The elite bubble shows it's ignorance

 Ann Althouse writes about a bigshot who recognizes that DEI is being ridiculed at various levels as racism, so decides instead of clarifying the criteria they use, they will merely rename the policy IED.

"DEI is getting a new name. Can it dump the political baggage? Under mounting legal and political pressure, companies’ DEI tactics are evolving" (WaPo)(free access link)...

[I]nstead of referring to DEI, [Johnny C. Taylor Jr., chief executive of the Society for Human Resource Management] switched to calling these efforts 'IED,' putting the focus on 'inclusion' as DEI accrued cultural and political baggage....

I guess too many people started making jokes that DEI meant DIE. As in "go woke, go broke".

But the decision to change this policy to IED just shows that these people live in their own cultural bubble: 

a typical comment on Althouse's blog:

  Political Junkie said... IED. Now that's a winner. Do they recall Iraq and Afghanistan?

of course the answer is no. One doubts they actually know anyone who had been in the military or injured by an IED.

Because to the average non woke Yank, IED means improvised explosive device, similar to a land mine, that has injured so many soldiers and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And it says a lot about these people that they are ignorant of this: especially since, in the past, a lot of companies had a veterans preference hiring policy. 

But apparently these consulting companies don't have any veterans or people with veterans in their family in their upper ranks to point out this obvious error: 

and what is worse is that the fawning article in the Washington Post was published praising this decision: I guess despite it's many fact checkers no one noticed this might be a bad choice, because unlike Joe Biden, I guess no reporter or fact checker in the WAPO has a relative who is in the military.

For if you think memes equating DEI as DIE is funny, wait until you start seeing memes about what IEDs do to woke companies.

the article actually names three of these consultants who run companies that make money by advising industry to adopt these policies. Presumably one should look into the history of such  companies, and who is funding them, and why they hire experts who are so tone deaf to public opinion.

Joelle Emerson, chief executive of DEI consultancy Paradigm [said] 'DEI has only been the acronym du jour since 2020... Regardless of what we call it, we’ve done a really poor job storytelling what this work is actually about.'"

actually I see what they are doing: 

Making money: 

 the DEI industry — which was worth an estimated $9 billion in 2023...

one is reminded of the quip: They came to do good and they did very well.