I work in a UK supermarket. Some days I put tins on shelves and I work on the checkout on others. I want to go to work, do my job – enjoy it wherever possible – and come home. I believe that most UK retail workers would probably say the same thing.
Yet increasingly, our employers expect us to do more than just fill stock or take customers hard earned cash: they want us to become activists; to get involved in making our companies more ‘inclusive’ and ‘diverse’. But what does this actually mean?
My workplace has a range of ages, from 16 to 70-something; people of several different ethnicities (the numbers pretty accurately reflecting the proportions of the demographics of our area); people of different religions and none and we have openly gay men and lesbian women who work alongside heterosexuals. We also have people of whom nothing is known about their lives or lifestyles outside of the workplace – that’s perfectly fine too – if they don’t want to share, why should they? It’s a workplace, not a social club. All of this makes me think we are already pretty diverse. The way we can all work together, have a laugh when we can and act as a team for the good of the business makes me feel that we are pretty inclusive too. And still we’re told that we aren’t diverse or inclusive enough.
So what’s going on?
It seems to me that this push for diversity and inclusion is actually just the opposite. The thing we are not allowed to have is diversity of thought or opinion. We mustn’t include those who think differently from those virtuous and righteous people in the D&I department. Shame them! Cast them out! Call them bigots, racists and transphobes: let them know that their kind of thinking is outdated and not welcome here.
The thing is though, those of us who think differently aren’t any of those things. We simply understand that, for example, discriminating against anyone for the colour of their skin is bad – it is bad if someone suffers racism because they are black, but it is also wrong to discriminate against people because they are white. Past wrongs aren’t eliminated by discriminating against a different group today. Shouldn’t the best person for the job get the job, regardless of any of their immutable characteristics? Sometimes the best person for the job will be a straight, white man. There, I said it.
We dissenters know that ‘identifying’ as something doesn’t actually make you that thing. I can’t identify as a black woman (look up Rachel Dolezal) or as a blind woman anymore than a man can identify as a woman. There’s a biological reality to our lives that shapes us, our experiences and our futures. It’s OK to state that humans can’t change sex – it’s the truth! It’s also OK to say that we don’t want males in female spaces.
The thing that is arguably the single biggest predictor of outcome in our country – the class system – doesn’t seem to have appeared anywhere on the radar of the D&I zealots. I’d have more time for them if they ever tried to implement new policies using a class based analysis; but they won’t. There aren’t any flags for the working classes, no funky parades, no oppression points and no colourful lanyards to honour those of us who feed and clothe the nation.
So they keep rolling out their ‘training’ and their directives. We keep rolling our eyes. We know that speaking out will get us labelled as baddies so we don’t bother. Instead we have whispered conversations about how it’s all a waste of our time: that we have stock to put out and we have customers queuing and we should be dealing with this rather than reading this months inclusion initiatives. They stay in their virtuous bubble while we earn the money that keeps them there, hoping that at some point soon, that bubble will burst.
