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.