Responding to the current anti-DEI movement, most practitioners and scholars seem to follow two strategies, refine the case for DEI and/or disguise DEI in benign packaging. We argue that both strategies operate in an “anti” mode. The anti can be a powerful force of resistance; however, it also tends to exacerbate rather than diffuse polarization. We develop and enact an “alter” mode, which bypasses direct confrontation in favor of novel options that move in from the side to revitalize DEI as we know it.
We engage with the anti-DEI movement through attunement, a critical practice drawn from affect studies concerned with matters of difference. The goal is not to criticize or detract from the anti but to collaborate with it by exploring if and how creative responses like attunement can change the present course of DEI, pointing a way to potential new futures.
We discern a feeling shared between pro- and anti-DEI camps, namely, an urgent pessimism about the future. This unexpected sense-in-common opens a new option: withdrawing energy from defending DEI as we know it and, instead, acknowledging neoliberal complicities and releasing what no longer serves. Accordingly, we propose three practices by which to “alter” DEI: (1) accept and realign with what is, (2) turn inward to take stock and retool and (3) learn to engage with “the enemy” obliquely. We illustrate these practices with imperfect examples drawn from our own encounters with DEI practice in a range of organizations.
By responding to the attack on DEI through attunement instead of opposition, we end up re-envisioning DEI as the cultivation of a human capacity to ethically relate and organize across difference.
