I kind of agree with a lot of this, and with wpkirish...

...I think George Orwell would have a field day with the bad-faith adoption of what sound like valid principles as cudgels to beat your ideological opponents into submission. On the other hand, I wonder if the frequent citations of bad-DEI-ish outcomes (like students screaming at a prof on the quad) reflect the mainstream reality or are outliers. We do tend to focus on the bright, shiny, loud objects.

Tom Wolfe certainly had a field day with the habit of fashionably adopting social justice issues while continuing to live lives that contravene, one way or another, social justice--see his piece, "Radical Chic."

Ackman does go seriously astray in the following paragraph, to which I have inserted labels to make my following discussion clear:

PART 1: "Having a darker skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman doesn’t make one necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged." PART 2: "While slavery remains a permanent stain on our country’s history – a fact which is used by DEI to label white people as oppressors – it doesn’t therefore hold that all white people generations after the abolishment of slavery should be held responsible for its evils. Similarly, the fact that Columbus discovered America doesn’t make all modern-day Italians colonialists."

Part 1 and Part 2 are like logical ships passing in the night. Part 2 does not remotely follow from Part 1; I'm not sure why he put them together in one paragraph, as if they logically belonged together.

I agree with Part 2--his conclusions are so absurdly simple that they approach the status of straw men.

I strenuously disagree with Part 1, even with his semi-caveat word "necessarily," and mostly because he decided to add "or even disadvantaged." Being a woman is still at least somewhat of a disadvantage in our economic society, and even in the culture at large. There is still a general pay gap. We have many people in this country who still subscribe to a religious belief that women must be subservient to men. We have legislators and courts who find that they know more than a woman's physician about what might be life-threatening, while we see none of that (that I can think of) concerning men's health.

Being LGBTQetc. is rather obviously a disadvantage in our society, as we have states passing laws about bathroom use, sports participation, etc. that impact such people and not the non-LGBTQetc. people. There is a lot of religious resistance to that lifestyle; if I recall correctly, a drag show or something like that was sponsored by some group or groups at ND nd widely decried as against the Catholic mission of the school Now, I don't dispute that per se; but it is objective evidence that if you are LGBTQetc. in this culture, you're going to have at least a somewhat tougher row to how than plain old straight white people.

There's still a fair amount of racism in our society; less than in years past, I suppose, but it sure hasn't disappeared. There is a lot of intolerance widely expressed on a wide variety of awful social media platforms.

I don't even think Part 1 contributes anything to Ackman's overall theme regarding DEI. he'd have been better off editing it out.