Many of us have wondered the same thing about the tens of thousands of consultants and paper pushers embedded in America’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” complex. According to data compiled by the research firm Coresignal, nearly 43,000 people were employed in DEI-related roles last year, up from 35,000 in 2022. That means America was on track to have more DEI specialists than commercial airline pilots (56,000) in the coming years.

But we know what pilots do. What exactly do DEI apparatchiks do all day in Anno Domini 2025? We may soon find out.

Last week, President Trump issued his own Severance of sorts. On 22 January, federal DEI employees were placed on paid administrative leave “effective immediately”. As a result, many are being flung back into the private economy at an inopportune time. DEI initiatives had already been hemorrhaging support in the C-Suite and among rank-and-file workers over the past two years; the private sector might soon be just as much of a DEI dead end as the government.

I don’t want to sound flippant about mass layoffs. Losing your job sucks, and extirpating DEI from the government is a mission Team Trump has taken up with McCarthyite zeal. It may cut too deeply. Trump’s decree also revoked the 1965 Lyndon B. Johnson order that created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC was tasked with preventing unlawful job discrimination “without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin” in the private and public sectors; ending it could have plenty of negative consequences, intended or not.

Here’s the thing, though: the modern DEI state isn’t a righteous flowering of the decades-old civil-rights movement; it’s a four-year-old tumorous outgrowth of panicky progressive paranoia about identity politics. LBJ and MLK would probably snicker if they knew that the main mission of contemporary DEI departments isn’t economic redistribution, but fussily policing the language and manners of college-educated professionals.

DEI is a relatively novel bureaucratic form invented whole cloth by the enlightened liberals of the white-collar world in the summer of 2020 (who says America can’t invent anything new anymore?). After the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, there was a dizzying moment when everyone seemed to be asking, “What can I do to stop racism”? Or more precisely: “How can the Best Buy chain of electronics stores stop racism”?

The lanyard class in board rooms, college campuses, and nongovernmental organizations all over the country responded in the only way they knew how: by creating new bullshit jobs.

The anthropologist David Graeber in 2018 coined the pithy phrase “bullshit jobs” to describe the rebirth of medieval feudalism in the modern corporate world, with the same tendency to create endless hierarchies of lords, vassals, and retainers. Bullshit jobs are the polar opposite of “shit jobs” that are disproportionately blue-collar, paid by the hour, and performed by the serfs. Bullshit jobs tend to be held by the college-educated lords. They’re salaried, sometimes generously, but have little social utility. Graeber said that they are “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence”.

The longer your job title is, and the harder it is to explain what you do to a stranger, the greater the chance that your job is superfluous. So it goes with DEI “experts” hired to enrich the workplace with diversity and equity — the latter is a fuzzy term that even Bernie Sanders threw up his hands when asked to define.

Exactly how full of shit are DEI jobs?

Graeber’s taxonomy places bullshit jobs into five categories: Flunkies, Goons, Duct Tapers, Box Tickers, and Taskmasters. DEI jobs could fit all five conceivably.

Consider Flunkies (workers whose purpose is to make their superiors feel important) and Goons (those who deceive others on behalf of their employers). Since the rise of DEI, executives grilled about their anti-racism initiatives by the media can simply gesture vaguely at their middle-management DEI Flunkies and walk away. The Goons are the ones mystifying what they do via the dark arts of public relations. Brands could wallpaper over bad behavior like union-busting by appearing to be Taking a Stand for social justice, even if they weren’t quite sure what that meant or what came next after all that standing.

I say this as a former Goon. In 2022, I did some contract work for a small ad agency hired to do DEI-related anti-racist campaigns. The company was helmed by a black woman, who outsourced much of the creative work to freelancers like myself. There was something bitterly ironic about being a straight white guy whose job was to design woke social-media posts — for Pfizer, among others — about the importance of celebrating Juneteenth. But that job was the kind of grift that helps disguise the fact that the whole DEI world is smoke and mirrors.

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The same goes for the people Graeber considered “Box tickers” — those who create the appearance that something useful is being done, when it emphatically isn’t. Will your company unionize or provide your employees with better health care? No, but how about promoting a Queer BIPOC Awareness Day? When I was a reporter covering Atlanta’s public-school system in 2023, I was puzzled by the fact that the district was spending $3.5 million a year on DEI. If your student population is 72% black, what does it mean to diversify it? Were white and Asian children “underrepresented”? No one could tell me. Additionally, three-quarters of Atlantic public-school students couldn’t even read at grade level. But why teach kids how to read when you can “uplift Indigenous voices” instead?

