"He failed, sister,” my mother said. Her voice betrayed weariness and sadness at the same time.
“Again?” asked Auntie Blandine, in disbelief.
They both shook their heads in disappointment. Uncle Amougou, their younger brother, had once again failed the police force exam. A month earlier, he had learned that he had failed the army exam.
“Sister, someone did this to him,” my mom immediately asserted without any evidence. She meant that Uncle Amougou had been bewitched and that behind his failures there was the hand of occult forces.
“The person who did this to him must have used a rare spell,” Auntie Blandine replied.
They began to rattle off various spells that might have been used to block their brother from moving up the social ladder. Auntie Bébé, my youngest aunt, joined them, telling the story of how a friend of a friend had been the victim of dark magic.
The men at songo’o, the traditional game that men played in my childhood in Fanta Citron, in Mvog Ada, the shantytown of Yaoundé in Cameroon where I grew up, were just as disappointed for Uncle Amougou.
“They don’t want us," commented Christophe, one of the neighbors, to the assent of all present. "They don’t want people like us.”
“They’re rotten," said Uncle Bisseau, while still immersed in his game. "They’re afraid that people like us will get in their way.”
Uncle Amougou was quiet. It was as if they were not talking about him. The pats on the shoulder from all to express their compassion seemed not to register. He, normally so talkative, only managed a slight smile to acknowledge their support. A few minutes later, he came back to life. Like the others, he directed his anger towards the government, blaming them for his failure.
“Sister, Anata just told me that Vieux doesn’t want to go to school anymore,” Auntie Blandine, hands on her hips, said to my mother a few months later, as they went back and forth through the books of their tontine.
“What? Vieux?” my mother jumped up. “But what is he going to do?”
They were talking about Cousin Vieux, who had hidden from everyone that he had been playing hooky for a little over a month. We children knew but had kept it a secret.
“Anata must do something. This child is under some kind of spell,” concluded Auntie Blandine. Anata, Cousin Vieux’s mother, was their sister-in-law. She was Uncle Jean Mvondo’s wife. “He must be cleansed. She must take him to the village to remove this evil spell that was put on him.”
“In the village? No, sister,” my mother protested. “They did it to him there. He’s completely possessed. There’s a marabout I’ve heard about. Apparently, he cures this type of black magic.”
In African culture, a marabout is a healer, someone who practices traditional African medicine or folk healing, often blending religious practices with indigenous healing methods. The women were devising different scenarios to save Cousin Vieux.
At songo’o, the men expressed their compassion to Uncle Jean Mvondo, telling him that government policy and corruption meant that we now had teachers who were despised by the students at the school.
“They did everything so that he would not go there anymore," Uncle Amougou asserted. "That’s how it is. They don’t want our children to replace them. They have taken control of the country and want to keep it for themselves.”
For my family and the people in my poor neighborhood, the blame for their problems and for every grain of sand that came to disturb our daily lives and our dreams and ambitions was to be placed either on witchcraft or on the government.
Behind every situation, women were always looking for the diabolical work of an evil spirit. It was necessary either to go see a marabout or to carry out ancient rituals to drive out the devil. They never asked the question of individual responsibility. It was always someone else’s fault.
The men directed their disappointment and frustration toward the members of the government. Listening to them, the government was the cause of everything, even of a cold or a headache.
Decades later, the same mentality remains, and above all, it seems to have expanded to the West. Here, the culprits are not the same but, as in my childhood, individual responsibility has completely vanished.
Over the past years, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, has become the devil that the women of my childhood saw in everything that was wrong, and the government for men. It is the most hated acronym which has become central to the culture war between the new right and progressivism.
