This morning I attended a workshop on the impact of Anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and racism in the USA. The workshop was at 3 AM for me. It is important to me so I got up at 2:30 and attended the workshop. It was really good. I learned a lot of the context for why the current administration in the USA is tearing down diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, and how it is part of the historical cycles that have happened in the past. I feel less powerless and less hopeless after attending the workshop. In other words, it was empowering to attend.

Here are some of my take-aways.

It’s vital that we work together. Many of the new policies are set up to have us fighting among ourselves to get what we can for our own survival. But the promises of this administration taking care of anyone other than the few at the top are lies set up to pit us against each other. We will only make progress if we fight on behalf of each other. We need to work on what gets in the way of us being unified and what separates us. If we don’t work together, we will believe the lies we are being told that those groups being targeted are too sensitive or crazy or playing the race card or overreacting. Those are all lies to prevent us from doing the hard work of opening our eyes and addressing what is actually going on.

We live in a society that is based on exploitation of workers. Society depends on that exploitation to function. Violence is used as a tool to maintain the status quo and continue the exploitation of workers for the benefit of those in control. Over time, more and more people get pushed down into poverty and fewer and fewer people can maintain their position in the middle class. The group of people who get to have power and avoid exploitation to some degree is also shrinking. Those at the top are being pushed down to the middle while those in the middle are being pushed down to the bottom. Those at the top don’t value our lives. We are targeted for destruction.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion policies were put in place to help raise more people out of poverty into a sustainable living situation. The policies are a kind of resistance to an exploitative society. That makes it a threat to maintaining the status quo where a few people have power and wealth and the rest are sacrificed so the few can have what they want. Those in power attack these policies to ensure their position can continue into the future.

There is a fantasy that we would all have access to wealth and comfort. Unfortunately, true liberation wasn’t created before it was targeted for destruction again. We never really had a chance of accessing the security we dreamed of.

All the anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion policies are meant to keep us down, keep us terrified, keep us blaming each other, so we can’t unite and fight together for all of us. These policies are being used to keep us from having human rights and civil rights. The rest of the world can see it. Many people in the USA can also see it. But the new policies are effective at dividing us. We fight it by reaching for each other and working together.

Those in power claim they want merit-based society. But they also define those in the targeted groups as not having merit. They only see cis, straight, able-bodied, white, Christian, men as capable of merit so they are the only ones considered. That’s how people from any different demographic with expertise are getting fired and those who are unqualified are being hired even if they aren’t legally qualified for the positions they now occupy. They take away our human and civil rights because they don’t see us as meritorious or deserving of rights. They are attacking history so we don’t have access to the information about the merit people in diverse groups have achieved.

And they want to do this globally. They are forcing other countries to follow their Anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion policies or lose contracts with and support from the USA. It’s pretty cunning. At the time of the Black Lives Matter movement, diversity, equity, and inclusion was used by corporations to expand their customer base so they made diverse ads. Now the money is behind stopping diversity, equity, and inclusionand many corporations are switching to that tactic and have dumped diversity, equity, and inclusioninitiatives. We can support companies that have maintained their diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

We learned about “disparate impact” where it doesn’t appear on the surface as if there is a civil rights violation or anything is wrong. But it only looks neutral until it is investigated. We heard about one example of a job category that had a test which included scaling a 10-foot wall. Few women were able to complete the task so few women were eligible for the job. When it was investigated, it was discovered that the job didn’t require the employees to scale a 10-foot wall. It was a pretence for excluding women from the job. So, the test had a different impact on men vs. women. That is disparate impact. It happens a lot. Now there is an executive order outlawing disparate impact suites. There are now limitations on civil rights law suites. Soon there will be no voting rights cases.

There is an executive order that makes English the only official language in the USA so there is no longer a requirement to provide interpreters in schools, hospitals, or courts. 68 million people in the USA speak a language other than English in the home.

There are executive orders threatening campuses with loss of federal funding if they don’t prevent antisemitism which they claim is for the benefit of Jews. That will effectively close campuses. But Jews value free speech too. We value human rights too. We don’t want people losing civil rights on our account. That makes us targets from one side and pawns from the other. They are using us as an excuse to commit civil rights violations. It’s not okay. It goes against our values. There were other issues about college campuses but this post is already too long. The theme was separating students so they couldn’t unite and work together for a more justice and liberation.

It was an intense and packed workshop. We had a little time to work together on these ideas during the workshop. We focused on the idea that liberation is more important than our individual survival. We noticed where we have been exploited by society. We worked on our early experiences and noticed that terrible things are happening right now and our responses are being influenced by things we experienced early in our lives.

Our homework is to work on discharging those early distresses we experienced that set up in us feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, and despair so we can recover our clear thinking and reach for each other to build coalitions. We are working on discharging what we need to so we can choose liberation over survival. We get to notice and focus on the idea that what we do does make a difference. We do matter. We can leave the feelings of hopelessness and helplessness in the past and refuse to let them determine our present. And when we feel discouraged, we can use that discouragement as a pointer to lead us to the place in our early lives where it got installed as a pattern and work there. We will become more effective as a result.

I had 2.5 additional hours of sessions later in the day and began tackling the things I learned in the workshop.

Here’s a painting of me attending a workshop at 3 AM.