Your opponent might smile at you

I have a blog post in the works that, if I ever finish it, will be critical of workplace DEI [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion] initiatives.

In part, I draw my critique from frustrations stemming from my encounters with adamantly pro-DEI coworkers. They tend to speak the loudest and in the most preachy terms. And because the meetings are now done remotely on everyone's favorite webinar tool, they often place messages in the "chat" feature. And the messages read like, say, comments on a particularly contentious blog thread. The lesson I'm inclined to take from those encounters is that they're promoting diversity (within a narrow range of accepted viewpoints), equity (which means what they want it to mean right now, regardless of what they meant yesterday or what they'll mean tomorrow), and inclusion (by excluding people who might see things differently). My takeaway is that their main strategies are bullying and shaming.

That's online culture. It's also "big meeting with a lot of people culture" and "workplace culture where some (like me) are timid about speaking up and others aren't." I should also point out that while I have maybe 100 or so coworkers at my specific unit, we're divided into subunits. That means that even though we know each other by site and name, we don't always work with each other, and it's common to go years without much interpersonal interaction.

But then recently I was involved in a community building event at my workplace. Well, not at my workplace. It was still virtual over everyone's favorite webinar tool. But it was with coworkers and loosely sponsored as a socializing event by my employer. There weren't a lot of us--maybe 10 or 15?--and it was a mostly unstructured game. By "unstructured," I mean that even though there were rules to the game and even though we were grouped in teams and even though there were winners and losers and we all tried to win--despite all that, no one actually cared too much about winning and we let some of the rules slide when people (like me) forgot them occasionally.

And some of the people who most aggravate me (in the DEI) context were there. And for the most part, DEI didn't enter the discussion. I do recall one comment made by somebody that, if you squint right, had more than a trace amount of DEI'ish snark. But otherwise, no. We had a good time. 

And I saw a different side of some of my coworkers, with some of whom I had had only minimal interaction. They were having fun and socializing. The contentious DEI issues weren't at the forefront. They were in the background, of course. But they didn't dominate, for that brief hour.