The

The Hello and welcome to behind the news. My name is Doug Henwood.

In this world of increasing derangement,

some things are more or less constant, two guests in two segments today. The philosopher

Olofemi-Taiwo will clarify the issues around DEI, and the historian Sophia Rosenfeld will explore

the meaning of choice in Western culture over the last two or three centuries. The three letters, DEI, which in case you

forgotten, stand for diversity, equity, and inclusion, habit at the center of our discourse in this

second Trump era. The standard definition, this from Wikipedia, is organizational frameworks that

seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups

who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination based on identity seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who

have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination based on identity or disability.

At the root of this is something important, mitigating the effects of these discriminations

and trying to prevent them from recurring. In practice, there's been a lot of silliness around it,

which has annoyed many people and not only bigots.

But the bigots have seized on that annoyance and are using it to revive those discriminations.

Trump and company have blamed DEI for wildfires and plane crashes, as if lesbians couldn't handle

a fire hose or black people couldn't fly an aircraft. Here to set us straight in all this is

Olufemi Taiwo and an associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown

University.

He was on this show a couple of years ago to talk about his book Elite Capture, an examination

of how our rulers appropriated ideas associated first with the black socialist feminist

Kambahee River Collective and turn them into banal corporate formulas.

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