Last night, I was two drinks in when he said it. “DEI? I hate DEI. Diversity, equity, inclusion?! It’s a scam!” Said it like he was reciting something memorized by heart and taught to react with. Because he was. Somebody sold him that line, and he paid for it with the only currencies that matter in this fight: attention and anger.
I didn’t argue. Arguing is what they want.
The whole stupid effing machine runs on you and me yelling acronyms at each other until nobody remembers what they stand for and why. So I seemingly changed the subject.
I told him about an org I helped a few years back, trying to break into new countries and getting nowhere. I asked if they’d tested their product with anyone who actually lived in those countries. They hadn’t. He laughed— obviously, you’d test with the people you’re selling to, what idiot skips that?
Then I told him that’s diversity and inclusion. He’d just called it common sense himself. My friend, listening across the table, grimaced, worried the guy was going to club me.
Here’s the thing I want you to sit with before we go further: somebody spent real money making this guy furious about a word. Not because the word threatens him. Because his anger is useful to them. A man raging about “DEI” at a barbecue isn’t asking who’s actually extracting value from his life. He’s looking in the wrong direction, and he was paid to look there. Paid in outrage, which is cheaper to manufacture than you’d think. And I’ve been to way too many of those barbecues, with way too many of my angry uncles. Great, now I’m shuddering over memories of summers past. Let’s move on.
I’m going to do to you what I did to the guy in this story. I’m going to describe eighteen things. Most of them you already believe. Some of them you may have been trained to hate. By the end, you can tell me if you still hate them.
I never have to say the word.
The four you were told to hate
A ramp
You build a ramp into your shop for the wheelchair. You know you can get an extra customer or two out of that, and it feels kind. Then you notice the guy with the hand truck uses it. And the mom with the stroller. And the delivery driver, and the old fella with the bad knee. You built one thing for one group, and it turned out half your customers needed it. Nobody on earth is mad about the ramp. That’s accessibility.
The thing you build for the edge serves the middle too.
The salsa? Yes, the salsa
A company makes salsa. Their whole taste-test panel is five guys who grew up in the same town, eating the same food. They spend a full quarter’s manufacturing budget investing in a massive batch, and they ship it. It bombs everywhere else. It’s too mild for some markets, wrong entirely for others. More tasters, from more places, would have caught it before it cost them the launch.
Of course, you want more kinds of people tasting the salsa to tell you if it’s actually good enough outside of your small bubble. That’s diversity.
It’s not charity. It’s not lowering the bar. It’s not letting someone fail upward. It’s putting more eyes on the thing before it ships, so it doesn’t ship broken or resonate with the smallest possible crowd. The word that might have just made you angry is “make the salsa good.”
The garbage
Two runners line up. One of them has a pile of garbage in his lane, twenty feet out, thrown there by a heckler. We aren’t going to carry him across the finish line or give him a head start he didn’t earn. But we notice the garbage. We remove it, ensuring this will be a clean race (pun intended). We want to measure two people running, not who got a clear lane and had to avoid obstacles.
We just described equity. If you want to argue the garbage belongs there, fine, argue away. But notice that’s a completely different argument than “equity is a scam.” Don’t get sold slogans.
The lobby
You hand someone a key to the building. Great, they’re in, right? Except the elevator and every main door once you get to the right floor also need a badge to be scanned, and they were never given a badge. So, they spend the day in the lobby, calling, emailing, or waiting for someone they recognize to come by while all the work is happening upstairs.
Letting people through the front door and calling it done is a trick that lets a company say “our doors are open” while nothing inside ever changes. Inclusion is making the doors upstairs open too. It’s the difference between “you may enter” and “you may participate.” Also, the literal building-vs-elevator-and-badge part of that scenario recently happened to me, and holy heck, did it make me feel awkward, unimportant, and excluded once I finally got into that room. I definitely didn’t feel like I belonged.
Which are scams?
A ramp, a salsa testing panel, garbage on a race track, and a lobby. Read them back. Find the scam.
There isn’t one.
There is, however, a bill. You pay this bill with your ability to think for yourself, with your independence, with your freedom of thought. Because it might be profitable to get you to think a certain way, or cheaper, or easier to get you pointed in a certain direction. So they make you mad about a word when you already know a ramp is a good thing.
Hopefully, you can start to see that, because if you can, the rest becomes easy.
The ones you already believe
You’re going to agree with all of these in about four seconds each. That’s the point. Watch how fast it goes when nobody’s been paid to poison the well.
- You tell the mechanic what’s wrong with your car. You don’t expect him to sell your home address to every tow-truck company in the county. Take only what you need, and use it only for what we agreed. That’s Privacy.
- A bank that builds the vault after the robbery is a bad bank. You lock the door before you hand out the keys, not after. That’s Security.
- A pool gets a fence and a lifeguard before the kids get in the water. You prevent the harm you can already see coming. You don’t wait for the funeral. That’s Safety.
