DEI is about original sin (and that might be a good thing)

One of the first posts on this blog, from late July last year, was about the marked similarities between DEI practice and the doctrine of Original Sin. In it, I argued that most corporate manifestations of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion practice are more about making people suffer and causing themselves pain than actually improving material conditions for marginalised people. I still think this article holds up pretty well, and describes the kind of pain my trans self has experienced trying to navigate the working world.

However.

The current political situation in the USA and elsewhere has not been kind to DEI programs of late. The US regime seems to be doing everything they can to gut any programs that purport to help anyone other than cis white men. They're using the pretext of eliminating "DEI hires" to purge the military. And elsewhere in the world, including New Zealand, an increasing number of political and cultural figures are leaning into using "DEI" as what's essentially a slur. And the consequences of this have been... well, not great, honestly. Trump is, after all, crashing the global economy while shouting that everyone who isn't a cis white man is incompetent. In short, DEI programs being rolled back seem to be having far worse consequences than even I anticipated, and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that however false and ineffective corporate DEI programs were, even the worst of them were doing some pretty important shit.

Given that this is the case, erstwhile critics of DEI policies from a broadly leftish perspective need a new synthesis for how to talk about DEI practices that captures the good things they were doing. What were they doing right that means that we're now missing the existence of a lot of these programs? Why did the whole thing fall apart so dramatically given that it was doing useful stuff? And how do those things interact?

Criticism of DEI practices from the broader left tend to come from two major places (For the purposes of this article I'll ignore the right-wing critiques, as they're mostly full of shit). The first is that DEI practices tended to make people with certain kinds of privilege feel ashamed or guilty as a consequence of focusing heavily on internal work at the expense of material change. The second, existing in some tension with this, is that DEI practices simply pushed people to act and express in certain ways without reforming any internal state. While I think these are credible criticisms, and not as contradictory as one might initially think, the evidence currently available to us suggests that contrary to what a fair number of us may have thought earlier, some of the things that the DEI movement was doing were more important than was immediately apparent. The particularly interesting thing is that a bunch of these aspects tie directly into the "original sin" aspects of the practice that I criticised earlier.

Shame and guilt are pro-social emotions

There has been a significant movement in anglosphere culture over the last fifty or so years, aided recently by the more widespread adoption of therapy culture, to see guilt and shame as being fundamentally harmful emotions: emotions that we should never feel and that should be eliminated wherever possible. There is some truth to this: guilt and shame have often been used to push down minority groups, police them heavily and coerce them into behaving the way that people in power want them to. Excessive feelings of guilt and shame can also be psychologically crippling to the extent that they prevent people from functioning at all, and particularly for victims of abuse, unlearning feelings of guilt and shame is a really important thing to do. All power, therefore, to the movement that has allowed this to happen.

Unfortunately, this isn't the only side of the movement. As the movement to see guilt and shame as bad emotions in and of themselves has grown, we've seen a corresponding expansion in people behaving terribly and being completely shameless about it. The obvious example is, of course, the current US regime, but people like that are everywhere and they've been around for a very long time. Guilt and shame are very important tools in our social and moral toolkit for constraining people like this to act in a minimally acceptable way in society, and the DEI movement was, for the last few years, an important way of encouraging pro-social behaviour among people who might otherwise have been completely awful and impossible to be in a society with.

It is appropriate that you feel bad when you fuck up: that feeling is an indication that you need to change your behaviour. When you do something antisocial, such as cheat on video games or destroy social security, it is correct for people to no longer want to associate with you and see you badly, and, though it absolutely gets misused, this is an important way of encouraging pro-social behaviour and getting people to play nicely with each other. While we'd prefer people to do these things for nobler reasons, we don't always have that option, and we do sometimes need to resort to social sanction and the accompanying shame.

And so, to DEI. A large part of the current backlash to the DEI movement is, I believe, because the movement tended to make people feel bad. It reminded people that many of our countries and institutions do carry original sin: we live in countries built on the blood of slaves and land that was stolen from the original inhabitants. All of our institutions have historically been deeply complicit in the subjection of women basically everywhere we look, and the way we've treated our queer communities has been nothing short of abhorrent. The world we live in is deeply shaped by these facts, and we still live with the people who've historically been mistreated by these systems being deeply disadvantaged. It's not even a moral question: this is just how things are. DEI as an institutional ideology brought all of that to light and into conscious view.

