Uber’s head of DEI on leave after hosting a talk titled ‘Don’t Call Me Karen’

There are lessons to be learned from this story though I doubt anyone at Uber is learning them. Like lots of other companies who wanted to display how equitable they were after the murder of George Floyd, Uber held a series of employee meetings under the banner “Moving Forward.” These were intended to be tough conversations about race guided by the company’s head of diversity, Bo Young Lee, who has been with the company since 2018.

Lee scheduled a pair of meetings titled “Don’t Call Me Karen” which were intended to let employees hear about “the American white woman’s experience.” As the title suggests, one of the things discussed was the “Karen” label and how that could make it difficult for some women. Minority employees on staff didn’t like that. It suggested that white women had problem too and could even be victims of unfair assumptions based on stereotypes.

Several weeks after that first event, a Black woman asked during an Uber all-hands meeting how the company would prevent “tone-deaf, offensive and triggering conversations” from becoming a part of its diversity initiatives.

Ms. Lee fielded the question, arguing that the Moving Forward series was aimed at having tough conversations and not intended to be comfortable.

“Sometimes being pushed out of your own strategic ignorance is the right thing to do,” she said, according to notes taken by an employee who attended the event. The comment prompted more employee outrage and complaints to executives, according to the Slack messages and the employee.

The second event, which happened last week, was meant to be a discussion of the first one. That’s when employees really got angry.

…in Slack groups for Black and Hispanic employees at Uber, workers fumed that instead of a chance to provide feedback or have a dialogue, they were instead being lectured about their response to the initial Don’t Call Me Karen event.

“I felt like I was being scolded for the entirety of that meeting,” one employee wrote.

The minority employees didn’t like the feeling of being scolded? That’s understandable. No one likes to be harangued about race as a condition of employment. In a better world, this could have been a point of empathy and common humanity, a moment where minority employees realized that these DEI meetings probably haven’t been much fun for white employees over the past three years.

But of course that’s not what happened. Instead the separate minority slack channels filled up with complaints. So Uber immediately suspended Bo Young Lee for having made minority employees feel pain. She likely won’t be back without a groveling apology explaining how she has learned from the experience and will be a better ally in future. The complainers are said to be happy that she was quickly suspended.

DEI is not about discussing different people’s experience of race in an open or evenhanded way. It’s about letting minorities complain about white people and forcing white people to listen and agree. The agreement part is just as mandatory as the listening part. If black employees want to call white women employees “Karen,” the company has to support that. If it hurts the feelings of the white women on staff, that’s okay. Better than okay, it’s justice. The judgment of minority employees cannot be appealed.

Bo Young Lee should have known that a meeting in which white women were portrayed as sometimes also victims was going to go over like a lead balloon. It’s inverting the whole purpose of these DEI conversations about race. Having the entire intersectional grievance pyramid turned on its head must have been a real shock for minority employees. We’re being scolded for treating white women as an undifferentiated group of privileged jerks. What is happening?!

This will never get better.

So long as corporations keep pushing this Robin DiAngelo inspired identity politics they will continue to have unhappy employees who are more focused on their own grievances than on the job they were hired to do. It’s already happened at nearly every progressive activist group and the same can happen to entire companies.

Simply put, if the head of DEI isn’t woke enough to avoid being suspended for wrong-think then no one is. Companies ought to look at this and consider whether this is actually making things better or just creating a new class of bullies who can’t be questioned or opposed.