Likewise, “Taskmasters” are the bullshit-job artists who create extra work for those who don’t need it, and that’s what DEI seems to do best. For four years, white-collar office workers have endured the same self-serious seminars on pronouns and “unconscious bias”, and have had to pretend to care about self-congratulatory “awareness” days with social-justice-y slogans. It was all premised on the theory that the way to beat racism is to be hyper-aware of race at all times — the rough equivalent of being told to treat intrusive thoughts about the possibility of death by moving into a cemetery. So, it’s no surprise that a growing body of research shows that DEI undermines diversity, rather than strengthening it.

To make matters worse for out-of-work DEI professionals, corporate America has been cutting back on all bullshit jobs recently amid a surge of consolidation, the rise of artificial intelligence, and the growing realization that many remote workers and middle managers weren’t adding much value. So will there be sufficient demand in other fields for someone in a suit who can lead dour Robin DiAngelo “White Fragility” support groups or write passive-aggressive emails to those using the term “pregnant women” rather than “birthing people” on Slack? That’s anyone’s guess.

Back in the Obama days, those whose hard-hat jobs were outsourced or automated away were told to “learn to code” and join the information economy. But now that the blue-collar sector is hot, maybe it’s time to tell ex-DEI workers: learn to hammer.

At my son’s school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ), Asian children account for about 70% of the student body. Many have worked incredibly hard to get into the prestigious institute, supported by first generation immigrant parents who, like me, see education as the best route to security and success. But in the months when America was rocked by race riots, self-described “equity warriors” described the Asian, mostly immigrant families of TJ as “white-adjacent” and “resource hoarders”. The white principal, Ann Bonitatibus, told us to check our “privileges”, while one teacher called on her to push through a “Diversity Initiative” while “The Iron is hot!”

In the months that followed, the local school board — all 12 members endorsed by the Democratic Party — voted to remove the school’s merit-based, race-blind admissions process, and replace it with one that was race-based. Along with other parents I was horrified by the school’s readiness to use identity, rather than achievement, as the basis of admissions. But when we objected, the Virginia education secretary, a Democrat, told our families that preparing for tests was like using illegal “performance enhancement drugs”. A black father, Harry Jackson, who spoke up for our cause was called a “motherfucker” selling “segregationist bullshit” — by a white activist who uses the Twitter handle @Antiracist14. These “anti-racists” have worked day and night to try to silence us, using pressure and insults, instead of debating us.

And our story is far from unusual: racist admissions processes are being reintroduced across America. Take the case of San Francisco’s elite Lowell High School, which garnered national attention last week: the overwhelmingly progressive city — Republicans account for less than 7% of the electorate — voted to recall three Democratic members of the school board in a landslide. One of those fired was Alison Collins who, in a now infamous tweet, had called Asian Americans “house n****rs”, insinuating that Asian parents who disagreed with her plan to turn an outstanding school into an experiment in racialism are captive to white supremacist forces.

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Like at TJ, activists waged a war on merit at Lowell, in the name of “equity”. Asian Americans, through diligence and ambition, had earned an impressive number of slots — so they were disparaged as “privileged” by anti-racist activists, who called on the school to replace merit-based testing with a lottery. The result was striking. Asian freshmen admitted to Lowell in 2021 fell to 42% from 50% the year before. White enrolment also decreased, to 16% from 21%. Black students increased to 5% from 2% and Hispanic students rose to 25% from 14%.

This process doesn’t just harm Asian American students. Despite increasing the enrolment of black and Hispanic students, schools like TJ put little effort into preparing them for their advanced academic classes. In school district enrolment figures made public for the first time, eight freshmen students, admitted through the new race-based admissions process, dropped out of TJ over just five months, between September 2021 and January 2022 (in the entire school year before, just one student dropped out). Changing admissions processes of outstanding schools does nothing to address the systemic failure of the education system to ensure these students are ready for rigorous training in Maths and Science. It also insults and demeans the achievements of black and Hispanic students who get into schools like Lowell and TJ through sacrifice and achievement. The message is clear: stop trying so hard. (The school district claims its new admissions process is “race neutral.”)

The United States Constitution — and common sense — tell us that a just society requires equality of opportunity, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender or social status. “Equity” is a divisive, illiberal system fundamentally at odds with this ideal, because it preaches that there is a quota of opportunities for every group; individuals now find that their skin colour ends up being more important than their hard work.

