DEI took off right after Occupy Wall Street. The whole purpose is to destroy the class discussion entirely and use DEI issues as a weapon against anyone who brings up class. That's why DEI feels so disingenuous, because at its core, that's exactly what it is.
This is exactly it. The entire DEI-driven conversation about "white privilege" is designed to distract from the reality that privilege in American and Western society is based on social class and economic status, not on skin color. Those two things are often correlated due to historical race-based discrimination, but they are not the same, and there are many many millions of white people who are lower class and treated horribly in America on the basis of their socioeconomic status.
DEI is all about dividing poor people based on immutable characteristics so they don't have a way to effectively organize against the wealthy elites. There's a reason DEI is most popularly held and enforced by elites with high levels of education, and not by those who are the working masses.
Frankly, it's /exactly/ the same stuff that was done to create white vs PoC racism in the US prior to the civil rights era to divide the working class to prevent labor organization. It's just the other side of that same coin, and basically the same tactics with a veneer of paint.
Socioeconomic class has always been the primary leading indicator of outcomes for people born in the US, and that has not changed significantly in the last 30 years as DEI rose to prominence.
