What does the banishment of Woke, DEI, and the like really mean?

First, it means that the mean, petty, and stupid have triumphed.  And that the rest of the population isn't literate enough to understand that.  Secondly, it means our education system has failed to instill even the rudiments of literacy as a goal of education. 

When terms such as woke and DEI are constantly used, the attitudes they provoke displace their meaning.  For example, the term woke came from black communities to designate the awareness of  racial prejudice and discrimination experienced by people of color in a white-dominated society.  People who harbored discriminatory attitudes in their minds used the term derisively to belittle people who claimed an awareness of racial discrimination.  It became a term of disparagement, an insult.  So, no one wanted to be insulted by being called woke.  Those who advocate or tolerate racial belittlement found they could advance their cause by applying the term woke in a disparaging manner, and such application of the term made racial prejudice seem like an acceptable, superior practice.  

One of the hypocrisies of American life is that we proudly recite that all people are created equal but have an obsessive need to assert superiority over others.  Most people resent being said to be equal with people they regard as inferior.  America's most serious failures as a democracy are rooted in that resentment, and that resentment is driving a retreat in the quest for equality.  America's right wing is successfully blocking equality  as a condition of American life. 

A corporation headquartered in my hometown, Moline, Ill., John Deere, issued a statement that it is abandoning DEI policies in favor of quality-based policies.  At the same time, it issued a statement that it was laying off more than 600 employees.  "Cut the DEI policies, Orville, and it's our chance to get the niggers, spics, and chinks out of here!"  Oh, and the company is moving some production to Mexico. The obvious implication is that the company thinks that employment practices that try to include people of diverse backgrounds interferes with the quality of work done.  Lower the diversity of the work force and you raise the quality of the work.  But then you send the work down to the country where some of these diverse people come from.  Along with abandoning diversity, equality, and inclusion in hiring policies, the company seems to also have abandon coherence in decision-making.  We live in the age of Trump, which has taught us that business CEOs find democracy a bit of a nuisance.

One thing we learn in this situation is that it is foolish to look for the qualities of a functional democracy in the way business is done.  Those qualities are detrimental to business.  Well, at least to business leaders who call themselves conservative.  We tend to forget that slavery was a profitable enterprise, and it was that damned  notion of equality that ruined that enterprise.