One year ago, I waited in a virtual waiting room to express those views to the San Francisco school board. I wanted to explain that it had made me sick to my stomach to witness the disdain endured by parents who look like me, for immigrants from Asia with dreams like my family’s. I’ve written here before about how I moved to New Jersey from India, as a child who spoke no English. What I didn’t write was that we lived in poverty. While I was learning the alphabet, I received free breakfast, part of America’s social welfare program for the poor. Now, families like mine are being called “privileged” and “white adjacent” just because our children have achieved academic success, like I did.

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The board members never called on me in that meeting. Instead of sharing my story, I listened to Collins — whose tweet calling Asian families “house n****r” had just emerged — discussing her efforts to change admissions to Lowell High School.

Other parents watched in shock, too. Siva Raj, an immigrant from India and father to two sons, wanted something very simple, he told me in an interview: for his sons to be able to return to school. For almost a year, the board had been on a virtue-signalling crusade — scrubbing American icons such as Paul Revere and Abraham Lincoln out of school names — while utterly failing to address the elephant in the room. In cahoots with the powerful union, the California Teachers Association, and a far-Left wing of the Democratic Party, the Berniecrats, the board showed little concern as parents pleaded with them to come up with a plan to reopen schools closed during lockdown.

All children, but especially the most disadvantaged, were suffering terribly under remote learning. Even the uber-liberal mayor of San Francisco wanted schools reopened. But “the school board had a wall of indifference,” Raj told me. And so on Valentine’s Day 2021, he sat in his kitchen with his partner, Autumn Looijen, and cooked up a plan: a recall election.

Looijen readied the papers and that Friday, Raj posted a Priority Mail Express envelope, his hands trembling. At the time, he was only in the US on a work visa (now he is on the pathway to citizenship). Growing up in an apartment above a carton factory in Chennai, where his parents worked, Raj learned to never challenge authority. “This is what gets your throat slit”, he said. But he could see his sons withering under online learning.

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Last week, Raj stepped onto a small stage at Manny’s, a community space in San Francisco’s Mission District, and read the results of the recall election. Looking on were leaders of the Chinese American and Indian American communities, as well as other parents. “We had a cross-fertilisation of energy”, Raj told me later: parents of all races, backgrounds and political beliefs had united to oppose the corruption of our educational system.

Even the progressive New York Times declared, “The recall, which galvanized Asian-Americans, was a victory for parents angered by the district’s priorities during the pandemic”. This felt like a turning point: the mainstream media has been all too eager to perpetuate the idea that parents who object to the prioritisation of “anti-racism” over effective education are “Republican strategists”, “right wing activists”, “suburban white moms”, “conservative white parents whipped into a frenzy” and “white supremacists” engaged in “domestic terrorism”. And yet these parents prevailed in San Francisco, arguably America’s bluest city.

And the implications of this victory ricochet across the nation. Prior to the recall election, Allison Collins posted a video of me speaking to my school board, asking why someone in Northern Virginia would care about a school’s dust-up on the West Coast. What was I thinking, “penning” articles about the story in which she was embroiled?

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After the results were in, I answered Collins. I am “penning” articles about Lowell High School because it is one battleground of many where Asians have become the illiberal regressives’ scapegoat, punching bag, doormat — pick your metaphor. In the new hierarchy of human value put forward by “anti-racism,” Asians don’t count.

Indeed, Hannah Nikole Jones, the author of the controversial “1619 Project”, once posted a tweet arguing that it was “disingenuous” to say that New York’s specialised high schools have “majority people of color”, because the majority are Asian. In November 2020, North Thurston Public Schools in Washington state — which includes 22 schools and some 16,000 students — lumped Asian and white students together, excluding “Asians” as “Students of Color.”

And, in discriminating against Asians, Lowell mirrors not only my son’s school, but schools across the country. In August 2020, in Loudoun County, Virginia, the mostly-Democratic school board ignored the pleas of Asian families from India by suddenly eliminating the merit-based admissions test to its advanced academic science and technology high school programmes. The same year, Boston’s all-Democratic school board dismissed the protests of Asian parents, who said their children were being targeted in a plan to change admissions to the city’s most advanced schools, imposing postcode quotas and a lottery system. In both cases, just as in San Francisco and northern Virginia, new freshmen classes saw a decrease in the number of Asian students.

For a long while, the parents fighting against these measures were outliers. Many are understandably afraid of cancel culture; some are already marginalised in their communities, because of their race, their fear of challenging authority, immigrant status and the fact they speak English as a second language. But the case of Lowell High School shows what they can do when they find the moral courage to organise. This courage, for many, comes from the high stakes. For many immigrant families, education is a way out of poverty; for others, it is the path to becoming more settled: secure jobs, rewarding careers, a deciding role in America’s future. As one father said online, as parents celebrated at Manny’s, “They touched the third rail for Asians. Never mess with Asians and their education.”

