AnIndefiniteArticle

Guess and check and guess and check and check the guessing by guessing a new way and checking out what happens.

I don’t have to imagine it. Part of why I’m grumpy and bitching on the internet is that I’ve found myself unemployed with a deleted career and an almost-finished phd. I’m kind of at a loss for what to do or what comes next or how I’ll pay rent in two weeks. I’m scared and I was victim blaming myself. Thanks for helping to contextualize my pain and pull me back to reality. I’m doing a lot better now after talking to people on lemmy than I was last night or even this morning.

Thank you so much for your work on this.

My post that you are replying to is mostly a tongue-in-cheek commentary on how programs that have existed for decades self-labeled as something that the right was able to rally against, thereby making themselves a single large target instead of a decentralized force distributed across agencies.

I just know that I first started seeing “DEI” as a label pop up in the first Trump admin. Frankly, in 2018, it was called “Climate and Diversity” in my local environment. Shortly thereafter it got relabeled.

DEI has been around since the 60s, in principle.

Yup! Remember how I said that before it was labeled there was a complex network of programs doing this job? DEI is more of a label than a program. I fully agree.

So, what constitutes DEI?
What the right is defining it as? What it has been since the 60s? What Biden enacted? What the government bodies enacted during sleepy trump?

It’s not well defined! It’s a scare word. It’s a label that we lined up behind that unintentionally made it easy for antiracist programs to be identified and targeted.

Being against DEI is like being against Antifa, or declaring Antifa a terrorist organisation. It’s not really a thing.
DEI is the awareness that previous centuries of discrimination no longer applies.
DEI isn’t a tangible thing. It’s humanity.
It didn’t happen during trump’s first term. But it did progress.
It didn’t happen during Bidens term. But it did progress.
That is humanity. Humanity progresses. Humanity is love, equity and freedom for all.

I can’t agree more! The label of DEI just makes these programs easier to find. This us true both for people seeking assistance from these programs and for people seeking to dismantle them. Such identification is a double-edged sword, and that’s what my depressed brain was trying to communicate.

Progress in the next 4 years is gonna be slow.
But everyone has worked on this before. It’s a hiatus. It will come back, and will be easier and more streamlined than before. Loads of people are backing up data, so it can be (relatively) easily restored. None of this has to be worked out again, nothing shared on the internet can truly die, ideas can’t be killed.
It’s gonna be 4 years of shit.
Hopefully Americans learn, and don’t vote in more conservatives.
…
…
Hopefully Americans get a chance to vote in another party.

I love you. Thank you for this message of hope. I’m sorry to qualify it by saying: just because data can be restored, doesn’t mean that people or careers can be.

Thank you.

I also still value those ideals. I wish that we as a society could do a better job of embodying them.

No, it’s not incel mentality.

It’s the mentality of addressing structural issues and inequities instead of symptomatic bad actors.

It’s the mentality of trying to fix broken systems that wronged me.

Inequality is structural and needs to be addressed structurally if we want to solve it.

Blaming people and trying to get revenge by punishing them is the mentality that created the problematic structures that I’m trying to address.

Lol, we are playing tag.

A particular group of people… who ran the program and used it as a tool of oppression.

Because of this, I think that it’s valid that I direct my criticisms towards the program. Would you rather I start rattling off names? Or should I focus on the structural inequities that enabled and rewarded these bad actors?

I suspect that these overreaches of power contributed to the rampant public animosity towards these programs and enabled fascism.

I hope that someone learns from my criticisms so that we can prevent what happened last year from happening again.

Thank you. I wish that the world had more people with compassion like you.

Moving my reply to the non-deleted duplicate :)

deleted by creator

Well, that’s been my life for the past seven years.

I really wish it weren’t true.

I went all-in on a reboot and second chance only to get shat on again.

I really don’t have anything else to live for at this point and I don’t know what to do other than to speak my truth and hope that the next attempts at something like DEI can learn from it.