This, of course, has a tendency to induce feelings of shame and guilt in the people who benefit from this system. While I don't think that those are always the appropriate emotions to be having, in moderate quantities they can be productive and encourage people to dismantle or change the structures that they're complicit in to make them more equitable. At the very least, DEI-encouraged guilt and shame might encourage people not to hurl slurs at people or be deliberately, outwardly bigoted. Yes, I think we'd all like to hope for more, but given current circumstances even that was clearly a win. DEI was thus quite a powerful tool for encouraging pro-social behaviour, even if it was on quite a superficial level and not really as effective as we might have hoped.

Unfortunately, the important role that DEI ideology was playing in our societies and institutions only really came to light over the last few months, where it became clear that a significant proportion of the most privileged members of society felt that any constraints on their behaviour and conduct or anything that made them feel remotely bad about things they'd done was an unacceptable attack on their right to act crassly, crudely and with complete impunity. While the DEI movement certainly didn't do anywhere near as much as I'd have liked to address real material inequalities, it did at least do something to prevent the absolute worst people in the world from being openly horrible. Now, by contrast, we have Elon Musk complaining about the "Woke mind virus" killing his "son", Zuckerberg complaining on Joe Rogan's show about business becoming neutered and effeminate, and thousands upon thousands of mediocre white guys actively flaunting their bigotry because they see the powerful doing it. And all because we expected them to treat people with basic respect.

One reading of this might be that DEI efforts and the associated social pressure didn't work, or didn't get us the results we wanted. There's something to this, and I'll discuss this later in the piece. Here, however, we can note that the social pressure and the associated guilt and shame, for the most part, actually worked in suppressing the worst of the shitty behaviour. Elon Musk is currently repeatedly going to pieces on Twitter because no matter how hard he tries, he can't get people to like him, respect him or stop seeing him as evil. Many of the Republican politicians responsible for the current formal purge of DEI efforts in the USA are going to pieces because they're having serious hostility directed their way by their constituents. And what makes this worse is that the only people they can get to support them in their shitty behaviour are, quelle surprise, truly awful people: rapists, pedophiles, Nazis and Matt Gaetz. Regardless of your political positions, these people are simply awful to be around because they don't have the social skills or manners to not fuck spaces up for everyone.

The current backlash against and widespread destruction of DEI programs is therefore less about the fact that the movement didn't work and more due to the fact that it did. For all its many flaws, DEI programs and policies created a situation in which it was unacceptable for a lot of people to be openly bigoted, and in which harbouring bigotry was seen as something to feel ashamed of. It was capable of creating a norm where people wouldn't associate with open bigots, and where the only people that bigots could find to be around them were people crass and distasteful enough to make their social circles intolerable (after all, the kind of person who will respond negatively to being told not to use slurs isn't likely to be able to co-operate nicely with any kind of social norms, after all). And so we now have a situation where these people are lashing out desperately, trying to destroy the social norms that DEI established, doing anything they can to stop themselves from feeling bad. It's ugly, and as I'll discuss later, it's a sign that the DEI movement didn't succeed as well as we might have hoped, but it's also a sign that it worked.

Action is upstream of belief

The second point (which is pertinent to the second line of criticism) to be made is that, while you can't really control how people think, action influences thought rather more than the reverse happens. The logical conclusion of this is that in many cases, if you can change how people act, you can consequently influence how they think. The reason is simple cognitive dissonance, which most humans aim to minimise or eliminate wherever possible. If you think or believe one thing, but do another, this tends to be uncomfortable, and there are really only two options for what to do. The first is to change your actions. Now, I'm generally in favour of this approach, but it is hard, and it means you have to make sacrifices, so it's generally only something you'd do when you really believe very strongly in what you're aiming to do. The second option, and the one which most people tend to do, is to change your beliefs to justify your actions.

While this can, of course, be a problem, it also means that we can make significant headway in changing attitudes by changing behaviours. In short, we can make people less bigoted by stopping them from saying slurs. This obviously isn't perfect and definitely won't get us all the way on issues that we care about, but it absolutely can, little by little, push people away from the worst excesses of bigotry. And this has knock-on effects: small changes in attitudes can lead to bigger changes in behaviour, which will in turn lead to further attitudinal changes. Given that this is the case, we thus have a definite interest in discouraging small acts of bigotry and small, problematic behaviours: something that DEI practices, for all their flaws and inadequacies, were actually quite good at doing.

