Diversity, equity, and inclusion (collectively known as DEI) sound like positive attributes. However, like critical race theory (CRT) and affirmative action (AA), DEI masks an agenda that is anything but positive. DEI comes from the perspective that minorities should get preferential treatment when it comes to jobs, grants, academic reforms, and even disciplinary policies. In the business world, DEI is a way to add to a company’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) score — yet another leftist effort at rigging the system.

However, the term “DEI” is fading from the corporate lexicon. As The Washington Post notes: “Amid growing legal, social and political backlash, American businesses, industry groups and employment professionals are quietly scrubbing DEI from public view — though not necessarily abandoning its practice. As they rebrand programs and hot-button acronyms, they’re reassessing decades-old anti-discrimination strategies and rewriting policies that once emphasized race and gender to prioritize inclusion for all.”

What is wrong with DEI? The same thing that’s wrong with CRT, AA, and ESG — it emphasizes superficial attributes such as race, gender, or sexual orientation and ignores the more significant and important attributes such as good character, qualifications, and merit. It’s a communistic idea that classifies people based on superficial attributes and grants them a certain amount of “oppressed status.”

Dan Lennington of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty points out that even just providing DEI based on “minorities” is flawed because there is no universal definition of what constitutes a minority. Some African-Americans are considered “white.” Not everyone from South America is considered Hispanic since that refers to Spanish-speaking people. Brazilians, for instance, speak Portuguese.

However, leftists aren’t going to be bogged down by defining terms. They are much more interested in pushing forward with their agenda and winning. In this case, leftists are using their favorite method — simply rebranding. DEI is now “People and Planet Metrics” or some other term conjured up by a company’s legal team or human resources department. In other words, they aren’t changing course, they’re just hiding it better.

DEI, in any form it decides to take, is discriminatory in a negative way. It cripples some it wrongly deems unworthy and elevates others based on characteristics that are arbitrary or politically chic. As Jenin Younes and Christopher Rufo aptly state: “The only constitutional and moral approach is to establish a single, color-blind standard applicable to all individuals, regardless of their background. Any policies which, by definition, subordinate the individual to the group and suppress our speech will harm our nation in the long run and exacerbate, rather than resolve, racial and ethnic prejudice.”

Until the fruits of the poisoned tree of intersectional hierarchy are rooted out, there will never be true justice or equality, and the people who are ultimately hurt the most are the people leftists purport to help.