These two incidents were connected by neither geography, subject matter, or substance; the first was a tense but ultimately toothless conflict between two neurotic New Yorkers in which nobody got hurt, while the second captured not just a horrific tragedy but a gross abuse of police power. It didn’t matter: within hours, the two viral moments had fused in the public consciousness to create a monster, literally. She was a boogeyman spawned on social media, one we loathed and feared in equal measure.

And because we live in the age of movies spawned by memes, she’s coming soon to a cinema near you. A bedraggled and atrociously-hairstyled Taryn Manning will be playing a villainous white woman who antagonises the sweet and blameless black family who’s just moved in down the street. She’s the embodiment of all evil, the manager-calling bigot next door, the proud owner of a soap dispenser emblazoned with the confederate flag. Her name, of course — and the movie’s — is Karen.

You don’t have to see Karen (and based on the trailer, it looks like a pile of hot garbage) to know how it will end: the villainess will come to a brutally but suitably violent end, and we’ll all learn an important, even life-changing lesson about embracing diversity and equity — lest one end up disemboweled by a wine opener.

Manning herself believes that Karen will pack a powerful, even global punch: “I felt a social responsibility to take on this role,” she told Deadline. “Even if I had to play the villain to effect change around the globe, then I was more than willing to step into the role… It’s time for change, and for me to be a part of the bigger picture meant a lot to me.”

Alas, Hollywood has but one “Karen” to cast. But for white women who yearn to effect change by embracing their own inner villain, two new books offer a way forward. Nova Reid’s The Good Ally and Rafia Zakaria’s Against White Feminism, both published this month, invite white women everywhere into a new, exciting role: that of the bad guy.

“I felt like I was being eaten alive by a pack of wolves,” Reid writes early on in her book. But the feeding frenzy she describes isn’t a brutal, racist attack; it’s how she felt after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, fielding calls and emails from people who wanted to hire her as a diversity consultant. The tragedy in Minneapolis triggered an international wave of reckoning, and being recognised as an expert in her field, people turned to Reid for help. And those wolves? White women. Entitled, hungry, snarling.

The white feminist antagonist, inflicting countless harms in her desperation to do good appears in both Reid and Zakaria’s books — but it’s in Against White Feminism that the critique is sharpened to a point. Not that readers should feel attacked, mind you — “White women must not feel that the critique of whiteness within feminism is some crude intimidation tactic meant to silence them altogether,” Zakaria writes, even as she insists on the importance of denouncing “those who cling to exclusionary histories, stories, and forms”. (So, you may be denounced, but don’t let it intimidate you.) Reid, meanwhile, assures her reader: “Any discomfort you feel is temporary and pales in comparison to what Black people and People of Colour often have to experience on a daily basis.”

In reading these books, Reid and Zakaria become an omniscient authority, one who has never met you but knows you better than you know yourself. Zakaria explains that people of colour understand white women fluently, as a matter of necessity: this is the natural outgrowth of “the need to survive in a white-run world”. In practice, this means that Zakaria spends much of the book ascribing intent and motive to the behaviours of various white women; needless to say, her interpretation is not flattering.

White women’s reactions — or in some cases, what Zakaria imagines those reactions might be — are presented in turn as expressions of fragility, of defensiveness, of grasping hunger for power. For instance, Zakaria was married young to an abusive husband, a terrible situation from which she ultimately fled. But when the opportunity comes to tell this story to a group of friends, she assumes that this is beyond the scope of any white woman’s experience. In fact, she doesn’t tell the story at all, lest the other women “demote me mentally below the women who do the real work of feminism”.

“I know that my companions’ world is split into women of colour who have ‘stories’ to tell, and white women who have power and an inherently feminist outlook,” she writes. Remarkably, she’s so certain of this she never actually tests her hypothesis; instead she tells a shortened version of her life story and then quietly resents her friends for the rest of the night, first for their imagined lack of empathy, and then for failing to notice when she pays more than her fair share of the bill. (Zakaria, unlike her “prettily dressed, slightly soused, fashionably woke” companions, had refrained from drinking — a decision for which she also imagines she’s being judged.)

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Zakaria is deeply suspicious of white women, perhaps reasonably so, but it’s hard to separate her historical analysis of white feminism from the grudges that animate the book’s more personal sections. Her anecdotes often include snide observations about other women’s physical appearances; Zakaria is antagonised by a “smug white professor” seen “duly sporting the scarves and baubles of the well-travelled,” or a “willowy blonde” with her hair in braids. And while she assures us that white women need not feel attacked, this may prove difficult even for the most open-minded reader; the words “white women” appear in Zakaria’s book 161 times (the book is 245 pages long.)