It seems clear, therefore, that while I think we'd all have liked it to have done better and been less humourless and tedious much of the time, DEI practices were doing a lot of things that most of us on the left wanted. For all its flaws, these practices did good things, and we have a real interest in holding onto the good things and making sure they keep happening. So, how do we do that?

Where the movement fell down

All of this raises the question: given that the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion movement was, on the whole, doing pro-social things, why did it fall down in such a spectacular manner? Some of the fault obviously has to be attributed to a massive reactionary wave in the USA which is increasingly spreading overseas: the legal suppression of DEI efforts and associated empowerment of open bigotry is downstream of the fact that the fascist right has turned DEI into a slur: this usage of it has very little to do with the actual movement and is simply an ugly reaction to women and people of colour existing in professional spaces. And to some extent, this is probably unavoidable: the fascist right will do as the fascist right does. Still, that leaves the question of why, in the face of this challenge, the DEI movement fell apart so quickly, and I believe that there is a significant structural element to this.

The main issue is that despite our best efforts, Diversity Equity and Inclusion efforts failed to become properly integrated into our institutions, and in particular that it failed to stick among the people that we needed to get on board. This is, in large part, because DEI practice quite quickly became an elite phenomenon. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's concept of Elite Capture is relevant here (by-the-by, it's an excellent book: I've not read it due to being a poor meow meow who's currently not gainfully employed, but I've read enough of his articles to be able to say that with confidence). The idea is that programs originally designed to help marginalised people (who might be marginalised by race, ethnicity, gender or queerness) pretty consistently tend to have their power base captured by the most privileged representatives of said groups. They then reorient their activities and what they do to focus in on this relative elite at the expense of other members of the marginalised groups. I think that at this point it's difficult to argue that this didn't happen to most corporate DEI practices.

While this might have been OK in general (though it wasn't), the capture of DEI practice by a relatively small marginalised elite has had one fatal effect: it reshaped the underlying ideology of the movement to secure power for this elite internally. This reshaping, moreover, introduced some serious moral and logical inconsistencies into the ideology behind DEI practice. This, l, think, is what led to the failure of the practices becoming institutionally embedded.

Let us take Catholic teaching as an example. The big strength of the teachings of the Catholic Church are that they remain broadly consistent no matter which level of engagement the people bound by the teaching are functioning at. Whether you're a layperson, a priest, a cardinal or a professional theologian, and regardless of your level of education or wealth, the broad shape of the moral demands on everyone are the same.

This simply isn't true for 2000's-era DEI efforts. The reading of DEI efforts that is presented to theorists is very different to that presented in the corporate setting, and both of them are different readings to internet hot-takes and the understanding of it that prevails on the ground. Now this is, to an extent, also the case for Catholic teaching: folk Catholicism is quite different from what the Church teaches or what a theologian might be working with, but they tend not to directly conflict. The DEI teaching absolutely does.

Those of us doing scholarly work around diversity, equity and inclusion tend to stress that privilege is first and foremost a fluid, emergent phenomenon, and it's generally not something that people directly create by themselves (even when one person is being openly bigoted towards another, it's emergent properties of society that give that real force beyond just one person being rude). For those of us with Marxist leanings¹, furthermore, privilege isn't just about what we say and do in society: it's about material access to resources and the way in which differing access to resources shapes people's experiences of the world.

Unfortunately, that takes a lot of education, a lot of reading and introduction to quite a lot of new concepts, which many people might not have the time, capacity or inclination to put the work into understanding. And that's not a bad thing! Not everyone should have to be a sociologist or a philosopher to be allowed to participate fully in our social and political life, and they certainly shouldn't have to study moral philosophy in order to be able to live morally. To that extent, DEI teaching, as with any ideology, simplified itself for wider dissemination in our societies and particularly in the corporate world. The issue is that it did this badly, in that the way it dropped complexity was largely by dropping the emergent and material properties of DEI analyses and applying them to individual people. While the analysis and much of the push was therefore sound, we lost a lot of potential improvement in the lives of minoritised groups by refusing to make the discourse materially rooted. Furthermore, in individualising an emergent problem and changing the framing from making material changes in the world into an individual examination of conscience (a very Protestant framing of the issue), we drifted from DEI being a political movement to something rooted firmly in the psychodrama. Finally, changing the categories used in the analysis from fluid to fixed ones (in essence, shifting from a framing of privilege as something you can have in certain situations to something that you are) radically reduced the scope of action that DEI programs have: taking a fixed lens restricts you to actions corresponding to your categorisation schema in some really unhelpful ways.

