This community when US tech is brought up

explain the downvotes

Based on the way you're talking I don't think you understand what DEI actually is, and yet, you remain committed to saying how much of it you want. Having a center opinion isn't a virtue; if you don't know enough about the subject, you should have no opinion, not advocate for a central one by default. Didn't downvote but I see why people are.

I don't see the equivalency as valid though. I am white, but that's not something I'd ever be proud of in itself because it's literally just pigmentation alone. I'm so ethnically mixed and Americanised that I can't really claim the English, Croat, or Scottish heritage I have got - despite being a British citizen living in England who eats haggis with enough frequency to disturb my family. I very much appreciate my heritage but it has no hold on me as an in-group identity. They don't claim me, nobody needs to.

If I was to take the stance of being "anti-DEI", which lets face it, it's just white supremacism with updated buzzwords, I'd be taking the stance that my literal mere pigmentation is an equally valid source of pride as a black woman's history of oppression, or a trans man's struggle to be treated as their true self.

I've struggled, but I haven't struggled from being white or cisgender. I've walked alone at night wherever I liked ever since I was barely a teen with hardly so much as a glance over my shoulder. Gone to other countries where I barely speak fifty words in the local tongue with nary a care. I've spent my whole life being given credit as the person I present as. I've been unafraid to take risks, and it gives me hell to know others haven't been able to enjoy those things in life. It's not even a huge amount of empathy we're talking about here.

So that's my story. Anyone who reads this and thinks I'm a self hating white is probably in need of a smack. I'm fine with myself. I want others to have a taste of being okay once in a while like I have, is all.

As for the downvotes I don't know I'm just talking here. I can't speak for them. In America, this issue is often played to 'both sides' in bad faith, and far right ideas are given more than equal time in ways that have normalised fascist tendencies for decades, leading to the current situation (more or less a coup in progress). It's a difficult needle you're trying to thread at the best of times, and right now an "even handed" stance feels a lot like cities trying to solve traffic by adding "just one more lane" to their already massive highways.

As ever, this is just me talking.