But DEI isn’t and wasn’t ever that. I did DEI training at two different jobs and it boiled down to “you can’t know what someone else may be going through, or where they’ve been, and no the best course of action is to be open and curious”. Heck, in my most recent DEI training, one of the people to be sympathetic towards was a white cis man - it was a section focusing on discrimination based on age.
Both sides can not, in my view, argue both things: the right as we see it in America wants to oppress people based on immutable values such as race and gender.
The left wants people to acknowledge that “hey maybe it’s ok if everything doesn’t cater to one specific archetype of a person” - no reasonable person on the left wants to punish or oppress anyone for being a “white cisgender male”.
There’s this idea I’ve held onto that seems very apt: when a group that was being oppressed is given the same rights as their oppressors, their oppressors feel as though something is being taken from them.
You're taking the most charitable view of the underlying worldview of the progressive left and the most infernal view of the right. That's not epistemologically fair.
There is a alot of performative contradiction being performed here, there's an evokation of post-structuralist assumptions when you critique the particularist structure of modern society that favours certain archetypes based on certain assumptions, but then your later statement about oppressors and oppressed itself is projecting a new framing that is prone to it's own dubious assumptions and favours certain archetypes (the oppressed). There isn't much actual concrete grounding of ethical values here, and that's ironically reflected in the fact that most people do have different opinions on the matter.
But that's not a contradiction that progressivism can escape, because to provide a strong grounding to say "Racism is bad", you need to evoke from a universalist framework, one that empiricism or liberalism previously provided. But it is precisely the perceived arrogance to declare your values as universal when they emerged particularly from the West that is what is being critiqued in critical theory as Systemic Racism. Power + Prejudice.
Well, the Left and Right does draw alot from the identity politics promulgated from the Nazi Philosopher Carl Schmitt. Did you know that he supported the Nazis from the basis of pluralism, that he was terrified of the rise of universalist, homogenous world state?
Did you miss the current administration's pushback against DEI for being "discriminatory towards white cisgender males"?