The issue here is obvious: we've created a situation in which DEI teaching is placing inconsistent moral demands on different groups of people. People with privilege are expected to do internal work, examine their conscience and pray for forgiveness: doing anything is considered optional, as there's no actions you can take to really expiate your privilege or do much to change the situation. The expectation is that you feel vaguely guilty and deferential at all times. People without privilege, by contrast, have a moral duty to act as moral guides and judges, teaching the people who have privilege to do their internal work and reform their morals in the correct way, often if not always at the expense of what they actually want to do² with their lives. People with privilege on some axes and without it on others wind up in an untenable situation where (because these roles are fixed more than fluid) we're expected to inhabit both roles fully at once, rather than shifting between them. This is, of course, practically impossible: while in any given situation I can listen to a person of colour about their experiences, or express my experiences of transphobia to that same person of colour, I can't be on both sides of a power imbalance at the same time in any given situation. Furthermore, there's no escape: no avenue out of this constructed hell, as fluid modes of categorisation describing an emergent social phenomenon have been flattened into fixed traits inhering in individual people. Finally, we have the implicit hierarchy generated by the educational layers: intellectuals get a different moral teaching from professionals, and professionals in turn get a different moral teaching from general society.

This had the consequences you might expect: a lot of us minoritised people just burnt out on the whole idea of DEI, being disgusted by the lack of respect afforded us as entire people and the demands the whole thing placed on us. More privileged people were rightly put off by the expectation that one should spend so much time ruminating on their own guilt and flaws without any way of feeling as though one had received grace or been forgiven. Everyone found the conflicting expectations placed on people by level of education faintly hypocritical. In the end, this meant that any attempt to truly institutionalise DEI practices tended to be treated by everyone with faint detachment and an unconscious sense that the whole thing was hypocritical or a bit silly, leading to a failure of the practice to become part of our institutions. This, in turn, made DEI particularly easy for regressive and bigoted people and movements to attack, and finally led to them collapsing totally as soon as an overtly bigoted regime was emplaced in the USA. Now, therefore, we find ourselves in the wreckage of a deeply flawed construct that nonetheless had many, many positive elements to it. What then, can we raise from the wreckage?

Notes towards a new DEI

Despite how bleak the situation seems at the moment, there are significant grounds for optimism that we can rebuild a better, brighter and more effective DEI movement in the years to come. First off, the entire world is getting a glaring object lesson as to what happens when anti-DEI ideology becomes ascendant in the form of the USA: competent people are getting fired and replaced with incompetent, clueless lackeys that happen to all be white men, and this is immediately followed by people suffering seriously due to the decisions that these people made. This immediately establishes two things in the minds of almost everyone who sees this (MAGA cultists excepted): that dropping DEI requirements leads to a massive reduction in merit-based hiring, rather than the claimed increase, and that not hiring by merit leads to things like economic depressions and planes falling out of the sky. Secondly, the main way that minoritised groups were excluded from consideration as being meritorious in the past was through restricting access to education and professional bodies. While that still happens a lot, we also have a large body of serious experts from minoritised groups in our society now, and we're hardly about to lose our skills, forget our knowledge or go into hiding and hide them. We might end up forced out of the USA, but in our increasingly globalised world, information leakage is very hard to stop. Restoring a merit-based system for filling social positions is thus both very important to many people at this point, and will inevitably and obviously involve a strong reassertion of DEI principles. We have an opportunity to make life a hell of a lot better for minoritised people in the long run, but we have to start building it and working out what it looks like now. Ideally, we want a DEI movement that avoids the failings of the previous one while keeping what's good in it. And here, thankfully, we have a lot of ways in which we can improve. The first and most important one is as follows: rather than telling people how to think or feel, we need to give people things to do.

