DEI, Elite Optics vs. Working-Class Reality
- richardgraves7
- Dec 28, 2025
- 5 min read
By: Richard A. Graves, December 28th, 2025
Why Perception Has Replaced Reality in the Backlash Narrative
Much of the contemporary backlash to DEI rests on a visual illusion. Commentators point to dramatic demographic shifts in elite spaces, media, academia, publishing, Hollywood, and professional-managerial environments, and then extrapolate those shifts into a broader claim about American society. That leap is where the analysis collapses. What looks like sweeping displacement at the top does not translate into structural change at the bottom, particularly in the working-class labor market where most Americans, including most White men and most Black men, actually live.
Empirically, the American labor force remains remarkably stable. In 2023, White workers still comprised roughly 76 percent of the civilian labor force, while Black or African American workers accounted for approximately 12.8 percent, a figure broadly proportional to population share (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS], 2023; Select Software Reviews, 2025). If DEI had fundamentally reordered employment outcomes across the economy, far more dramatic changes would be visible in these numbers. They are not.
Elite institutions nonetheless occupy outsized cultural real estate. Newsrooms, universities, Hollywood writers’ rooms, corporate communications departments, nonprofits, and HR offices shape national narratives far beyond their actual economic footprint. When demographic changes occur in these spaces, they are treated as evidence of economy-wide reordering. In reality, these sectors represent a narrow slice of American work, governed by credentialism, discretionary hiring, and ideological conformity.
By contrast, in working-class and skilled-labor sectors, construction, manufacturing, warehousing, transportation, utilities, sanitation, and frontline public safety, demographic patterns have remained comparatively stable. Men, particularly White men, remain heavily represented, often well above their population share, especially in physically demanding or dangerous occupations (BLS, 2023). That stability matters, because it directly undermines the claim that DEI has broadly reshaped American working life.
The sectors that have experienced sharp demographic change share a common profile. They are prestige-oriented, symbolically powerful, and insulated from immediate material consequences when hiring decisions are driven by ideological priorities rather than operational necessity. These are environments where representation is visible, countable, and easily leveraged as moral signaling. DEI did not move evenly across American life. It concentrated where it could extract symbolic value at relatively low cost.
Hollywood Forgot Its Audience
Nowhere is this misalignment clearer than in Hollywood. As writers’ rooms, production offices, and directing roles increasingly skewed toward women, women of color, and queer creatives, the content itself changed accordingly. That shift is not mysterious. Creators inevitably bring their experiences, priorities, and politics into the stories they tell. Self-insertion is human and understandable.
The problem was not diversification.
The problem was that Hollywood forgot who its audience was.
For decades, the core audience for family-oriented blockbusters and legacy franchises was disproportionately White, working- and middle-class, and often male-led households. That is not a moral claim. It is a market reality. These families built the franchises, sustained them financially, and passed them down culturally.
As creative control shifted, those same audiences increasingly stopped seeing themselves respected in the narratives meant for them. Traditional heroism was reframed as suspect. Male roles were diminished or caricatured. Whiteness was treated less as a demographic fact and more as a moral liability. Audiences responded the only way consumers can, by disengaging.
Hollywood misread that disengagement as prejudice. It was market feedback.
The Snow White Case and Elite Entitlement
The backlash surrounding Disney’s live-action Snow White remake illustrates this dynamic clearly.
The controversy was never primarily about whether the actress cast as Snow White fit a literal racial description. That framing was convenient, but misleading. The deeper issue was the posture adopted by elite cultural actors who appeared emboldened to publicly dismiss traditional male roles, denigrate the story’s foundational themes, and signal contempt for the cultural baseline of the families most likely to see the film.
More damaging still was the open disrespect shown toward the source material itself. Classic fairy tales endure because they transmit shared meaning across generations. When creators or performers publicly distance themselves from that inheritance, audiences do not experience it as progress. They experience it as erasure.
That sense of entitlement, expecting patronage while lecturing or morally correcting the audience, has become a recurring problem in elite Hollywood culture.
The results were measurable. Snow White opened to a domestic box office of roughly $43 million, widely described as underperforming relative to expectations for a Disney tentpole release (Los Angeles Times, 2025). Subsequent reporting indicated weak global performance compared to prior live-action remakes, despite a substantial production budget (New York Post, 2025).
Box-office outcomes are always multi-causal. But when underperformance coincides with open disdain for audience sensibilities, it stops being mysterious.
From Hollywood to the State: When Optics Replace Accountability
The same optics-first logic governing elite culture has shaped elite political and legal institutions. The Democrats forgot the White Working Class, as far as who they were tailoring their message to.
When President Biden announced the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, the administration chose to foreground identity in its public narrative rather than jurisprudence or constitutional philosophy. Jackson is unquestionably qualified. Yet repeatedly emphasizing that it was “time for a Black woman” sent a clear signal that symbolism mattered at least as much as merit.
The rapid elevation of figures such as Fani Willis followed a similar pattern. Rather than careful scrutiny and institutional restraint, media and political elites rushed to foreground her as a symbol of moral clarity and diversity. When signs of questionable judgment later surfaced, the response was not reflection but defensiveness.
Equally revealing is who does not qualify as a symbol within this framework. A figure such as Condoleezza Rice, a Black woman with extensive executive and national-security experience, fits any serious definition of institutional competence, yet is excluded from progressive representational politics due to ideological nonconformity. In this framework, diversity is not merely about race or gender. It is about alignment.
DEI Perception Is Not Reality
DEI reshaped elite institutions. It redistributed prestige, narrative control, and professional status within the managerial class. What it did not do was materially transform working-class life for Black men, White men, or most families watching from outside those circles.
This is one of the topics I will discuss in my upcoming release “Black OVER Blue.”
Representation without respect is not inclusion.
Visibility without accountability is not progress.
Until Hollywood, academia, and progressive politics understand that people do not reject diversity, they reject being talked down to, this cycle will continue. Audiences will disengage. Voters will defect. And elites will keep mistaking optics for reality.
References
Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2023). Labor force characteristics by race and ethnicity, 2023. U.S. Department of Labor.
Los Angeles Times. (2025, March 23). “Snow White” opens to lackluster box office amid controversy.
New York Post. (2025, June 13). “Snow White” becomes Disney’s worst-performing live-action remake in a decade.
Select Software Reviews. (2025). Workplace diversity statistics in the United States.
About the Author
Richard A. Graves is the author of "Black OVER Blue" a forthcoming work examining race, class, culture, and political realignment in contemporary America.
Author’s Note
This essay is adapted from themes developed more fully in my forthcoming book, Black OVER Blue. The project examines how progressive liberal institutions have increasingly mistaken representation for structural progress, and how that confusion has produced cultural backlash that is then misread as racism, sexism, or reactionary politics.
Comments