The latest flashpoint in conservatives and the far right’s war against so-called “woke culture” concerns diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
Many Republican officials and conservative public figures have publicly blamed tragic accidents, such as the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, on “DEI hiring practices.” South African billionaire, owner of X and new “administrator of the Department of Government Effectiveness” in the United States Elon Musk blamed DEI for massive climate change-driven fires in Southern California this month, saying in a video posted on X that “DEI means people DIE.”
In recent months, those who oppose DEI have also attacked the institutions that support these efforts. From the Intrepid Fund has Merckfrom Walmart to McDonald’sand of Meta Faced with Amazon, some non-profit organizations and large companies are now in retreat. They are abandoning or eliminating programs they implemented or had significantly expanded following the uprisings following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. In states like Alabama, Iowa, Utah, Missouri, Kentucky, Texas and Nebraska, dismantling DEI infrastructure in public higher education establishments reportedly started at the local and institutional level more than three years ago.
As expected, President Donald Trump took advantage of the first day of his second term in the White House to begin the dismantling across the federal government’s diversity and inclusion infrastructure. He demanded that everything be federal DEI staff will be put on paid leave from Wednesday – they will eventually be made redundant.
So why end DEI – which generally consists of the acceptance, even acceptance of racial, gender, sexual orientation and other differences, as well as the creation of a welcoming climate for marginalized Americans in universities and in the workplace – is it such a priority for Trump? his conservative supporters and the far right at large?
They want to see an end to DEI because they believe these programs pose a real challenge to their efforts to rebuild the “white man’s country” they aspire to. Their insistence on colorblindness in education and employment practices is really an insistence on returning to the days when only white men could actually benefit from supposedly objective practices of social mobility. They want to do nothing but close the already extremely narrow avenues of social and economic progress available to people of color and other marginalized people in the United States. They want to ensure that DEI or other anti-racist or “woke” programs cannot force them to confront their own racism in the process. To them, DEI is just code for “Never Integrate.”
None of this is accidental. Since 2019, the far right has been throwing grenades against critical race theory and African American studies 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 United States Supreme Court ruled that race-based affirmative action in college admissions was 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 all part of a broader movement to return the United States to a state of near racial segregation legal.
Long before current efforts against DEI, opponents of race-based affirmative action routinely denounced the idea that Americans of color – particularly black people – needed a gateway to better educational opportunities and employment. They opposed President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 plan. Executive Order 11246 and its gradual expansion beyond government contracting to higher education and employment in all sectors of the U.S. economy. Perhaps President Johnson also sensed this potential opposition. In his 1965 commencement speech at historically Black Howard University in Washington, D.C., in June of that year, under the title “To Respect These Rights,” Johnson said, “You don’t take a person who for years has been hindered by chains and do not free her, do not bring her up to the height. the starting line of a race, then say, “You are free to compete with everyone else,” while rightly believing that you have been completely fair. Johnson wanted to find ways to create on-ramps to an otherwise uneven playing field, which had always heavily favored white Americans and white men over all other groups. Trump’s Executive Order 14171Ending Unlawful Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunities 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 remedial action intended to combat the white supremacist racism entrenched in American systems and institutions — whether affirmative action, DEI, or even theory criticism of race – is an overcorrection. Connerly, who is African American, opposed 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, managed to overturn the affirmative action in the state. with the initiative of Proposition 209 in 1996. Implementation of the initiative into law helped significantly reduce the number of black and brown students attend California universities.
During an interview with Politico in 2023On the eve of the end of affirmative action, Connerly once again laid out his reasons for ending any race-conscious admissions and employment efforts, whether affirmative action or of DEI. “But ‘building diversity’ is just a euphemism for discrimination, because you are race conscious.” For Connerly, the path to equality was through race-blind policies, because “government is supposed to be color-blind. I think we, as people, should strive to be colorblind – to attach no consequence to a person’s color.”
Edward Blum’s work as an anti-affirmative action and anti-DEI activist over the decades follows directly in Connerly’s footsteps. In his own explanation of his storm of trial against universities, law firms and private corporations 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’s endeavors . In explaining the SFFA’s 2023 Supreme Court victory, Blum doubled down on his vision of a colorblind state in the United States. “In the cultural war this nation waged for enlightenment, the SFFA’s opinion was like the Allied landing on the beach at Normandy.” According to Blum, “SFFA’s lawsuits have garnered overwhelming support from individuals and organizations across the country who share our belief in the importance of meritocracy and color-blind admissions policies.” .
This is the main problem with Connerly and Blum’s work. The United States is not a colorblind society. It is a society where white supremacist racism, patriarchal misogyny, and massive socioeconomic inequality are written into its cultural DNA. Fighting for “fairness,” “meritocracy,” and “color-blind” policies simply means that conservatives and far-right folks like Connerly and Blum are fighting to end any on-ramp for marginalized Americans to social mobility through higher education and middle-class jobs. . And if the main ladders for creating positive opportunities in a white (and male) dominated society are destroyed, the failure of exclusion and segregation in higher education and the labor market will soon follow. The impact of dismantling positive discrimination is already evident in a small Black and Latinx university And medical school admissions over the past 18 months, and will surely also impact hiring and promotion practices.
But the truth is that neither exclusion nor segregation has ever disappeared. not with more than 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies with white men in the lead. And certainly not with more than half of black and brown children attending predominantly black and brown schools, while 76 percent of white children attend predominantly white schools. But in higher education, employment and entrepreneurship, Connerly and Blum are on a mission to end the small tap that affirmative action and DEI programs have provided for the past six decades. But with 43 percent of students attending coveted Ivy League universities as a legacyit would seem that affirmative action is still welcome for white Americans, even in Connerly 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 “rationalization.”[ing] the contemporary status of minorities as the product of market dynamics, natural phenomena and cultural limitations attributed to blacks. People like Connerly, Blum, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk are simply exercising the narcissism that comes with their socioeconomic, racial, and gender status.
As typical of this group, they place the blame for setbacks and failures on individuals, not on systems that primarily value white people and particularly affluent white men. In reality, their excuses for attacking anything related to anti-racism, discrimination and affirmative action are a smokescreen to express its racism and tacit approval of segregation and exclusion on the difficult path of inclusion.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