While American Protestantism (which the modern DEI movement took many of its cues from) leans heavily on orthodoxy (correct belief) and holding the correct internal emotional states, more institutional religions such as Catholicism and Rabbinic Judaism emphasise orthopraxy (or correct action) significantly more. While I can't much speak about Judaism, I think we can learn a lot from the Catholic approach here. Catholicism is lousy with rituals and things you're meant to do that help you along the path to salvation: importantly, Catholic sacraments are held to be spiritually effective, which is to say that they have an effect beyond just the psychological and they actually do something. The exact nature of the rituals vary from dangerous to "on the face of it silly but important for social bonding", all the way through to "actively encouraging people to act pro-socially through almsgiving and support for the most vulnerable people in society". Importantly, having things to do allows people to transform shame and guilt into pro-social behaviour, and thus into positive changes in our society. We need to emulate this approach (though ideally without the dangerous shit).

At one end of the scale, we need small, easily doable things that people can be persuaded to do even when they're not entirely comfortable with the whole idea of DEI practice³. This is obviously going to look different depending on where one is situated, so I'll restrict myself to a few examples and hope that we can generalise relatively effectively.

In the tech industry and the private sector more globally, a small, easily doable thing might be to make sure that any interviews for new roles contain at least one candidate who's a woman, one person of colour and (though actually implementing this would take a lot of thought to avoid introducing additional bias into the process) one queer person. This is a small thing that should be easy enough to manage, and won't have a drastic impact on an individual level (after all, since leaving my last role, I'm currently counting about fifteen situations where I got through the entirety of the hiring process only to be thrown out at the last minute). In the aggregate though, this would create a hell of a lot more opportunities for minoritised people to get their foot in the door in the private sector and potentially even succeed in it (though I'd not hold my breath). Importantly, this is something that is ideal for people who don't want to be seen as bigoted but who also feel uneasy about DEI to do: it can easily be phrased as simply giving people a chance as opposed to something they might perceive as not hiring on merit, it doesn't require a huge amount of direct effort, and it's something that even fairly lukewarm people might be persuaded to hold the line on (which is, in turn, an excellent way of bringing them more fully on board with the movement down the line). It also has the significant advantage of not requiring people, at least initially, to put too much work into unpacking their biases: it allows for an incremental shift rather than having to change everything at once. In general, small, easily persuadable interventions like this are a good approach, and cognitive psychology and behavioural economics both have a wealth of tactics that we can borrow from in order to make real change more effectively.

In wider society, the incrementalist approach is likely to look like an approach based primarily on encouraging contact and exposure to other groups of people in non-political contexts. I've previously claimed that Liam Kofi Bright's Warhammer 40K website probably has a significant anti-racist effect in the tabletop war-gaming community, and similarly Pavel Samsonov has noted that his time spent playing TTRPGs when younger allowed him to humanise trans people before the propaganda hit (Samsonov, being a decent human being, would of course have come down on the right side of things anyway). It turns out, as it happens, that interacting with people who have common interests with you but who are different in other ways makes bigotry and bias that much harder, as it gives people concrete examples of marginalised people as humans that have the same full spectrum of likes, dislikes, hopes and fears as everyone else. A strong initial step towards rebuilding DEI practices in the wider sphere is thus simply to encourage community involvement: make time for it, build support structures that allow more people to participate in community events and generally bring more people into contact with each other in ways that aren't immediately politically charged. For those of us who are marginalised in one way or another, this means that we do have a duty to be involved in wider community stuff to the extent that we can, especially in things like hobbies and stuff that we do for fun (I'll admit that I'm not particularly good at that).

To be clear, what we're trying to do with incrementalist approaches isn't deprogramming hard-out bigots. That won't work, and simply causes us pain. Rather, what we're trying to do is mobilise people who are broadly sympathetic to ideals of fairness and equity, but who for one reason or another don't like the progressive movement (either due to upbringing, latent bigotry or simply finding us extremely annoying). Even if they individually only do small things, the sheer weight of numbers they can muster can result in significant social changes. We're also trying to break up the broad pro-bigotry coalition, which is made up of a hard core of outright bigots surrounded by a wider cloud of people who are vaguely bigoted but who don't make it a part of their self-image and who don't want to be seen as bigoted. Bigotry, after all, relies heavily on the perception of social acceptance: if we can make that wider cloud feel more socially accepted for not being a bigot than for being one, we can quite effectively shut up the hardcore bigots.

Obviously, we can't just give people a list of tasks and rituals with no context, so, while I think we definitely overemphasised education and internal work the first time around (inasmuch as we kinda made it the entirety of the movement rather than simply an important part of it), making DEI practice stick the second time around is still going to require a lot of sitting down and talking with each other. We thus have a significant interest in doing it more effectively this time.

