For US Conservatives, DEI is code for ‘Don’t Ever Integrate’

The latest flashpoint in the conservative and far-right war against so-called “woke culture” is diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes.

Numerous GOP officials and conservative public figures publicly blamed tragic accidents, such as the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore, on “DEI hiring practices”. South African billionaire, X owner and newly assigned United States “Administrator for the Department of Government Efficiency” Elon Musk has blamed DEI for this month’s massive climate change-driven fires in Southern California, claiming in a video posted on X that “DEI means people DIE”.

In recent months, those against DEI have also gone 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 in a headlong retreat. They are abandoning or stripping down programmes they either implemented or had significantly expanded on following the uprisings over the 2020 police killing of George Floyd. In states such as Alabama, Iowa, Utah, Missouri, Kentucky, Texas and Nebraska, the dismantling of DEI infrastructures in public higher education institutions reportedly began at the local and institutional level over three years ago.

As expected, President Donald Trump used his first day of his second term in the White House to begin the dismantling of the federal government’s entire diversity and inclusion infrastructure. He demanded all federal DEI staff be put on paid leave starting on Wednesday – they will eventually be laid off.

So why is putting an end to DEI – which typically is the acceptance, even embracing of racial, gender, sexual orientation, and other differences and the creation of a welcoming climate for marginalised Americans at universities and in workplaces – such a priority for Trump, his conservative supporters and the wider far right?

They want to see the end of DEI because they believe these programmes present a real challenge to their efforts to rebuild the “white man’s country” they long for. Their insistence on colour-blindness in educational and employment practices is really an insistence on returning to the days when only white men could affirmatively benefit from allegedly objective practices for social mobility. They want to do nothing short of closing already extremely narrow pathways for social and economic advancement available to people of colour and other marginalised people in the US. They want to ensure that DEI or other antiracist or “woke” programmes cannot force them to confront their own racism in the process. For them, DEI is just code for “Don’t Ever Integrate”.

None of this is accidental. Since 2019, the far right has been lobbing grenades at critical race theory and African American studies in K-12 and at colleges and universities throughout 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 stand-alone developments. The efforts against DEI programmes, affirmative action in education and employment and critical race theory are all part of a larger movement to return the US to a state of quasi-legal racial segregation.

Long before the current efforts against DEI, opponents of race-based affirmative action regularly decried the idea that Americans of colour – especially Black folk – needed an onramp to better educational and employment opportunities. They stood in opposition to President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Executive Order 11246 and its gradual extension beyond government contractors to higher education and employment in all sectors of the US economy. Perhaps President Johnson sensed this potential opposition as well. In his 1965 commencement speech at the historically Black Howard University in Washington, DC, that June, titled “To Fulfill These Rights,” Johnson said, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” Johnson wanted to find ways to create onramps onto an otherwise unlevel playing field, one that had always heavily favoured white Americans and white men over all other groups. Trump’s Executive Order 14171, Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity, has officially revoked Johnson’s order, and 60 years’ worth of anti-discrimination protections in the federal workforce with it.

Every movement has its champions, even anti-social justice movements. For conservatives like Ward Connerly and Edward Blum, any correctives meant to work against the ingrained white supremacist racism of the American systems and institutions – whether affirmative action, DEI, or even critical race theory – are overcorrections. 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 the overturning of affirmative action in the state with the Proposition 209 initiative in 1996. The initiative’s implementation into law helped severely reduce the number of Black and brown students attending California’s universities.

During an interview with Politico in 2023, on the eve of affirmative action’s end, Connerly once again laid out his rationale for ending any efforts at race-conscious admissions and employment, whether affirmative action or DEI. “But ‘building diversity’ is just a euphemism for discrimination, because you’re race-conscious.” For Connerly, the path to equality was through race-blind policies, as “the government is supposed to be color-blind. I think we as people should strive to be color-blind – to attach no consequence to a person’s color”.

Edward Blum’s work as an anti-affirmative action and anti-DEI litigant over the decades follows directly in Connerly’s footsteps. In his own explanation for his blizzard of lawsuits against universities, law firms and private firms 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 them or harm them in their life’s endeavors.” In explaining the SFFA’s 2023 Supreme Court victory, Blum doubled down on his vision for a colourblind US. “In the culture war this nation has fought over wokeness, the SFFA opinion was like the Allied landing on Normandy Beach.” According to Blum, the “SFFA’s lawsuits have garnered 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 colourblind society. It is a society which has white supremacist racism, patriarchal misogyny, and massive socioeconomic inequalities encoded in its cultural DNA. Fighting for “fairness” and “the meritocracy” and “colourblind” policies only means that conservative and far-right folk like Connerly and Blum are fighting for the end of any onramps for marginalised Americans towards social mobility through higher education and middle-class jobs. And if the primary ladders to create affirmative opportunities in white (and male) dominated society are destroyed, the default towards exclusion and segregation in higher education and the workforce are soon to follow. The impact of dismantling affirmative action is already evident in reduced Black and Latinx university and medical school admissions over the past 18 months, and will surely impact hiring and promotion practices as well.

But the truth is, neither exclusion nor segregation has ever gone away, not with more than 70 percent of Fortune 500 corporations with white men at the head. And certainly not with more than half of Black and brown kids attending majority Black and brown schools while 76 percent of white kids attending predominantly white schools. Only, in higher education, in employment and entrepreneurship, Connerly and Blum have made it their mission to end the small spigot that affirmative action and DEI programmes have provided over the past six decades. But with 43 percent of students attending the coveted Ivy League universities as legacies, it would seem that affirmative action is always welcome for white Americans, even in Connerly and Blum’s vision for a colourblind 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 “rationaliz[ing] minorities’ contemporary status as the product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and blacks’ imputed cultural limitations”. Folks like Connerly, Blum, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are merely exercising the narcissism that comes with their socioeconomic, racial and gender status.

As typical of this set, they place the blame for setbacks and failures on individuals, and not on systems that primarily affirm white folk and especially affluent white men. Really, their excuses for attacking anything antiracist, anti-discrimination and affirmative action-related is a smokescreen for expressing one’s racism and tacit approval of segregation and exclusion over the difficult road of inclusion.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.