- The menu shows a tall, juicy burger. They hand you a flat, grey disc. You’re not mad it’s a bad burger, you’re mad they lied with the picture. Don’t lie with design. That’s Honesty.
Four for four. Notice nobody had to be talked into any of those. Nobody runs a campaign to make you hate locking the bank. Hold onto that, because the absence of a campaign tells you something. The four at the top got a campaign. Ask yourself why those four and not these.
Follow the money
Up top, the thing aimed at you was a lie about other people. Down here, the thing aimed at you is aimed at your wallet, and the people doing the aiming are not your friend (or angry uncle) at a barbecue. They’re the ones who sold him the anger, so you’d both stop watching your pockets.
- Your grandfather’s hand tools still work. The printer you bought eighteen months ago, on the other hand, “needs” replacing already, and somehow the new one won’t take the old cartridges. That’s a decision someone made to kill the thing on a schedule so you’d buy another. False obsolescence. Building it to die, so they sell it twice.
- The free trial took one click to start. Cancelling takes a phone call, a hold queue, and a guy whose entire job is talking you out of it. That gap— easy in, engineered-hard out— is there by design. It is part of the product. Economic justice is the principle that says the trap doesn’t get to be a feature.
- Spotless restaurant dining room. Out back? A kitchen where nobody’s had a break in nine hours, the dishwasher has been asked to chop vegetables today, and the line cook hasn’t seen a raise in three years. You can eventually taste this kind of problem. Labour ethics says the people building the thing have the same claim to dignity as the people buying it. The polish in front is a lie if the people behind it are breaking.
- A factory dumps upstream from its own town. This helps them save money this quarter. Meanwhile, it poisons the well that everyone in the same town drinks from by the next decade. Ironically, the same company then runs an ad calling itself “green!” Environmental sustainability counts the whole cost, across the whole life of the thing, and doesn’t lie about the number.
Feel the shift? None of those four required me to confront you. The villains walked on stage on their own. Some of them even laughed maniacally as they did so. This is what happens once you stop fighting about acronyms… You start seeing who’s actually got a hand in your pocket or thinking for you.
The ones about who’s steering
These four are about a quieter kind of theft: the kind that takes your judgment instead of your money.
- Have you ever been in a casino? Ever notice that most of them have no clocks, no windows, and free drinks the moment you sit down? Every inch of a casino is engineered to keep you there past the point your own good sense would’ve walked you out. User health is the rule that says you don’t get to build the thing to beat the user’s own judgment.
- A good salesman lays the options on the table and lets you pick, but a bad one buries the “no thanks” button three menus deep and makes “yes” the only thing glowing. Autonomy is real choices, and a real door out. No freaking mazes.
- Reading the news, if the only time it mentions a neighbourhood is in the crime rate, readers come to believe something false about the people who live there. They may have never said a lie outright, but a pattern said it. Representation is when you watch what your defaults teach people, even when you never typed the sentence.
- The bank denies your loan. You ask why. “The computer said no” is not an answer. If a machine makes a call that lands on a human, the human is owed an articulate reason they can actually argue with. Algorithmic accountability means things should be explainable and contestable.
One principle that explains the whole thing
Imagine the person who owns the town square rents the loudest megaphone to whoever screams the angriest. Not the truest or the most useful. The angriest. Why? Because angry crowds stick around, and a crowd that sticks around is worth money. Pretty soon, nobody can have a normal conversation in that square, because normal doesn’t pay. The whole place gets louder, meaner, and dumber, and the owner gets richer the whole way down.
Civic responsibility is the principle that says if you own the square, the state of the square is on you. It says you don’t get to corrode how an entire society talks to itself and call it “engagement.”
Do you see it?
That’s the thing that walked into all of my uncles’ heads and rents them out. Somebody owns a square, somebody figured out that “DEI is a scam” gets more megaphone than “we tested the salsa,” and so that’s what got the megaphone. My uncles didn’t choose their anger. It was the most profitable thing to hand them, so it got handed to them.
That’s the machine. And it’s time to break free, Neo.
What do you do with this?
Don’t say the word if you aren’t sure about the audience and what empty slogans they’ve already subscribed to. This is a lesson I’ve had to re-learn several times now. But if you do this, sticking to scenarios, context, and empathy building, by the time the word arrives, people will generally have agreed with the thing it names, and the slogan they’ve memorized will have nothing left to bite.
That’s the whole trick, and it’s yours now. You don’t argue the acronym. You describe the ramp. You let the person agree with the obviously good thing in plain daylight, and then you tell them what it’s called and watch them try to be mad at something they just nodded at. It’s not about winning a fight; it’s about leading people back to critical thinking and independence.
So the next time someone tells you the word is a scam, don’t take the bait, and don’t take the bait of getting mad at them, either
Build them a ramp.
Pour them some salsa? Yeah, pour is the right word. Pour them some salsa.
Show them the garbage on the race track. Then… ask who put it there, and who paid to make sure they’d never look.