The national turn against DEI
Renewing the progressive concept of equal opportunity for all
The Civil Rights Movement of 1955-1965 struggled for the end of discrimination against blacks, the protection of civil and political rights, access to public accommodations, and equal opportunity in education and employment. It attained a great legal, social, and cultural transformation. Its goals were for the most part attained, although the great reform did not change the fact that public schools were unequal and that there were many exclusive private schools. In addition, as a legacy of past discrimination, inequality in employment and income remained. With respect to these remaining issues, Dr. King proposed educational parks to educate all children regardless of where they lived; and he proposed a multi-racial and multi-ethnic movement to demand reforms necessary to attain economic equality, to the benefit of all races and ethnic groups.
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From affirmative action to identity politics to DEI
Affirmative action, initiated in the 1960s, departed from the spirit of King’s proposals, and in addition, it stood against the American Creed of equality for all, in that it mandated preferential treatment on the basis of race, ethnicity, and sex. Moreover, affirmative action was flawed from the perspective of social justice, because it provided support for blacks and women who had credentials to enter competition for highly valued employment and prestigious universities, but it provided no support for blacks and women who lacked the minimal credentials to enter the competition.
Affirmative action would have been a good measure, if it had been conceived and presented to the people as a temporary correction for past discrimination, and if it had been accompanied by a broad-based program of educational and economic reforms. However, in spite of its evident limitations, the great majority of whites accepted affirmative action. And through the decades, white attitudes became increasingly race neutral, moving away from the racist beliefs of the pre-1965 era. At the same time, racial inequalities in income and wealth persisted, as a result of the inherent limitations of affirmative action and the absence of a broad-based movement for economic reform. Affirmative action reflected the particular interests of the black middle class.
The Rainbow Coalition led by Jesse Jackson in the 1980s responded to the stagnation that had set in with respect to the process of change. It sought to form a political coalition of all racial and ethnic groups and social sectors, including white workers and businesspersons. It put forth a comprehensive program of economic and social change to the benefit of all non-elite social sectors. And it proposed a reorientation of U.S. foreign policy from East-West confrontation to North-South cooperation, appropriating ideas that previously had been expressed by Pan-Africanism, Malcolm X, the black power movement, the student anti-war movement, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Rainbow Coalition was a positive and constructive effort to revitalize the Civil Rights Movement.
By the 1990s, the Rainbow Coalition had dissipated without attaining reforms, and identity politics emerged. Identity politics is an accommodationist project that abandons the goal of transformative social change of the African-American movement of the period 1966-1972 and of the Jackson presidential campaigns of 1983 to 1988. It seeks greater inclusion in the institutions of the nation of blacks, women, Latinos, indigenous peoples, and LGBT persons. Identity politics assumes the inclusion of such groups will create a greater diversity of viewpoints, and thus it will strengthen the institution in the attainment of its goals, and in some situations, could lead to change in the definition of institutional goals. The corporate elite supports identity politics, because it is in a position to control changes that might emerge from it, guaranteeing that its own power and privilege is preserved. At the same time, identity politics can add to political stability, by channeling radical impulses among the excluded sectors toward inclusion in the structures of authority in the established order.
In the 2010s, in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 and the rapid dissemination of the notion of the 99%, academics and activists put forth the notion that white racism was the cause of the persistent racial inequality in wealth and income. In a 2018 article in Dialectical Anthropology, “Antiracism: a neoliberal alternative to a left,” Adolph Reed Jr., Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania and a recognized black political scientist, maintains that the new anti-racist politics is incompatible with leftist politics as conventionally understood; it is in fact anti-leftist. It “is fundamentally antagonistic to a left politics of broadly egalitarian social transformation.” It does not seek the elimination or reduction of economic inequalities of the nation; it only seeks equal access to the hierarchical distribution of goods and services. It is committed to the pursuit of racial parity within the established order; it does not seek to forge a large, broad political base seeking social transformation. It is rooted in the social position and worldview of governmental administrators tied to the Democratic Party, news analysts and commentators, educational administrators and professors, corporate administrators, social service and non-profit sectors, and the diversity industry. The members of this stratum are in agreement that race and other ascriptive identities should be central to the framing of social justice issues.