The idea behind DEI was to promote individual differences and awareness about climate change. To fight for gender equality, to admit that racism and racial discrimination are real, and to lay the foundations to address them. In essence, the goal is noble. But unfortunately, DEI advocates have themselves given to their opponents the weapon with which to defeat them. Their intolerance towards those who make a mistake and their hastiness to cancel people (cancel culture) have earned them more enemies than friends. It turned the people against them. Take for example, the pronouns. Why would you reprimand or cancel someone who misgenders you? People are allowed to make mistakes. No. DEI advocates wanted purity, and wanted it immediately. In doing so, they have alienated major influencers, first and foremost Elon Musk, the world’s richest man.
He and his tech bros managed to portray DEI as an existential threat to Western society. They have been calling DEI “woke” and vice versa, creating the most effective confusion. Anything that aims at societal progress is accused as DEI or woke, they say. They mounted a counter-offensive. They called themselves “the resistance.” A promotion of a woman or a Black or Brown person to a high position of responsibility has been labeled woke. They came out with the expressions “DEI hire” or “woke hire.” This expression has resonated with the average person.
For white people, especially those whose lives have been disrupted by globalization, DEI became the reason why they have not been promoted or could not find a job. Their promotion or job went unfairly to a woman or a person of color. They were robbed, they believe, of what was rightfully theirs based on merit. From that position, people of color and women owe their careers or their admission at a top college to the color of their skin or their gender, instead of their hard work.
DEI opponents claim that DEI initiatives disadvantage white people, create an anti-white sentiment and result in reverse discrimination, when they are meant to address existing discrimination.
However, the numbers are stubborn. Black people, for example, make up 6.3% of managers in the United States, compared to 67% for white managers. According to a 2021 McKinsey study, although Black employees amount to 14% of all U.S. employees, very few rise to senior-manager levels. Only 5% are at the vice-president level and 4% become senior vice presidents.
Furthermore, DEI is also shunned by minority groups. Black and Brown adults are split about transgender rights. More than a third (36%) of Black adults say that society has not gone far enough when it comes to accepting people who are transgender, according to a 2023 Pew Research’s study. 31% said acceptance of transgender people has been about right and 29% said it has gone too far.
Opponents of DEI or anti-woke have thus managed to bring together a motley coalition. Little by little, the balance of power has shifted to their side.
The upcoming presidency of Donald Trump is shaping up to be a victory for the anti-DEI movement. The President-elect recently announced that Harmeet Dhillon will lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which fights discrimination. Dhillon, an Indian-born immigrant, is a conservative San Francisco attorney who has burnished her credentials by launching legal battles over diversity, free speech and COVID-19 lockdowns. She represented a Google engineer fired for opposing diversity efforts inside the internet giant.
“Throughout her career, Harmeet has stood up consistently to protect our cherished Civil Liberties, including taking on Big Tech for censoring our Free Speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID, and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers,” President-elect Donald Trump said of her on December 9.
Her appointment was welcomed by Musk, who is Trump’s new BFF, and has vowed to end what he called “woke propaganda.”
If confirmed by the Senate, Dhillon, also known for her anti-trans stance, is expected to terminate DEI policies at public institutions, schools, and federal agencies. U.S. companies are also pulling back from their DEI initiatives.
All of this means that DEI is all but dead.
The question now is this: Whom are white people going to blame when they fail? How will they explain that their kids were not admitted to Yale or Havard? They won’t have the easy excuse anymore that the admission was given to a Black or Latino kid.
Nature abhors a vacuum. There is no doubt that they will find a new target, an easy target. If they do not succeed, the politicians will do it for them. It is easier to find a scapegoat to argue away your own incompetence. It may be something linked to race, as race is easily used to awaken our fears, our hatred and our darker instincts. Race enables us to see the other person as the enemy, the one who threatens our status and our existence.
The death of DEI will not change anything for the white working-class. It will not stop technology, such as AI, from replacing workers in factories or in offices. It will not suddenly increase the numbers of white working-class kids admitted to Ivy League colleges. It will preserve the current status quo, where some white men maintain their privileges and their seats forever at the table.
In the heartland of America, the frustration will continue. So will the blame game. The question is, who will be the next villain?
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Luc Olinga's work on Medium.