For American conservatives, DEI is code for ‘Don’t Ever Integrate’ casteism
The latest flashpoint in the conservative and far-right’s war against so-called “woke culture” are diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
Many GOP officials and conservative public figures publicly blamed “DEI hiring practices” for tragic accidents such as the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore. Elon Musk, a South African billionaire and owner of claimed that “DEI means people die”.
In recent months, opponents of DEI have also come after the institutions that support these efforts. From the Fearless Fund to Merck, from Walmart to McDonald’s, and from Meta to Amazon, some nonprofits and major corporations are now pushing back. They are abandoning or eliminating programs they either implemented or significantly expanded following the 2020 uprising over the police killing of George Floyd. In states such as Alabama, Iowa, Utah, Missouri, Kentucky, Texas, and Nebraska, the dismantling of DEI infrastructure at public higher education institutions reportedly began at the local and institutional level three years ago.
As expected, President Donald Trump used the first day of his second term in the White House to begin dismantling the federal government’s entire diversity and inclusion infrastructure. They demanded that all federal DEI employees be placed on paid leave starting Wednesday — ultimately leading to their being laid off.
So why is DEI being dismantled – which is about the general acceptance, even acceptance, of racial, gender, sexual orientation and other differences and the creation of a welcoming environment for marginalized Americans in universities and workplaces? To build up – is such a priority for Trump, his conservative supporters and the broader far right?
They want to see the end of DEI because they believe that these programs pose a real challenge to their efforts to rebuild the “white man’s country” that they desire. His insistence on color-blindness in educational and employment practices is actually an insistence on a return to the days when only white men could positively benefit from supposedly objectifying practices for social mobility. They want to do nothing less than close the already extremely narrow pathways to social and economic advancement available to people of color and other marginalized people in America. They want to ensure that DEI or other anti-racism or “woke” programs do not force them to confront their own racism in the process. To them, DEI is just code for “Don’t Ever Integrate.”
None of this is accidental. Since 2019, the far right has been throwing grenades at Critical Race Theory and African American studies in K-12 and colleges and universities across the country. In the June 2023 cases of Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard University and SFFA v. University of North Carolina, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions is unconstitutional, overturning decades of precedent. . These were not isolated developments. Efforts against DEI programs, affirmative action in education and employment, and critical race theory are part of a larger movement to return America to a state of quasi-legal racial segregation.
Long before current efforts against DEI, opponents of race-based affirmative action routinely denounced the idea that Americans of color – especially black people – needed a pathway to better educational and employment opportunities . They stood in opposition to President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Executive Order 11246 and its gradual expansion beyond government contractors to higher education and employment in all sectors of the American economy. Perhaps President Johnson had also sensed this possible opposition. Washington D.C. in 1965 In his commencement speech that June at historically black Howard University, titled “To Fulfill These Rights,” Johnson said, “You don’t take a man who has been in chains for years He binds and sets him free.” , bring him to the starting line of the race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with everyone else,’ and still reasonably believe that you are being completely fair. Johnson wanted to find ways to ramp up an otherwise uneven playing field, which had always overwhelmingly favored white Americans and white men over all other groups. Trump’s Executive Order 14171Ending Unlawful Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity officially rescinds Johnson’s order, and with it 60 years of anti-discrimination protections in the federal workforce.
Every movement has its champions, even antisocial justice movements. For conservatives like Ward Connerly and Edward Blum, any reform to work against the white supremacist racism inherent in American systems and institutions – whether affirmative action, DEI, or even critical race theory – is overreform. . Connerly, who is African American, stood against affirmative action in the 1980s and 1990s. He led the anti-affirmative action movement in California, and with the help of Republican Governor Pete Wilson, successfully managed to overturn affirmative action in the state with the Proposition 209 initiative in 1996. The implementation of the initiative into law helped to severely reduce the number of Black and brown students attending California universities.
During an interview with Politico in 2023, on the eve of the end of affirmative action, Conerly once again made his argument for ending any efforts at race-conscious admissions and employment, whether affirmative action or DEI. . “But ‘creating diversity’ is just a euphemism for discrimination, because you’re race-conscious.” For Connerly, the path to equality was through race-blind policies, because “the government is supposed to be color-blind. I believe we should strive to be color-blind to people—to the color of a person No importance should be given.
Edward Blum’s work as an anti-affirmative action and anti-DEI plaintiff for decades follows directly in Conerly’s footsteps. In his explanation for his flurry of lawsuits against universities, law firms and private firms over the past few years, Blum said, “I’m a one-trick pony. I hope and care about eliminating these racial classifications and preferences in our public policy… A person’s race or ethnicity should not be used to help or harm them in their life endeavors. While explaining SFFA’s 2023 Supreme Court victory, Blum doubled down on his vision for a colorblind America. “In the culture war this nation has fought over awareness, the SFFA opinion was like the Allied landings on Normandy Beach.” According to Blum, “SFFA’s lawsuits have received overwhelming support from individuals and organizations across the country who share our belief in the importance of merit and color-blind admissions policies”.
Herein lies the main problem with the work of both Connerly and Blum. America is not a color-blind society. This is a society whose cultural DNA contains white supremacist racism, patriarchal misogyny, and massive socioeconomic inequalities. Fighting for “fairness” and “merit” and “color-blind” policies only means that conservatives and far-right people like Connerly and Blum are marginalized toward social mobility through higher education and middle-class jobs. Fighting to eliminate any barriers to living Americans. , And if the primary steps to creating positive opportunities in a white (and male) dominated society are destroyed, the default toward exclusion and segregation in higher education and the workforce will soon follow. The impact of dismantling affirmative action is already evident in the decline in Black and Latinx university and medical school admissions over the past 18 months, and will certainly have an impact on hiring and promotion practices as well.
But the truth is that neither exclusion nor segregation has ever gone away, nor have more than 70 percent of Fortune 500 corporations been headed by white men. And certainly not, given that more than half of black and brown children attend majority black and brown schools, while 76 percent of white children attend predominantly white schools. Simply, in higher education, employment, and entrepreneurship, Conerly and Blum have made it their mission to eliminate what little disruption has been provided by affirmative action and DEI programs over the past six decades. But with 43 percent of students attending prestigious Ivy League universities as legacies, it seems affirmative action is always welcome for white Americans, even in Conerly and Blum’s vision of a colorblind society.
As Duke University sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva noted in his book Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, “color-blind racism” involves the contemporary treatment of minorities as products of the market. Involves rationalizing the situation. Mobility, naturally occurring phenomena, and the imposed cultural limitations of blacks”. People like Connerly, Blum, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk are simply exercising the narrow-mindedness that comes with their socioeconomic, racial, and gender status.
As is typical of this set, they blame setbacks and failures on individuals, not systems that primarily affirm white people, and especially affluent white men. In fact, their pretext for attacking anything related to anti-racism, anti-discrimination, and affirmative action is a veil for expressing one’s racism and tacit acceptance of segregation and exclusion on the difficult path to inclusion.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
