How to put true ‘inclusion’ into DEI

Whew. Is 2025 over yet?

The past two weeks have felt like a year, with an onslaught of executive orders, firings, attacks on DEI and transgender rights, a federal budget freeze and then an unfreeze, a massive push to downsize the federal workforce, an end to civil rights litigation, a suggestion to “clear out” Gaza of Palestinians and so much more.

Education, health, climate, jobs, civil rights. Everything you can imagine is under threat. 

It’s overwhelming to process and think about — which is part of the point. 

So many people are scared right now. I am scared. 

But even amid this avalanche of attacks, within days of President Donald Trump’s inauguration I began to see in my local social media conversations a too-familiar pattern emerge. 

I saw people dismissing other peoples’ fears, calling them ignorant and naive for being afraid. This country has always been racist, they said, nothing has changed, so you must be oblivious to history if you are worked up now. Others said there was no difference between the Democrats and Republicans anyway — they were all the same corporate-aligned oligarchs, so it didn’t really matter. When people cheered Costco’s rare pocket of resistance to the new corporate retreat on DEI, others called them capitalist stooges. 

Sigh. Are we really doing this again?

This is going to be a long, hard road ahead. 

There are those that share the belief, as I do, that we are all better and stronger when we embrace values like equity, diversity, justice, protection of the Earth, and love and care for immigrants and our queer and trans family. 

But instead of focusing on the values so many of us share, in places like Seattle where the political spectrum is so narrow, relatively minor strategic differences are made to seem like unbreachable gulfs. The hyperfocus on small divisions is what I heard someone call “disorganizing” strategies, or the opposite of organizing strategies.

What are we going to change going forward so movements for justice actually grow? How will we change so that we say to more people you are welcome and wanted, even if you don’t know everything, even if you still have things to learn? How can we give each other a little more grace?

As my dear friend Malkia Devich Cyril often says, there is a need for what they call “principled struggle,” which means we don’t gloss over strategic differences, but we approach each other with more curiosity and less disdain.

Local columnist Katie Wilson recently wrote a thoughtful and provocative piece that I really appreciated in The Stranger titled “Lessons for Seattle’s Left From Trump’s Victory.” She said this moment offers us a chance to look in the mirror and do some self reflection. While it is true, she wrote, that the Democrats failed to counter Trump with a “convincing left version of populism,” you can’t stop the analysis there.

“The fact is, we — the left to the left of the Democrats — largely share with the party a culture that, despite ‘grassroots’ and radical pretensions, marks us as part of an educated and liberal establishment. We’ve adopted theories, practices, and language that come across as obscure, elitist, and condescending to the very people we are trying to attract and organize,” she wrote.

“We’ve created an unappealing politics of guilt and sanctimony that proved alienating especially, though not only, to men. We certainly weren’t going to win over the white working class, and it turned out that working class people of color didn’t buy it, either. Instead, they drifted right.”

She’s right. An inconvenient truth is that the precincts that swung most to the right this past election in Seattle were like the one where I live: the lowest income, the most immigrant, the most marginalized. I hope to dig deeper into why this is in the coming months.

I get the temptation by so many to feel schadenfreude or, in internet parlance, “FAFO” to those who voted for someone who would blithely strip them of their rights and blame all failures on their “inferior” intellects, but I would ask — whose agenda does that serve?

I think this moment invites people of conscience to get ourselves together. These are serious times, peoples’ lives and our very future are at stake. In the coming months and years we have an opportunity to build community through openness, vulnerability, curiosity and, yes, kindness, embracing contradictions and nuance with humility, knowing none of us has all the answers. 

Or, we can go back to fulfilling the wishes of our digital overlords and continue to fuel the outrage machine, scolding and shaming like-minded souls on social media, racking up profits for Big Tech while ensuring our communities get smaller and smaller and weaker and weaker. 

I hope we choose the former.