This is a fascinating article as an anatomy of the DEI movement's rise and fall in micro. There are distinct peaks and declines in the lib Long March and it's interesting to see exactly how they happen.

DePino talked about growing up in a white, mostly Catholic suburb between Trenton, N.J., and Philadelphia. She admitted to not having Black friends until after college. She told audiences she'd always thought of herself "as not racist — one of the good ones" — but it wasn't until that day in Starbucks that "it just hit me" that racism "never happens to me."

Saahene, who studied health policy in college, spoke of entering corporate healthcare and becoming dismayed at the idea of profiting from helping people — before realizing her purpose was to push white people to speak out against injustice. The daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, she used lessons she'd learned from an online diversity, equity and inclusion certificate course to talk about race.

So the white one is a fat boomer that got too comfortable with her lifestyle and was looking for a cause. The black one is likewise a beneficiary of the American educational and corporate standard, but that wasn't enough for her either.

The world watched as a police officer pressed his knee into a Black man’s neck for 9½ minutes on a Minneapolis street corner. Protests raged in response to George Floyd’s murder. America began soul-searching.

From Privilege to Progress — the project the women called P2P — took off. The number of followers on their Instagram account shot up from around 20,000 to roughly half a million. By late 2020, the women had monthly, sometimes weekly, paid engagements at Google, Spectrum, Ikea, Yale, MIT, Tufts and the United Nations.

[This] latest boom was unprecedented. Corporations pledged tens of billions of dollars to further racial equality. In California and New York, governments launched DEI initiatives. Schools, nonprofits and businesses across the U.S. hosted diversity summits. Many outsourced training to people like Saahene and DePino.

The Saint George incident was the starting gun for all the DEI and ESG initiatives lined up on the blocks.

The duo nearly doubled their joint speakers rate to $10,000 total per appearance. In 2021, each netted more than $100,000.

This is the speaking fee a typical diversity grifter could expect. About 20% of Hillary's - not bad.

Then the demand for talk and training on race slowly started to subside. [...] Part of the reason was national fatigue. [...] Another part was politics. [...] And part was practical.

In 2021, the Washington Post asked the 50 most valuable U.S. companies, which had promised a total of $49.5 billion to diversity programs since 2020, how much they actually spent. It received responses from 37 confirming less than 4% of that amount— $1.7 billion.

The workforce research group Revelio Labs crunched data on 17 million layoff notices since 2020 and found that by the fall of 2021, diversity-related jobs were being cut at double the rate of non-DEI jobs.

The anti-DEI campaigning, right wing backlash, counter-messaging seems to have an effect. Probably the much more significant reason, though, is the massive economic contraction caused by our DEI elected president.

"We were used to putting speaking dates on the calendar months ahead of time," Saahene said. "Then it began to go dry."

Saahene grew introspective. Living in Ghana for long stretches had made her feel empowered in her Black skin. She began to question her role as a Black woman who spoke to white audiences about racism.

She began to think back to disagreements she'd had with DePino — differences that had seemed minor at the time but in a new light felt more troubling.

When the money dried up, the black grifter suddenly started to notice a bunch of racism.

Then there was the question of how to divide the profits from their business. The two women had always split them evenly, but in 2019 Saahene had suggested that she deserved a greater share. It seemed clear that the venture would have gotten little traction without a Black woman on board, and in her view, speaking about racism required more "emotional labor" on her part. She said DePino disagreed, contending that she did more background work: nonprofit filings, managing money and posting to social media accounts.

So basically the white one was doing all the work and the black one just had to show up and enjoy some cocktails afterwards.

In late November 2021, she texted DePino: "I’m exploiting my trauma. ... Someone said this to me yesterday, 'No one asks a sexual assault survivor to retell their story, so why are Black people expected to tell theirs?'"

“You have to do what feels right by you," DePino replied. "I support you completely."

The black grifter starts to feel uncomfortable with the concept of work in general

They continued to talk, to try to sort out differences. Saahene texted, saying she felt unheard and pointing out past moments she now considered "microaggressions."

