Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is just the bureaucratic implementation of Critical Race Theory (CRT).
Both basically use race baiting language to implement Marxist ideology. According to Jonathan Butcher and Mike Gonzalez, CRT “is purposely political and dispenses with the idea of rights because it blames all inequalities of outcome on what its adherents say is pervasive racism.”
Delano Squires says CRT has “four cornerstones: Karl Marx’s conflict theory, Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony, the Frankfurt School’s critical theory, and Derrick Bell’s critical legal studies.”
The idea of class struggle or “structural inequality” is rooted in the politics of envy. Their progenitor is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s, who’s Discourse on Inequality (1755) described two kinds of inequality: natural (physical) and moral (political). His imagined “political inequality” would continue “until new revolutions completely dissolve the government or bring it nearer to a legitimate institution.”
That is the true purpose of DEI/CRT: to transform our society. Their proponents do not share the philosophical lineage of our nation. They do not talk about individual rights but group power dynamic.
Our founders did not hesitate to define legitimate government in our Declaration of Independence as one that has the consent of the governed for the purpose of protecting individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Note that they listed individual rights, not group rights.
They were against redistributionist policies because the “pursuit of happiness” was known to include the right to property as an extension of one’s own faculties and labor. For example, James Madison, the primary author of the U.S. Constitution, wrote: “Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses.
This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.” (See his essay “Property” from 1792.)
Unfortunately, the Left is pushing DEI/CRT and seems to control all the levers of power: government, media, education, pop-culture, social media.
“But, unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions… it has acted in direct opposition to its own purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others.”
FRÉDÉRIC BASTIAT, THE LAW, 1850