The claim that white racism is the cause of persistent racial inequality in income and wealth ignored other factors, such as familial and societal disintegration, as several black conservative scholars today argue. It ignored the analysis of the African-American sociologist William J. Wilson, who maintained that the outmigration of the black middle class from historically black neighborhoods had resulted in socially isolated lower-class black neighborhoods with high levels of poverty, welfare dependency, youth joblessness, male joblessness, street crime, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, and female-headed families.
In a Heritage Foundation program, three black intellectuals/activists (Glen Loury, Ian Rowe, and Robert Woodson) noted that the income gap between blacks and whites had declined in the 1950s and 1960s, during the Jim Crow era; but the racial income gap increased in the 1960s and 1970s, following the civil rights reforms and the adoption of government policies to reduce poverty. The reasons for the racial gap, they maintain, are the rise of single-parent families, a decline in family stability and functionality, the declining influence of the church, the prevailing belief that the government is responsible for rectifying social problems, and the emergence of a narrative that stresses black victimization. They noted that the consequences of the racial income gap today are most fully experienced by the black lower class. See “Conservative black intellectuals speak: We are responsible for our own community development,” August 5, 2022.
To be sure, racism continued after 1965, but it took a different form. Blatant racist attitudes were greatly reduced, but the economic consequences of historic racism continued to have an impact on black society. For the most part, racism after 1965 was subtle, characterized by an ethnocentric indifference to the needs of black society or African-American history and culture. But in this indifference to others, the great majority of whites were similar to the great majority of persons in the modern era, including blacks who migrated out of the traditional black neighborhoods, with little attention being paid to the consequences with respect to the development of the neighborhood left behind. (See “The causes of racial inequality in USA: A look at historic, economic, and cultural factors,” January 14, 2022).
“After equality of opportunity: King’s call for a multiracial coalition seeking economic justice,” March 17, 2023
The anti-racist ideology, particularly its use of the term “systemic racism,” is rooted in the post-modern turn of higher education, which began in the 1980s, especially among white feminist scholars at elite universities. Post-modernism is not a threat to the elite, because post-modern epistemological assumptions send the people into a bewildering morass of conflicting subjectivities, rendering them powerless to defend their interests. At the same time, with the people reduced to babble, the capacity for advances in human civilization is undermined.
For post-modernists, reality is not reflected in political-economic dynamics, such as the changing customs with respect to race in the USA after 1965. Rather, reality is defined by words, by discourse, by the way people speak. What is more, the true meaning of words is discerned by specialists, who are able to discern a racist meaning that was not necessarily intended by the speaker. In this way, the idea has been disseminated that white society is racist, not so much in its political-economic practices or social customs, but in its language, which is pervasive, or “systemic.”
Those who claimed that the USA today is characterized by “systemic racism” often used a leapfrog rhetorical maneuver. They move in their discourse from one social and historical context to another, from slavery times or the era of Jim Crow to exemplifying incidents of the present day, disdaining any effort to understand the real racial political-economic system today and the dynamics of its evolution since 1965. The leapfrog maneuver reflects the post-modern tendency to forge truth on the basis of one’s personal truth, feelings, and lived experiences, rather than seeking to understand objective reality. The overall effect of the post-modern scholarship with respect to race has been to create the myth that whites continue to be racist, just as they have been since slavery times.
Who would create such a myth, and to what purpose? Black conservative scholars have done excellent work in exposing the game. They note that it is in the interests of the black middle class, especially in the context of an American economy that has passed its historic stage of expansion, because it ensures continued preferential treatment in the competition for admission to exclusive universities and in employment. “Race hustlers” among politician, activists, and academics have emerged, whose careers are fueled by racial injustices, real or constructed, creating new opportunities for black professionals and the black middle class, especially in an expanding diversity sensitivity industry.
