Amazon and Politics (Part 2): Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
Part 2
Link to Part 1 or go directly to Part 2 with this introduction: Our multi-cultural, two-pizza team is uneasily reflective after being required to watch a DEI Ted Talk by Mellody Hobson published on YouTube: Color Blind or Color Brave?
To say Ms. Hobson had argued a point based on anything more than pure emotion was a stretch, but this much was new: At the time, 2019, pre-Covid, -George Floyd, and the PC-Sturm und Drang, there was still a fleeting whiff of across-the-aisle support for individual rights, including free speech, and the separation it implied between “Church and State.” The incursion of forced, Maoist, Cultural Revolution-style, are-you-dry-or-wet, interrogative litmus tests had yet to rear its head, at least in the workplace. Over the last three years, this soupçon of constitutional discretion began to evaporate in the heat generated by chest thumps from a Presidential Twitter account.
Gradually, then quickly, the call went out for an all-hands-on-deck “this is what good looks like” putsch, and no one was going to out-high-road the B-man. When it came to Amazon’s “activist” tactics applied to DEI therefore, it was brow-raising to witness open employee pushback.
A half-year earlier, on September 18, 2018, a few months after Amazon hired me, an “Inclusion and Diversity” Newsletter published by our team’s parent business unit—Health, Safety, Security, Sustainability and Compliance (HS3C)—was emailed to employees under the signage of one Jon S_, a senior manager of Inclusion & Diversity, with the lead article, “How Can White Males Assume the Role of Ally for More Marginalized Voices.”
The audience reached by the message was large, it became apparent. Whether “Reply All” was intentionally or accidentally clicked was deemed moot by the all-inclusive trashing motif:
From: K, Jules
Subject: HS3C Inclusion and Diversity Newsletter – September 2018
Thanks Team – much appreciated. I will unsubscribe now
From: N. Javier
To whom this may concern can you please remove me from this list as well please and thank you
From: F. Tatianna
To whom this may concern can you please remove me from this list as well please and thank you
From: K. Rami
Please include me in the request below as well…
From: H. Matt
Please include me in the request below, quite disappointed in the fact that this is actually a topic discussed in this setting.
From: B. Patrick
Please do not reply all with your complaints, thank you
From: R. Leslie
https://w.amazon.comindex.php/Unsubscribe
If anyone is interested in unsubscribing. Will save a lot of email traffic
From: H. Wendell
Please remove me from this email chain for context I am biracial I find it racist and offensive
And so it went … That’s throwing a spanner into the works!
As the thumbnail photos accompanying the emails showed, all genders and races subscribed to unsubscribing to the Inclusion and Diversity Newsletter. Restraint is needed to limit the take-aways to two:
One (surprise!), scrape a millimeter beneath the patina that robes Big Tech, and its employees, in far-left liberal orthodoxy, and you will uncover a diversity of views
Two, a referendum, when distilled, on the B-man himself
Need proof of how the thinking of even a genius can go off the rails? While DEI is couched as embracing justice and equality, it is merely ill-conceived for inserting a debatable political agenda into the workplace; when it singles out one gender and race as the bogeyman it is perceived as tainted, distasteful and, duh, racist.
Yet, to the B-man, an objective realist, calling out the white man as an oppressor-villain in the context of inclusion and diversity is a disingenuous statement of the obvious. The anode requires the cathode, potential, the kinetic; matter of inclusion and diversity requires the anti-matter of racism.
The B-man doesn’t give a damn. This is about power, not sobriety of thinking. If someone or something, say, a country, gets thrown under the bus, what B-man worry? The important thing is that the cause of Amazon is always served. Open rebellion? Merely an opportunity to bring in the tanks, demonstrate resolve, double down.
Shortly after the email jailbreak, our Tiananmen Square appeared thusly: Cadre meetings, (See Amazon and Politics: Part 1—conclusion picked up below) instituted by comrade Libby, shaking down any revisionist leanings toward the DEI party line laid down by Chairman B.
A primer on critical race theory, hosted by Road-logistics team member, comrade Clovis, courtesy of You Tube; the bot-generated narrator droning the Marxist drivel, hypnotically transporting us into the medium of an Orwellian horror movie.
A litany of emails penned by the comrade S-team managers all the way to the top, issued under the subject line “Standing Together Against Racial Injustice,” avowing and decrying America’s “systemic racism,” sent out during stages of the BLM bedlam
My thoughts returned to Libby’s query. Color Blind or Color Brave? Racism existed, certainly. But somehow driving a stake in ground demarking people along lines of skin color didn’t sound like a great way to fix it. Talk about revisionism. Didn’t this bespeak the root of segregation, the odious pre-condition of racism Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and millions of others had protested? Perhaps this repurposing of an idea in the interest of identity politics and power, too, would prove toxic?
An objective realist should know this much: Cherry picking evidence was akin to kicking the ball down the road. Sooner or later, you would be forced into living with untenable positions. The Ukraine, perhaps. Or riding shotgun with the idea that raising corporate taxes is the cure for runaway inflation. Inevitably, the night will write a check the morning can’t cash.
“I’m color blind,” I said, exhaling.
Libby blinked and looked around. “Anyone else?”
Native Seattleite Nicholas, a team program manager, patched into the meeting from the remote feed. “I promise to use my white privilege with honor.”
On that poignant note the meeting was adjourned.