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How is this different from conservative commentators saying “diversity is code for anti-white”? It’s the same rhetorical game.
More generally, I think reactionaries are too obsessed with black people. Black people are unlikely to make up more than 15% of the American population any time soon. AA birth rates have converged with the white rate. In South Africa, black people are the great majority of the population. In America, they likely never will be. Black people have been in the US longer than many Europeans, and have nothing much to do with the large scale demographic change that has occurred since the 1970s. Ultimately, any pro-black affirmative action, state support etc will always have to be passed with the assistance of the majority of the rest of the population, whether that is white or latino or a mix of both. Issues with race relations that exist between black and white Americans are largely separate to mass immigration, and would exist in the same way even if America had remained 85% white.
One is true and the other is false.
"Diversity is code for anti-white" is based on the logic that since efforts to diversify organizations/companies/government/etc. typically involve reducing the relative proportion of whites and increasing the proportion of non-whites, diversity is anti-white.
"Anti-woke is code for anti-black" is based on the logic that since 'anti-woke' efforts include as a central pillar the elimination of affirmative action (in education, employment, federal contracting and so on), thereby certainly reducing the relative proportion of black people in those organizations, anti-woke is anti-black.
You can take a principled libertarian stance that 'diversity' is manipulating the ratios and 'anti-woke' merely restoring the natural order of things, but from a consequentialist perspective one linearly reduces the proportion of whites in major organizations and one linearly reduces the proportion of blacks. A white person advocating the latter and a black person the former are both displaying ethnic self-interest.
"Anti-woke" includes many things that are beneficial to black people, most obviously in that it opposes wokeness in areas that have nothing to do with race, but also even within the realm of race. For instance, consider the CDC's COVID-19 vaccine prioritization policy. They deprioritized older people relative to essential workers because older people are more white, even though they estimated this would result in many additional deaths (especially if the vaccine was less effective at preventing infection than serious disease, which turned out to be the case). This policy killed more black people it just killed even more white people so the proportion of the deaths was more white. How did it benefit black people that more of them died so that more white people would die so that the percentages looked better to woke ACIP/CDC officials? Take the argument from the expert on ethics and health-policy the NYT quoted:
I don't think the average black person would really be sympathetic to this argument, even before you pointed out it was also going to kill more black people. These sorts of arguments are mostly only appealing to the woke. And of course the same is true for plenty of less life-or-death issues, like Gamergate's NotYourShield consisting of women and minorities who didn't think they benefited from journalists defending themselves by accusing critics of being sexist/racist/etc.
Furthermore, even within the limited realm of affirmative-action I don't think wokeness genuinely serves the racial self-interest of black people. There are many more black people who benefit from infrastructure than from racial quotas in infrastructure contracts, more who need medical care than who go to medical school, more who use Google than who work for Google. It isn't just the principles that want the black percentage to be high vs. the ones that want it to be low, there is an inherent asymmetry because meritocracy isn't just an arbitrary "principled libertarian stance", it serves an important functional purpose.
Of course diversity advocates also sometimes say that affirmative-action/etc. benefits everyone, it's just that they're wrong. Other times racial resentment and malice clearly play a role, but even then that doesn't mean it actually serves racial self-interest. In general I think ideological conflicts have a lot more true believers and a lot less people cynically pursuing their interests than people tend to think they have.
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