The false and superficial claims of academics and activists served the particular interests of the black middle class, because they kept affirmative action alive long past its time, and they facilitated the expansion of affirmative action in the more advanced form of DEI, which became a new “service” industry, authoritarian in its tactics, due to its lack of reasonable grounds for its defense.
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Trump defends the traditional American Creed against post-modernist DEI
Most people of all races and ethnic groups had sufficient common-sense intelligence and worldly experience to see the defects of DEI and to recognize that is stood against a fundamental component of the American Creed, namely, the evaluation of individuals on the basis of merit or “the content of their character,” independent of the color of their skin. It is one of the reasons, among several others, that a majority of the American people voted for Donald Trump in the presidential elections of 2024.
Trump’s executive orders eliminating DEI draw upon the assumptions that ground the American Creed. For example, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” orders the Director of the Office of Personnel Management to ensure that “Federal employment practices, including Federal employee performance reviews, shall reward individual initiative, skills, performance, and hard work and shall not under any circumstances consider DEI or DEIA factors, goals, policies, mandates, or requirements.” In a similar vein, “Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service” declares:
American citizens deserve an excellent and efficient Federal workforce that attracts the highest caliber of civil servants committed to achieving the freedom, prosperity, and democratic rule that our Constitution promotes. But current Federal hiring practices are broken, insular, and outdated. They no longer focus on merit, practical skill, and dedication to our Constitution. Federal hiring should not be based on impermissible factors, such as one’s commitment to illegal racial discrimination under the guise of “equity,” or one’s commitment to the invented concept of “gender identity” over sex. Inserting such factors into the hiring process subverts the will of the People, puts critical government functions at risk, and risks losing the best-qualified candidates.
“Keeping Americans Safe in Aviation,” signed by the President on January 21, orders the Secretary of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administrator to “immediately return to non-discriminatory, merit-based hiring.” The Executive Order maintains that hiring on the basis of race, sex, or disability, even when done to promote equity, is illegal and discriminatory, and it “penalizes hard-working Americans who want to serve in the FAA but are unable to do so, as they lack a requisite disability or skin color.” It maintains that hiring and promotion must be based in “individual capability, competence, achievement, and dedication.”
The Preamble to the January 21 Executive Order, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” declares:
Longstanding Federal civil-rights laws protect individual Americans from discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. These civil-rights protections serve as a bedrock supporting equality of opportunity for all Americans. As President, I have a solemn duty to ensure that these laws are enforced for the benefit of all Americans.
Yet today, roughly 60 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, critical and influential institutions of American society, including the Federal Government, major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, large commercial airlines, law enforcement agencies, and institutions of higher education have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) or “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) that can violate the civil-rights laws of this Nation.
Illegal DEI and DEIA policies not only violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws, they also undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system. Hardworking Americans who deserve a shot at the American Dream should not be stigmatized, demeaned, or shut out of opportunities because of their race or sex.
These illegal DEI and DEIA policies also threaten the safety of American men, women, and children across the Nation by diminishing the importance of individual merit, aptitude, hard work, and determination when selecting people for jobs and services in key sectors of American society, including all levels of government, and the medical, aviation, and law-enforcement communities. Yet in case after tragic case, the American people have witnessed first-hand the disastrous consequences of illegal, pernicious discrimination that has prioritized how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing.
The Executive Order seeks the elimination of all discrimination in the name of diversity and equity in the executive departments and agencies of the Federal government, contractors and subcontractors of the Federal government, private sector corporations, large non-profit corporations, foundations with large assets, bar and medical associations, and colleges and universities with large endowments.
The Trump administration, therefore, has taken decisive steps to eliminate DEI and restore the historic American value of equal opportunity for all, regardless of race or ethnicity. I expect that these decisive measures will be supported by majority of the American people.
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