The latest flashpoint in the conservatives’ and far right’s war against the so-called “awakened culture” is diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.
A number of GOP officials and conservative public figures publicly they blame tragic accidents, such as the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, on “DEI Employment Practices”. South African billionaire, owner of X and newly appointed “Administrator at the Department of Government Efficiency” of the United States Elon Musk blamed the DEI for this month’s massive climate change-fueled wildfires in Southern California, claiming in a video posted on X that “DEI means people are DYING”.
In recent months, those opposed to DEI have also targeted the institutions that support these efforts. From The Fearless Fund to Merckfrom Walmart to McDonald’sand from Target according to Amazon, some nonprofits and large corporations are now pulling back headlong. They are abandoning or canceling programs that they have implemented or significantly expanded after the riot over the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. In states such as Alabama, Iowa, Utah, Missouri, Kentucky, Texas, and Nebraska, dismantling DEI infrastructure in public higher education institutions it reportedly started at the local and institutional level more than three years ago.
As expected, President Donald Trump used the first day of his second term in the White House to kick things off dismantling entire federal government infrastructure for diversity and inclusion. He demanded all federal DEI staff will be placed on paid leave starting Wednesday – eventually fired.
So why is ending DEI—which is usually embracing, even embracing racial, gender, sexual orientation, and other differences and creating a welcoming climate for marginalized Americans in universities and workplaces—such a priority for Trump, his conservative supporters, and wider far right?
They want to see the end of DEI because they believe these programs pose a real challenge to their efforts to rebuild the “white man’s country” they crave. Their insistence on colorblindness in educational and work practices is really an insistence on a return to the days when only whites could benefit from supposedly objective practices of social mobility. They want to do nothing but close the already extremely narrow pathways to social and economic advancement available to people of color and other marginalized people in the US. They want to ensure that DEI or other anti-racist or “woke” programs cannot force them to confront their own racism in the process. For them, DEI is just code for “Never integrate”.
None of this is by accident. From 2019, the far right threw grenades at critical race theory and African American Studies in K-12 and at colleges and universities across the country. In the June 2023 cases Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard University and SFFA v. University of North Carolina, the US Supreme Court ruled that race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions is unconstitutional, overturning decades of precedent. These were not independent developments. Efforts against DEI programs, affirmative action in education and employment, and critical race theory are part of a larger movement to return the US to a state of quasi-legal racial segregation.
Long before the current anti-DEI efforts, opponents of race-based affirmative action regularly decried the idea that Americans of color—especially blacks—need access to better educational and employment opportunities. They opposed President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 Executive Order 11246 and its gradual expansion beyond government contractors to higher education and employment in all sectors of the US economy. Perhaps President Johnson also sensed this potential opposition. IN his opening speech in 1965 at the historically Black Howard University in Washington, DC, that June, titled “Fulfilling These Rights,” Johnson said, “You don’t take a person who has been chained for years and set them free, bring them to the starting line of a race, and then say : ‘You are free to compete with everyone else,’ you still justifiably believe that you have been completely fair.” Johnson wanted to find ways to create ramps on an otherwise uneven playing field, one that had always favored white Americans and whites over all other groups. Trump’s Executive Order 14171Ending Unlawful Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity officially revoked Johnson’s order, along with 60 years of protections against discrimination in the federal workforce.
Every movement has its champions, even anti-social justice movements. For conservatives like Ward Connerly and Edward Blum, any corrections that are supposed to work against the entrenched white supremacist racism of American systems and institutions—whether affirmative action, DEI, or even critical race theory—are overcorrections. Connerly, who is African-American, was against affirmative action in the 1980s and 1990s. He led the movement against affirmative action in California, and with the help of Republican Governor Pete Wilson, he successfully overthrew affirmative action in the state with the initiative Proposition 209 In 1996, the implementation of the initiative into law helped seriously reduce the number of black and brown students attend California universities.
During 2023 Politico interviewon the eve of the end of affirmative action, Connerly reiterated his rationale for ending any efforts at race-conscious admissions and hiring, whether affirmative action or DEI. “But ‘building diversity’ is just a euphemism for discrimination, because you’re racially conscious.” For Connerly, the path to equality led through race-blind politics, because “the government should be color-blind. I think we as people should try to be color blind – not to attach any consequence to someone’s color”.
Edward Blum’s work as an anti-affirmative action and anti-DEI litigator over the decades following directly in Connerly’s footsteps. In his own explanation for his blizzard of lawsuits against universities, law firms and private companies over the years, Blum said, “I’m a one-trick pony. I hope and care about ending these racial classifications and preferences in our public policy… An individual’s race or ethnicity should not be used to help or harm them in their life endeavors.” In explaining SFFA’s Supreme Court victory in 2023, Blum doubled down on his vision of a colorblind USA. “In the culture war this nation has been waging over vigilantism, SFFA’s 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 meritocracy and colorblind admissions policies.”
Here is the main problem with both Connerly’s and Blum’s work. The US is not a colorblind society. It is a society that has white supremacist racism, patriarchal misogyny, and vast socioeconomic inequalities encoded in its cultural DNA. Fighting for “fairness” and “meritocracy” and “color-blind” politics only means that conservative and far-right people like Connerly and Blum are fighting to end any barriers for marginalized Americans to social mobility through higher education and middle-class jobs. And if the primary scales for creating positive opportunities in a white (and male) dominated society are destroyed, exclusion and segregation in higher education and the workforce will soon follow. The effect of dismantling affirmative action is already evident at a reduced black and Latino university and admission to medical school during the past 18 months, and will certainly affect the practice of employment and promotion.
But the truth is that neither exclusion nor segregation ever disappeared, not with more than 70 percent of Fortune 500 corporations with whites at the helm. And certainly with no more than half black and brown children attend predominantly black and brown schools, while 76 percent of white children attend predominantly white schools. Only, in higher education, employment and entrepreneurship, Connerly and Blum have made it their mission to end the small disparities that affirmative action and DEI programs have provided over the past six decades. But with 43 percent of students attend coveted Ivy League universities as a legacyaffirmative action always seems to be welcome for white Americans, even in Connerly and Blum’s vision of a color-blind 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 “rationalizing[ing] the contemporary status of minorities as a product of market dynamics, natural phenomena and attributed cultural limitations of blacks”. People like Connerly, Blum, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk are just exhibiting the narcissism that comes with their socioeconomic, racial, and gender status.
As is typical of this set, they place the blame for failures and setbacks on individuals rather than systems that primarily affirm white men, especially affluent white men. Indeed, their excuses for attacking anything related to anti-racism, discrimination, and affirmative action is a smokescreen for expressing one’s racism and tacitly condoning segregation and exclusion on the difficult path to inclusion.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
