DEI is on its last legs, but the right risks keeping it alive
It seems one of the only sources of bipartisan agreement in the culture today is that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are how black people get jobs. In what will be yet another example of people stretching a term past the point of no return, the pushback against DEI is well on its way to the same rhetorical ash heap as “racist,” “fascist,” and “Nazi.”
One conservative influencer with three million followers on X called Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl performance a “DEI halftime show.” Another right-wing commentator with more than one million followers linked a Black History Month event at the White House to DEI — and, for good measure, blamed DEI for Michelle Obama’s decision to wear long nails.
The truth is that both the left and right seem intent on using 'DEI' as a euphemism for 'black' when it suits them politically.
If things continue at their current pace, conservatives will need to update the popular meme “Everyone I don’t like is a racist” to reflect their current DEI bugaboo.
Anyone with common sense can admit that separating and prioritizing the population along identity lines violates our founding principles and is a recipe for social unrest. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, the lone dissenter in the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case, famously remarked:
In view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.
This message holds as true for white people today as it did for black people 100 years ago. DEI is dying a quick death because far too many institutions thought they could use historical wrongs to justify present-day discrimination.
The former DEI chief at Johns Hopkins University Hospital sent out a New Year’s message last January with a list of “privileged” identity groups, which included white people, heterosexuals, “cisgender” people, and Christians. Progressives see this type of rhetoric as perfectly normal, but I’m not sure how many lives will be saved at a hospital just because doctors believe it’s a privilege to be white.
Companies and government agencies that thought they could set aside programs for blacks, Asians, Hispanics, women, and LGBT-identifying people without any response from straight white men don’t understand human nature. It’s an iron law of human dynamics: Providing special benefits to one person in a group automatically triggers the other members to ask, “What about me?”
Exposing and rooting out the excesses of the DEI industrial complex from public life marks a positive step. However, like all political movements, the temptation to swing the pendulum too far remains ever-present. Overcorrection often becomes the rule rather than the exception in politics.
The irony is that conservatives never assume black people on the right are DEI hires.
Justice Clarence Thomas served on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals — his only experience as a federal judge — for a little over a year before President George H.W. Bush nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1991. For comparison, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson served close to nine years in the federal judiciary before her appointment.
Conservatives cheered when President Trump selected Dr. Ben Carson to be his secretary of Housing and Urban Development during his first term. Prior to entering the political arena, Carson was a world-renowned pediatric neurosurgeon doing cutting-edge work at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore. But somehow the man who led a team that separated conjoined twins was deemed qualified to lead HUD. Charlie Kirk floated Carson’s name to lead the Department of Agriculture in the second Trump administration — one week after he claimed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was a “DEI pick.”
Nothing undercuts the conservative push to rid the culture of the identity-obsession created by DEI programs more than arguing that a four-star general who spent decades in leadership is unfit to run the military while a decorated surgeon is qualified to rightsize the Section 8 program.
It’s clear that the left has its own DEI blind spots. Progressives spent years making skin color, sex, and bedroom activities the most important qualities in public life. Now, they lament the loss of DEI programs in corporations, government agencies, and other institutions as if they were the only thing keeping black people from suffering Jim Crow-style discrimination at the hands of employers.
The truth is that both the left and right seem intent on using “DEI” as a euphemism for “black” when it suits them politically. Using the term haphazardly distorts its meaning and drains it of political potency.
Conservatives should resist that temptation because nothing hardens a group more than overusing the terms used to police its behavior. It’s the reason many right-wing pundits stopped caring about being called “racist.” Doing the same with DEI is the blueprint for breathing life into identity obsession, not what you do if you want it to die.
Vice President Kamala Harris is a light skinned Jamaican-Indian woman married to a white man and if it weren’t for the fact that she’s a Democrat, the news media would be savagely attacking her for both until November. Rest assured that if Harris were running for president as a Republican, calling her a “D.E.I. hire” […]
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