Sometimes, the entire case for this or that thing being fundamentally “white feminist” seems to rest on the presence of an individual white woman somewhere in the equation. One chapter, titled “White Feminists and Feminist Wars,” seeks to frame the War on Terror as a white feminist exercise primarily through the lens of Zero Dark Thirty, the movie about the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and its female CIA agent, Maya, who was instrumental in the operation’s success.

Here, too, Zakaria’s personal experience ends up dominating the narrative. She dwells at length on the screening she attended of Zero Dark Thirty at a movie theater in Indiana, where the crowd “repeatedly cheered” at the sight of “a brown man being waterboarded”, then gave the movie a standing ovation while Zakaria wept despondently in her seat. (Sidenote: I know the notion of a bunch of red-state yokels cheering for torture scenes before leaping to its feet to applaud the end of Zero Dark Thirty — in fact a pretty meditative work that in no way glamorises or glosses over the horrors of the operation that killed Osama Bin Laden — may hew believably to certain ugly stereotypes about the American midwest, but if you’ve ever actually seen a movie in the US, this scene is so out of keeping with how audiences usually behave that it’s hard to believe it’s entirely factual.)

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Amid this myopic focus on a fictional CIA agent and a handful of real-life female soldiers, one could almost forget that the American war on terror was enacted, strategised and fought almost exclusively by men. And indeed, overlooking the role of men in lieu of vilifying white women is a recurrent theme in Against White Feminism. In one chapter, Zakaria blames “self-declared feminists” after an article she wrote for Dissent magazine is met with an Islamophobic response — even though the ugly backlash was apparently fuelled by a male editor.

In another, she recounts showing up to an event that was billed to her as a speaking engagement, but turned out, humiliatingly, to be a sort of global bazaar at which she was supposed to man a table of Pakistani handicrafts. Zakaria was urged to attend by two friends, both men, who evidently misinformed her about the nature of the event — but rather than blame them, her contempt falls squarely on the women in attendance. She rages at the organisers, at the white women drinking wine and buying crafts, and particularly at the “Black and brown women doing the bidding of my handler and others of her kind”.

Zakaria is at her strongest when she zooms out to a systemic distance, such as critiquing misguided efforts to support women overseas, where a lack of cultural literacy led to interventions that were more intrusive than useful. But even as Zakaria reasonably criticises various movements for “imposing the goals of white, Western feminists upon women who were neither white nor Western and did not necessarily share their concerns”, the bad actors at fault were massive organisations: the UN Global Alliance for Clean Stoves in one case, the Gates Foundation in another.

And in some cases, her anger at the “dictatorial feminism” practised by these would-be do-gooders is oddly reminiscent of the right-wing critiques that have lately proliferated surrounding the failed American operation in Afghanistan: both Zakaria and Tucker Carlson have similar things to say about the usefulness of neoliberalism in a nation ruled by tribal politics and religion, and its attempted imposition of Western gender roles on Afghan women. At any rate, it’s hard to see what the individual white women who make up her readership are meant to do with this information.

So, where does this leave Karen?

Out of commission, probably. If she reads Against White Feminism, she’ll be too busy wallowing neck-deep in self-flagellating guilt to get busy making a difference, or indeed even have the faintest idea how she’d begin to do so. If she takes the advice of The Good Ally, she’ll be journaling through her awokening with the evangelical zeal of the alcoholic trying to white-knuckle his way through the early days of sobriety (“The magnetic undercurrent of white supremacy is a force to be reckoned with and will tempt you to go back to your comfort zone when it gets too hard,” Reid warns.) Neither book offers concrete solutions; indeed, one gets the impression that asking for them would be just another expression of white feminist entitlement.

But that’s fine. Readers don’t buy these books because they want to be efficient activists. They buy them to marinate in the vision they sell — because while white feminism probably isn’t to blame for every last one of the world’s ills, there’s a particular breed of guilty white liberal woman quite eager to believe it is. Maybe it’s because, if you look at it just right, it suggests a victory of sorts: that feminism has moved beyond mere empowerment and into the realm of actual power, that some women have shed the mantle of victims to become formidable villains in their own right. After all, women can’t ever be truly equal to men until we’ve not only achieved power, but abused it, using it to crush those beneath us. Orwell once said that “if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

These books take that picture to the next level: imagine the exhilarating power of having your own dainty foot inside the boot.