One involved a suggestion by DePino that they visit a lynching memorial in Alabama together. "As if we haven't had numerous conversations about how traumatizing it is for me to witness violence against Black bodies," Saahene wrote.

Brainstorming is retroactively defined as a microaggression

DePino replied: “I thought our personal relationship was so much deeper... this text sounds like we are strangers.”

Saahene emailed to say she was done sharing stages. Since returning from Ghana, Saahene wrote, she was on a “transformation of healing and decolonizing.” She accused DePino of “defensiveness and other manifestations of whiteness.”

Finally, replying to accusations is also racism.

“I thought we were working things out. I thought we were best friends.” DePino said in an interview. “Instead, I learned that we were not friends anymore. ... The organization had a mission and she no longer supported it.”

The white grifter apparently had no suspicion the black grifter would do anything like this, indicating that she completely suspends her higher judgment when dealing with black people.

In the last several months, [Saahene] has spoken at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg about racism, healing and self-care, visited Malawi to join the board of a nonprofit for children and co-hosted a fundraiser for the group in Los Angeles.

Her next big project is organizing a six-day retreat for "changemakers" at a Black-owned luxury hotel in Morocco. She expects most attendees will be Black.

The black one is now suctioning money off white people in different ways.

[DePino] pores over old essays by white abolitionists. "Those are the revolutionary white people throughout history that did not drop that ball,” DePino said recently. “But people didn’t always like them, either."

She is helping her [black] boyfriend digitize and catalog his video archive of Jim Crow-era Black family life, hoping it can be part of a permanent museum exhibit or public digital collection.

DePino finds comfort in moving from place to place: to Delaware to see her boyfriend, to New Mexico to see family, to New Orleans to hear jazz, to Los Angeles to be with her kids.

The white one is licking her wounds and coping with her status as a 2nd-class racial citizen.

In the end, the political merging of white and black women is like oil and water, where the only thing that holds them in the same place is money. Take away the grift, and the movement falls apart.

Ironically, though, the prosperity both experienced in America gave them the luxury to think about racial agitation. So it ain't all about the money either.

This is a fascinating article as an anatomy of the DEI movement's rise and fall in micro. There are distinct peaks and declines in the lib Long March and it's interesting to see exactly how they happen.

DePino talked about growing up in a white, mostly Catholic suburb between Trenton, N.J., and Philadelphia. She admitted to not having Black friends until after college. She told audiences she'd always thought of herself "as not racist — one of the good ones" — but it wasn't until that day in Starbucks that "it just hit me" that racism "never happens to me."

Saahene, who studied health policy in college, spoke of entering corporate healthcare and becoming dismayed at the idea of profiting from helping people — before realizing her purpose was to push white people to speak out against injustice. The daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, she used lessons she'd learned from an online diversity, equity and inclusion certificate course to talk about race.

So the white one is a fat boomer that got too comfortable with her lifestyle and was looking for a cause. The black one is likewise a beneficiary of the American educational and corporate standard, but that wasn't enough for her either.

The world watched as a police officer pressed his knee into a Black man’s neck for 9½ minutes on a Minneapolis street corner. Protests raged in response to George Floyd’s murder. America began soul-searching.

From Privilege to Progress — the project the women called P2P — took off. The number of followers on their Instagram account shot up from around 20,000 to roughly half a million. By late 2020, the women had monthly, sometimes weekly, paid engagements at Google, Spectrum, Ikea, Yale, MIT, Tufts and the United Nations.

[This] latest boom was unprecedented. Corporations pledged tens of billions of dollars to further racial equality. In California and New York, governments launched DEI initiatives. Schools, nonprofits and businesses across the U.S. hosted diversity summits. Many outsourced training to people like Saahene and DePino.

The Saint George incident was the starting gun for all the DEI and ESG initiatives lined up on the blocks.

The duo nearly doubled their joint speakers rate to $10,000 total per appearance. In 2021, each netted more than $100,000.

This is the speaking fee a typical diversity grifter could expect. About 20% of Hillary's - not bad.

Then the demand for talk and training on race slowly started to subside. [...] Part of the reason was national fatigue. [...] Another part was politics. [...] And part was practical.

