Elon Musk has announced he will help people sue Disney for discrimination after he recently posted a document revealing Disney’s “Inclusion Standards.”
According to the document, Disney apparently requires virtually every piece of entertainment content the company produces to have at least 50% “Underrepresented Groups” in every category from plot lines and actors to writers and producers.
Musk reacted by calling the Inclusion Standards “mandatory, institutionalized racism and sexism” in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, and by offering to help those victimized by the policy get legal redress.
“If you were discriminated against by Disney or its subsidiaries (ABC, ESPN, Marvel, etc), just reply to this post to receive legal support,” he wrote.
Musk’s highlighting of Disney’s comprehensive embrace of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” however, opened up a social media discussion revealing that other companies and government agencies have adopted similar policies.
Musk commented “insane” when another user posted a link to Amazon’s DEIA (A for Accessibility) website, where Amazon lists quotas required for every Amazon Studios production:
“Where it doesn’t compromise the authenticity of the story, the minimum aspirational goals for casting across speaking roles are 30% white men, 30% white women and non-binary people, 20% men from underrepresented races and ethnicities, 20% women and non-binary people from underrepresented races and ethnicities.
“Where we can have more people from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups, we will seek to do that. … We also aspire to cast at least 10% of our roles with people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or gender non-conforming/non-binary; and 10% with people who self-identify as a person with a disability.”
Proponents of such policies argue that prioritizing diversity in hiring promotes equality in the workforce.
For instance, “race-based affirmative action … is a critical part of ensuring racial justice and equity,” Liz King of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said in previous reporting on the subject by Politico.
Musk’s stricture on employment discrimination via DEI began a day earlier when he offered to fund actress and MMA fighter Gina Carano’s wrongful termination lawsuit against Disney for firing her from the company’s hit Star Wars spin-off series The Mandalorian.
Carano was fired for an Instagram post in 2021 in which she compared political discourse at the time to how Nazi Germany treated Jews, as reported by the Daily Mail.
“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors even by children,” she posted, per the Daily Mail.
The post continued: “Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”
Carano also questioned the integrity of the 2020 presidential election and made light of the trend to put gender pronouns in one’s social media bio, which she claimed was a factor in her termination, per the Daily Mail.