That’s what it claims to mean, but that’s frankly not how it was implemented.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are fabulous ideals that result in better science that improves the lives of more people. If properly implemented, they create a better workplace ecosystem that better serves its employees and our nation/planet/community.

I wish that DEI programs didn’t stand for Demonization, Exclusion, and Inequity.

Now, to respond to your edit/tl;dr:

I didn’t want the DEI hiring baby thrown out with the bathwater. DEI structures were overpowered and centralized and enabled these toxic dynamics. I am only saying that this poor implementation is what led to animosity against DEI programs. Most people don’t see the hiring, but they do see the drama and firing and abuses of power. This feeds into the fascist agenda and pushes people away from progressive causes.

tl;dr: this is how we got people willing to vote for Trump

I got raped by my advisor, then sexually assaulted, then tried to move on without rocking the boat.

The DEI committee decided to go out of their way to defend the rapist and remove me. That is what I am charitably calling rape apology.

It was the DEI committee doing the slapping.

The DEI committee was the top-down instrument coming after me and others for wrongthink.

I firmly believe in bottom-up approaches, and that’s what I tried to implement. Unfortunately those at the top were too powerful, and those at the bottom too scared to speak out in my favor.

I was not the wheel that was squeaking. I was desperately trying to move on from the drama. It was the DEI committee that couldn’t stop squeaking. They got the grease of getting me kicked out twice.

I have no problem with DEI hiring. I love that part of it!

I have a problem with the rape apologists masquerading as feminists populating DEI committees to powertrip over prosecuting wrongthink, and the cops that they use to harass people.

I don’t want any positive recognition for my mistake of eating out my boss after her advances towards her employee. I only wanted the drama and bullshit to end so I could focus on Saturn.

I do not, and I would LOVE for you to tell me what I did wrong.

No one else will give me that courtesy.

All I tried to do was live my life and do my work. I didn’t even try to go after my former advisor. I repeatedly said that she wasn’t a monster. I just tried to move on after learning the hard way about how workplace hierarchies make relationships toxic.

And you’re right, I did skim over details for space. I was also sexually assaulted by that former advisor AFTER I split with her personally and professionally. Even then, I refused to go after her for her actions because I just wanted to move on.

Tell me what I did wrong. I really, honestly, do not see it.

I just responded to another comment asking questions in the same spirit. Please see my answer there.

The DEI program (at least the one that interfaced with me) excluded and erased anyone who didn’t fit their prescribed notions of diversity.

I had a bad experience with an advisor in 2018. She invited me to her home, and asked me to bring food. We ate dinner. After, she put on netflix and started rubbing her butt on me. I ate her out, giving her my virginity. I quickly switched advisors. I had a swarm of “feminists” come down on me to cancel me for daring to eat out my female boss. Because I have something like a penis, it must be my fault, workplace hierarchies be damned.

I was kicked out of space sciences, and clawed my way back over a several year long struggle. In the meantime, I decided to transition to female. I am intersex, and hoped that it would help me avoid harassment. I cannot go on HRT because it would kill me. I try to qualify and push back against the HRT worship performed by mainstream trans culture. Trans people try to cancel me for speaking to my life experience and for pointing out that there are negative medical consequences of HRT that needs to be a part of the discussion. HRT should not be pushed as the default or only way to be trans. This and lingering animosity from the 2018 incident caused me to get kicked out a second time.

DEI, as it was implemented, was as much about reaching out to marginalized communities as it was about enforcing that everyone in the workplace hold the same beliefs. It was as much about bringing in new faces as it was about silencing even moderately dissenting voices. It was about supporting a diversity of identities, while also silencing a diversity of thought. I believe that the exclusive and inequitable implementation of DEI is a major driver of many people’s animosity towards it.

My situation would have been better without the DEI program. I would have my PhD by now, and I would probably not be unemployed. I recognize that for others the program was a foot in the door. That does not change the fact that for many like me, it was a boot in the ass.

Edited to put the story in chronological order.

No, the DEI program erased me.

Nah.

I’d rather they see that we have a common enemy in the fascists and extend a hand of solidarity before I run out of the means to survive in a few weeks.