Sit & Write #266
And a half-baked meditation on DEI rollbacks
Greetings, friends!
Join me this weekend for some mutual productivity time. If you’re new to Sit & Write, read this before attending.
WHAT: Sit & Write #266
WHEN: Saturday, 2/15, 11:00am-2:00pm ET
WHERE: Zoom
LINK: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83819731761?pwd=fpnDHv1DH7X9tFdL4PMs166qHE6QkY.1
MEETING ID: 838 1973 1761
PASSCODE: 706161
HALF-FORMED THOUGHTS
“Look,” Mr. Allen interjects, “we’ve all seen the protests across the City. We’re doing business in a highly sensitive political moment. But consumers still crave escapism. The only difference is now they feel guilty about it. If our brands are going to survive this moment, we need to fill the gap between what people feel obligated to do and what they actually want. We have got to soften the edges until it is a totally seamless desire.”
The above is an excerpt from my novel-in-progress. I wrote this well before Trump took office last month, and am feeling equal parts furious and vindicated by its prescience.
It’s a bit surreal watching my more moderate peers melt down over the literal erasure of trans people from government websites and communications and the rollback of DEI initiatives and language from corporate and academic entities.
Yes, it absolutely sucks to be erased from even things that were so clearly our own, like the Stonewall National Monument. It’s degrading at best, violent at worst. But I’m not sure our inclusion was entirely beneficial to begin with.
Arguably, it’s not always helpful to be formally acknowledged (interpellated, if you will) by corporations and federal offices. See the onslaught of cis-passing nonbinary people who got X gender markers on their federal documents, now scrambling for solutions. See how even cis-passing transsexuals are less able to fly under the radar in public bathrooms etc. like they once could. Visibility and overexposure go hand-in-hand.
The antidiscrimination aspects of corporate and governmental DEI initiatives were concretely helpful to individuals, of course. But some of these spaces and systems we were invited to join were arguably not worth joining. See the trans and nonbinary soldiers, no longer invited to aid the U.S. imperialist project. See defense contractor Northrop Grumman, once a fixture at diverse hiring fairs, walking back their inclusive stance.
As a whole, I think marginalized groups in the U.S. and similar cultures have been lulled into a false sense of security by the high-level recognition. Here’s the thing: the government doesn’t love you. Google and Amazon don’t love you. It’s not that these entities suddenly stopped caring about us — it’s that they never saw us as anything more than consumers or pawns in the first place.
Alright friends, that’s all for today.
Warmly,
Julian Shendelman
www.collectivelit.com
P.S. This newsletter has not been proofread!
This is in line with the pandemic-inspired reality that your job doesn’t love you and is rarely looking out for your best interests . A startling realization for some!
Right on. And if we acknowledged this reality, we might have been using our $$$ all along to empower ourselves, not to make the very people who hold us in contempt, rich as f..k. Even these recent boycotts seem after the fact.