I'm so sorry that this is your experience, and I'm sorry that you're being used. This is one of the unfortunate outcomes of so many DEI initiatives - or at least every single one I've seen directly or heard about secondhand. It's wrong that they use you this way and, worse, by doing so they are effectively putting a little asterisk next to every one of your accomplishments, which is of course deeply unfair to you, but also to everyone around you.
Hopefully not many DEI efforts are insincere from the outset (i.e. driven by a desire to not look bad), but it certainly seems that DEI efforts are cheapened by their publicity. Keeping them private might be an improvement, but human diversity has so many dimensions to it, and the fixation on relatively superficial things like skin color is largely unhelpful if the goal is actual diversity of things like ideas, perspective, and experience (as opposed to the goal of appearing diverse).
I don't know how to reverse the damage of past eras of things like racism and sexism, but diversity hiring does a lot of harm (and, at the end of the day, is really just more racism and more sexism anyway).
Hopefully not many DEI efforts are insincere from the outset (i.e. driven by a desire to not look bad), but it certainly seems that DEI efforts are cheapened by their publicity. Keeping them private might be an improvement, but human diversity has so many dimensions to it, and the fixation on relatively superficial things like skin color is largely unhelpful if the goal is actual diversity of things like ideas, perspective, and experience (as opposed to the goal of appearing diverse).
I don't know how to reverse the damage of past eras of things like racism and sexism, but diversity hiring does a lot of harm (and, at the end of the day, is really just more racism and more sexism anyway).