Silveira: DEI Without the Dogma

Overly long read but the final paragraphs provide an alternative to some of the more extreme DEI approaches of some consultants and organizations. I have had experience with both approaches in some management training and found that I benefited from both:

…Marxism appealed to me when I was young, as it does to many young people, because it presented a simple good-versus-evil template to explain the injustices of the world. But humanity is more complex than that. And my political science professor was correct when he told me that we shouldn’t rely on rigid paradigms to make sense of the world and categorise the moral value of fellow humans.

This is a lesson I’d ask DEI instructors to reflect on. If social justice is the goal, employing divisive, shaming tactics aimed at exorcising sinful thoughts from the proletariat masses is self-defeating. Instead, we should see ourselves as coaches who simply help individuals behave respectfully and collaboratively in their workplaces. Otherwise—if I may adapt my old Marxist jargon—it’s only a matter of time before our industry is dismissed as an opiate of the elites, and swept into the dustbin of industry.