Diversity seems to bear a certain ambivalence in our cultures. In some privileged contexts, it would appear that diversity has acquired a new sort of value. Organizations often claim to be enriched by diversity. They purport that attracting and maintaining a diverse workforce makes them more creative and innovative, while also allowing them to appeal to a wider customer base. Meanwhile, multicultural societies like to boast about their tolerance, inclusivity and easy access to a smorgasbord of ethnic foods. Yet lurking beneath this outer layer is a growing unease with diversity and apparent threat to white patriarchal power. On the back of the ‘whitelash’ that elected Trump, it appears that many people see diversity as an unwelcome incursion. More than a handful suspect that diversity is a nefarious apparatus of reverse discrimination against white people.

This contempt for diversity and its management has propelled people like James Damore to file class action lawsuits for reverse discrimination. Damore was dismissed from Google in 2017 after violating Google's code of conduct when he posted an internal memo attributing the reason fewer women than men worked in the technology industry to biological gender differences. He alleged that Google discriminated against white men while applying ‘illegal hiring quotas to fill its desired percentages of women and favoured minority candidates’.

Abigail Fisher sued the University of Texas after she was denied admission to the institution in 2008. She claimed that she was unfairly rejected in favour of minority applicants with poorer academic credentials. However, Fisher failed to place in the top 10 per cent of her graduating class, which would have guaranteed her admission to the University of Texas. Among the 47 accepted students with lower overall scores than Fisher, 42 were white, four were Latino and one was Black. Further, 168 Black and Latino students with scores identical to or higher than Fisher's were also denied admission.

Cases like Damore and Fisher provide insight into the ways white supremacy and patriarchy operate through an obstinate sense of entitlement. Google belongs to men. As women are biologically unsuited to a technology career, or so Damore's memo implied, they stole the jobs from more qualified men. Likewise, the University of Texas belongs to white students.