Will Sexton, as part of a post explaining their reasoning for dropping Basecamp back in 2023:

The blog post that our colleague shared in July, titled “The law of the land,” by 37signals co-founder, co-owner, and CTO, David Heinemeier Hansson, celebrates the US Supreme Court’s ruling ending considerations of race in admission to colleges and universities. In that post, Hansson links to another that drew our attention, “The waning days of DEI’s dominance.” We also read a third post of his, “Meta goes no politics at work (and nobody cares).” We found there a thread of ugly thought, couched in an overriding intellectual dishonesty, that re-escalated our discussion about continued use of Basecamp.

It was the language he used in “waning days” from November 2022 that really put DHH back on my radar. Will does an excellent job of explaining why it is so problematic:

In the “waning days” piece, Hansson depicts Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as a movement that became entrenched in 2020, a process he characterizes being “accelerated” by a number of factors, including “the riots in the wake of George Floyd.” Referring to the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd as “riots” is an offhand gesture as Hansson uses it, but it gets our attention because we know how false, ideological, and ugly it is.

Research and the documentary record show that the protests of 2020 were overwhelmingly peaceful, that incidents of violence were limited and often instigated by counter protestors or provocateurs, and that in many cases the responses of the police and federal authorities provoked and exacerbated the violence. The characterization of these events as “riots” followed as part of a deliberate disinformation campaign by right-wing groups, media’s distorting focus on isolated incidents, and biased framing by political campaigns. It plays on a longstanding and shameful tendency in the US of depicting any protest or demands for justice from Black members of our society as innately violent and threatening.

In the same post, Hansson takes glee in the mass layoffs of tech workers in late 2022. He imagines that they were the group “from whom the DEI movement drew its most active and engaged disciples,” and seems to be delighted that “hundreds of thousands” of tech workers will be out of work – “perhaps for quite a while!” – and therefore “the most fervent ideologues among them” will be unable to find work. The implication is unavoidable, that he and perhaps other tech bosses might blacklist workers who have records of advocating for more diverse and inclusive workplaces.

The rest of the blog post is a digression on the legacies of systems of oppression, and considering the harm they’ve caused. I took a lot away from it, and strongly recommend giving it a read.