It's very simple in my opinion. The discrimination we have in the US is all about wealth, not diversity. If we shift all DEI to simply focus on those who don't come from wealth, we will have solved discrimination without resorting to subjective racial or ethnic or sexual qualifications.
That's been a sub-strain of post election US Democrat thinking: that it should be more about poor vs rich and less about identity.
Unfortunately, there's a large cottage industry that hitched their careers / thought leadership to identity and are fighting it tooth and nail.
Imho, it's pretty obvious and simple. Two poor folks have more in common with each other these days than the poor with the rich, whatever combination of other identities.
It's simple, but not that simple, because poverty and outcomes are weighed and distributed by race. Meaning, if we do implement this sort of DEI, we will be helping black people WAY more than white people. And conservatives don't like that, that's their original complaint with DEI.
When you do that you’ll realize it is also about identity, about how some ethnic and sexual minorities are discriminated against and end up with fewer economic opportunities than the white-cis-male-christian norm, whose privilege is encoded not in law, but in the fabric of our societies.