In 2021, the Washington Post asked the 50 most valuable U.S. companies, which had promised a total of $49.5 billion to diversity programs since 2020, how much they actually spent. It received responses from 37 confirming less than 4% of that amount— $1.7 billion.

The workforce research group Revelio Labs crunched data on 17 million layoff notices since 2020 and found that by the fall of 2021, diversity-related jobs were being cut at double the rate of non-DEI jobs.

The anti-DEI campaigning, right wing backlash, counter-messaging seems to have an effect. Probably the much more significant reason, though, is the massive economic contraction caused by our DEI elected president.

"We were used to putting speaking dates on the calendar months ahead of time," Saahene said. "Then it began to go dry."

Saahene grew introspective. Living in Ghana for long stretches had made her feel empowered in her Black skin. She began to question her role as a Black woman who spoke to white audiences about racism.

She began to think back to disagreements she'd had with DePino — differences that had seemed minor at the time but in a new light felt more troubling.

When the money dried up, the black grifter suddenly started to notice a bunch of racism.

Then there was the question of how to divide the profits from their business. The two women had always split them evenly, but in 2019 Saahene had suggested that she deserved a greater share. It seemed clear that the venture would have gotten little traction without a Black woman on board, and in her view, speaking about racism required more "emotional labor" on her part. She said DePino disagreed, contending that she did more background work: nonprofit filings, managing money and posting to social media accounts.

So basically the white one was doing all the work and the black one just had to show up and enjoy some cocktails afterwards.

In late November 2021, she texted DePino: "I’m exploiting my trauma. ... Someone said this to me yesterday, 'No one asks a sexual assault survivor to retell their story, so why are Black people expected to tell theirs?'"

“You have to do what feels right by you," DePino replied. "I support you completely."

The black grifter starts to feel uncomfortable with the concept of work in general

They continued to talk, to try to sort out differences. Saahene texted, saying she felt unheard and pointing out past moments she now considered "microaggressions."

One involved a suggestion by DePino that they visit a lynching memorial in Alabama together. "As if we haven't had numerous conversations about how traumatizing it is for me to witness violence against Black bodies," Saahene wrote.

Brainstorming is retroactively defined as a microaggression

DePino replied: “I thought our personal relationship was so much deeper... this text sounds like we are strangers.”

Saahene emailed to say she was done sharing stages. Since returning from Ghana, Saahene wrote, she was on a “transformation of healing and decolonizing.” She accused DePino of “defensiveness and other manifestations of whiteness.”

Finally, replying to accusations is also racism.

“I thought we were working things out. I thought we were best friends.” DePino said in an interview. “Instead, I learned that we were not friends anymore. ... The organization had a mission and she no longer supported it.”

The white grifter apparently had no suspicion the black grifter would do anything like this, indicating that she completely suspends her higher judgment when dealing with black people.

In the last several months, [Saahene] has spoken at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg about racism, healing and self-care, visited Malawi to join the board of a nonprofit for children and co-hosted a fundraiser for the group in Los Angeles.

Her next big project is organizing a six-day retreat for "changemakers" at a Black-owned luxury hotel in Morocco. She expects most attendees will be Black.

The black one is now suctioning money off white people in different ways.

[DePino] pores over old essays by white abolitionists. "Those are the revolutionary white people throughout history that did not drop that ball,” DePino said recently. “But people didn’t always like them, either."

She is helping her [black] boyfriend digitize and catalog his video archive of Jim Crow-era Black family life, hoping it can be part of a permanent museum exhibit or public digital collection.

DePino finds comfort in moving from place to place: to Delaware to see her boyfriend, to New Mexico to see family, to New Orleans to hear jazz, to Los Angeles to be with her kids.

The white one is licking her wounds and coping with her status as a 2nd-class racial citizen.

In the end, the political merging of white and black women is like oil and water, where the only thing that holds them in the same place is money. Take away the grift, and the movement falls apart.

Ironically, though, the prosperity both experienced in America gave them the luxury to think about racial agitation. So it ain't all about the money either.