With the many stories of “DEI” bureaucracies being dismantled in academic institutions, it is easy to think that it has been defeated and in retreat, with sane voices ready to declare victory. However, in some schools, they are just rebranding themselves and changing just enough to not explicitly run afoul of new prohibitions. The University of Southern Mississippi rebranded it’s DEI office as the “Office of Community and Belonging” while in the University of Florida their “Center for Inclusion and Multicultural Engagement” was shut down and replaced with an “Office of Community and Belonging” as well. What a coincidence!
The problem, though, is much more extensive than simply pulling out any new woke weeds that sprout up doing the same thing under a new name. The roots of this problem remain, and not only will sprout up again, but spread. The roots are like an insidious rhizome that spreads underground undetected until it breaks the surface, and which continues to escape notice after the superficial problem has been ripped out. To continue to botanical analogy, wokeness—and the broader hard Left in general—tends to work sub rosa to normalize stepwise itself and when it overreaches, it retreats only far enough away to not give up more than it needs to, with that overreach being both a sacrifice and a learning experience.
Pictured: The Left at work.
Falling into the trap of the superfiscial is one both conservatives and the broader Right have a tendency to fall into. When there is a disruption to their sense of normalcy, they fight against that and will relax once it’s gone, not realizing the problem continues to spread. Instead of defeating the root problem, they end up playing perpetual whack-a-mole. As newer generations get used to it, the Right moves on to the newest thing. The fight against same sex marriage is the new normal and fighting transgender ideology is the new threat to be pulled out. That later fight, though, has only gained traction because it involves grooming children; an adult who tries to be able to “pass” as the other biological sex will likely gain traction as those rhizomal shoots spread and grow while those who pulled out the shoots that breached the Earth ignore it. Your humble author even noted to others over a decade ago that much of the transgender ideology is “baked into the cake”.
This is the modus operandi of the Left. They replace stepwise the pillars of society and change the basis of what is normal and how people not only talk about something but how they think about something. This is not done in overt and explicit ways, or by direct challenging normalcy itself, they simply teach new fundamentals that are consistent with their way of thinking and inconsistent with the old fundamentals from whence the old normal rested; once this is sufficiently done, then introducing a new norm will stick because it is more consistent with the new ways of thinking and the old norms inconsistent with the old normal, and it is too late to simply assert the old normal which has become the new weird.
To truly eliminate “DEI” or any similar madness that may arise, the very roots and every rhizome itself must be removed. To do so we must understand how they spread and work, and thus how to identify them. Al will be for naught, though, unless we can place something substantive based on more than mere superficiality—and there is no better beginning towards that end than to look back at what we’ve manage to conserve.
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