> How sick is it, if true, people are purposely pitting people against each other for the sake of getting away with something.
I don't know if "purposeful" is the right word. More like the emergent behavior of lots of people in large organizations working in their self-interest. Imagine you're a young Harvard graduate entering Wall Street. In the olden days, you would reconcile yourself to being "the man," and convince yourself that the working classes deserved their condition due to their moral shortcomings. Now your schooling has filled your head with notions of justice and equality, but you're still "the man" and your personal incentives haven't changed. Committing to "equity" while condemning working class white people for their moral failings allows you to square the circle and make minimal changes that could affect your own self interest.
But the consequences of that attitude downstream are dire and indistinguishable from a deliberate effort. When a white manager commits to "equity" and condemns the white line workers as "racists, sexists, and homophobes," that not only divides the working class amongst itself. It also inverts the traditional cultural understanding that the line workers are "the good guys" and the managers are "the bad guys"--further depriving the working class of what little political and rhetorical capital it used to possess.
> Semi related...I hear a term a lot recently that seems similar...'pulling the ladder up.'
You see this acutely among first versus second+ generation Asians. I relied on meritocratic systems to get ahead after my parents immigrated here from Bangladesh. I went to a public magnet high school, engineering school, and law school based on my test scores. I don't know anybody on that side of the ladder who thinks there's anything wrong with using testing to identify talent. But my kids go to a private school where we have a second winter break for ski vacations. Whatever system replaces standardized testing, I will know how to work it and my kids will be fine.
You see a specific example here: https://www.city-journal.org/walmart-critical-race-theory-tr.... It's also part of the larger zeitgeist. In my heavily left-leaning social circle, being a Reaganite who hates taxes and regulations will raise no eyebrows. Nobody complains about Wall Street. But someone's racist uncle in rural Illinois? He's the real problem with America.
You saw his dynamic play out in the professional class's (including the media's) reactions to Trump. You'd expect Democrats to hate Trump for the things he shares with Bush or Romney: tax cuts for the rich, trying to repeal Obamacare, etc. But even from the beginning, that's not what outraged people the most. They hated Trump far more for the things he shared with his working class voters. Indeed, the media rehabilitated Bush and Romney--bombing Muslim countries could be overlooked; saying nasty things about Muslim refugees could not be.
Above the Law is a manifestation of this. It used to be a non-political legal gossip site. These days, it's got a heavy dose of left-wing articles--all revolving around racism, sexism, etc.--juxtaposed against cheering six figure bonuses for 20-somethings. Never will you find any criticism of the work these firms do turning the gears of corporate America, or even the a milquetoast center-left ditty on raising taxes on these ever-growing bonus checks.
I think you're running this argument 100 yards past the end zone. Is there overheated rhetoric about racial equity in liberal communities and in the broader business world? Yes, obviously. Do suburban crypto-leftists equity-wash arguments to get their way or establish status? Yes, that is clearly a thing that happens ("we need a city-block-sized covered farmer's market, not more luxury housing!").
Where I snag on this is that I don't believe anyone takes the DEI-speak in that REI syllabus seriously; a long stretch of it --- not coincidentally the part that Rufo chose to highlight --- is almost verbatim the same content that the Smithsonian was forced to apologize for posting in a display about whiteness vs. blackness. The documents start with a framing (that most people would find risible, though it's mostly accurate) that "white" doesn't mean what you assume it means, but is rather a artificially constructed category deliberately design to exclude outgroups. That's true! It's not well argued, and nobody is going to pay attention to it, and it's a terrible flaw in the pedagogy, but it's also not valid to suggest that the document is saying you're automatically a white supremacist by dint of e.g. being a Minnesotan of Nordic heritage. The whole syllabus is shoplifted from other people's work, but probably 80% of it is stuff you agree with, or at least have in the past professed to agree with.
Isn't it enough just to call out hucksters making a buck off clueless corporate initiatives, or status-obsessed Very Online people trying to score Twitter points? The idea that white people are routinely attacked at their places of work for an unexpurgated original sin of racism is just not plausible.
I don't know if "purposeful" is the right word. More like the emergent behavior of lots of people in large organizations working in their self-interest. Imagine you're a young Harvard graduate entering Wall Street. In the olden days, you would reconcile yourself to being "the man," and convince yourself that the working classes deserved their condition due to their moral shortcomings. Now your schooling has filled your head with notions of justice and equality, but you're still "the man" and your personal incentives haven't changed. Committing to "equity" while condemning working class white people for their moral failings allows you to square the circle and make minimal changes that could affect your own self interest.
But the consequences of that attitude downstream are dire and indistinguishable from a deliberate effort. When a white manager commits to "equity" and condemns the white line workers as "racists, sexists, and homophobes," that not only divides the working class amongst itself. It also inverts the traditional cultural understanding that the line workers are "the good guys" and the managers are "the bad guys"--further depriving the working class of what little political and rhetorical capital it used to possess.
> Semi related...I hear a term a lot recently that seems similar...'pulling the ladder up.'
You see this acutely among first versus second+ generation Asians. I relied on meritocratic systems to get ahead after my parents immigrated here from Bangladesh. I went to a public magnet high school, engineering school, and law school based on my test scores. I don't know anybody on that side of the ladder who thinks there's anything wrong with using testing to identify talent. But my kids go to a private school where we have a second winter break for ski vacations. Whatever system replaces standardized testing, I will know how to work it and my kids will be fine.