic structures of neoliberal capitalism have thoroughly co-opted the language of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) to uphold and perpetuate racial capitalism. 

In this blogpost, I will argue that the circulation of DEI within infrastructures of power has upheld toxic communicative processes that have worked to consolidate elite control while at the same time erasing those at the margins. 

Undermining agency of communities, planting doubts, spreading rumors, organizing in cliques etc. emerge as strategies for maintaining and perpetuating power. These toxic strategies are then rebranded as methods for organizing for justice, thoroughly capturing power while erasing openings for critique. Any critique is projected as unsafe, uncivil, and non-collegial.

The gatekeeping of knowledge systems and resources has been placed in the hands of those with power in discursive spaces, while simultaneously keeping out communities at the margins. 

The co-option of DEI has worked to perpetuate classed inequalities while propping up a professionalized managerial class profiting from writing grants, carrying out projects, and writing up project reports. 

This has played out in the form of communicative processes that continually delegitimize the voices and participatory capacities of communities at the margins, often deploying the language of safety and quality. Those who have attained power within the hegemonic DEI regime must decide on the games of participation and must determine the rules of safety. The language of safety is deployed precisely to uphold cliques and consolidate financial power. 

Evident here are the games of elite actors within DEI infrastructures in deploying the games around safety to secure more resources while keeping out communities at the margins and those at the "margins of the margins" of communities.

Consider for instance the upper caste, gender diverse postcolonial scholar in the metropole working through various power games to delegitimize and undermine students and early career researchers working from the margins and located at the margins. Consider here the posturing of casteless-ness to perform victimhood while discussing marginality, power, equity etc. 

Consider similarly white scholars seeing DEI as a funding opportunity and building careers out of the DEI scholarship market while working through these same gatekeeping processes to keep out diverse early career researchers from scholarship and funding opportunities. In Aotearoa, consider the funding opportunities opened up in particular junctures by positioning grant applications in conversation with Te Tiriti while doing very little work in standing up to resist the structures of whiteness, or worse, while being complicit with the structures of whiteness in perpetuating erasure.

Consider similarly rainbow organizations in the mainstream deploying the language of safety to secure political and economic resources while keeping out communities at the margins.

That DEI infrastructures, under the attacks from the far-right, have started crumbling, toeing into the games of power, is directly a result of the complicity of these structures with power. The toxic ab/uses of DEI has erased the transformative capacities of the work of organizing for equity and justice while inventing a palatable language that perpetuates the status quo.


Popular posts from this blog

The whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa

When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga...
Read more

Upper caste Indian women in the diaspora, DEI, and the politics of hate

Figure 1: Trump, Vance and their partners responding to the remarks by Mariann Edgar Budde   Emergent from the struggles of the civil rights movement , led by African Americans , organized against the oppressive history of settler colonialism and slavery that forms the backbone of US society, structures around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) formed an integral role in forging spaces for diverse recognition and representation.  These struggles around affirmative action, diversity, equity and inclusion were at the heart of the changes to white only immigration policies, building pathways for migration of diverse peoples from the Global South.  The changes to the immigration policies created opportunities for Indians to migrate to the US, with a rise of Indian immigration into the US since the 1970s into educational institutions, research and development infrastructures, and technology-finance infrastructures. These migratory structures into the US were leveraged by l...
Read more

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit...
Read more