To my mind, the most significant trouble that our educational techniques had the first time around was that they focused in on a relatively small group of identities that we then treated as temporally and geographically fixed. In general, we spoke about people of colour, women and the LGBTQ community, and while we spoke a lot about intersectionality, we generally weren't very good about actually being intersectional. This had a lot of problems: for one thing, it made elite capture of the movement remarkably easy, as people from said marginalised groups could easily position themselves as being appropriate leaders of these groups, even if they had levels of wealth, education or class position that might otherwise have made it difficult to justify their position in the forefront. If class, education and similar factors are treated as invisible or not DEI concerns⁴, leadership of the movement being dominated by people who have the most resources along these axes is inevitable. It also leads consistently to very one-sided interactions, where one side is held to have all the power and privilege and the other is held to have none of it. While it's important to have conversations like this sometimes, doing it all the time breeds resentment on one side and an attitude of toxic righteousness on the other: it really does just make everyone worse. If you have an odd combination of traits, it's even worse: for example, I'm expected to act like a prototypical white person when talking about people of colour, and like a prototypical queer person when talking about queer issues, despite the fact that these things interact in a nonlinear manner, and white queer people have different issues with racism in their communities from white straight people⁵. At no point is there space to hold nuance about being a multifaceted person who can benefit from and suffer from the way our society apportions privilege at the same time; rather, I have to switch from "privileged mode" to "oppressed mode" and back, and can never allow the two to mix. Again, we talked about intersectionality a lot, but we weren't very good at actually doing it, and consequently, we consistently had absolutely dogshit discussions primarily dominated by the people best able to conceal their privilege.

To prevent elite capture of the new movement we build and the build-up of resentment in the people that we need to support us, we need to make sure that the way we talk about categories and organise conversations in the years to come remains fluid and open. An excellent way of doing this might be to deliberately and consciously try and divide up conversations differently. Rather than looking to the canonical divisions all the time, we might consider looking at a given relatively heterogeneous group of people through social class or levels of education. This has multiple advantages: first, and as mentioned before, being able to see areas of common experience and common issues with people who might otherwise be different to you on the race/gender/ethnicity spectrum makes it that much harder for people to harbour bigoted opinions (though definitely not impossible). There is a lot of value in being able to say something along the lines of "you have it worse/better than me, but this is the same kind of issue", and having that knowledge makes it that much easier to act in solidarity with other people rather than trying to help them from the outside (which never ends entirely well, let's face it). Splitting things up differently also evens out the power dynamics that otherwise tend to form in these situations, and makes it that much more difficult to construct an elite that can take power and shift the direction of the work being done in a direction more beneficial for them at everyone else's expense.

Final thoughts

Finally, to bring things back to the "original sin" point, the important thing about the doctrine in Christianity is that everyone has it. Your identity, such as it is, doesn't matter. We're all human, all tempted to sin, all capable of cruelty and callousness. Fortunately, we're also all capable of working against that part of our nature: capable of receiving grace, capable of forgiveness and capable of learning. This, I think, is valuable for DEI work: we need to remember that we're all capable of bias and bigotry and that we're most likely to do it in precisely the places where it's hardest for us to see ourselves doing it. We need, therefore, to maintain humility, apologise and make amends when we fuck up and extend grace to each other.

The fatal flaw of the first, elite captured form of DEI practice was that while it brought the idea of original sin into our current political sphere, it didn't bring any of this along with it. We are, for better or worse, all complicit in and responsible for the system we live in collectively, and even when we're members of minority groups ourselves, we can easily do harm to other people. The common form, by contrast, has no space for people to be morally complex, thanks in large part to the fixed-role thinking that the elite often uses to justify itself. Either you are a Good Person and have no sin, and can thus behave how you like, or you are a Bad Person. When you are a bad person, not only are you capable of sinning, but you are constantly in an active state of sinning. These things are exclusive to each other, even when you're somehow expected to fit into both of them (I'm a person, and thoroughly classical: privilege/oppression is not, despite what we seem to have inadvertently settled on, a quantum state). This is broken in some pretty deep ways, and I believe it's something that we as a movement have to repent of. Ironically enough, this means that the failings stemming from elite capture of DEI programs, which fatally damaged and brought down the first iteration of the movement, might represent our own original sin.