The following article, “DEI Is a Failure Because the Civil Rights Movement Wasn’t About Elite Diversity: The tide is turning against modern diversity bureaucracies. But that’s not necessarily bad news for progressives, at least if they believe in the goals of the civil rights movement” by Zaid Jilani, is cross-posted from substack.com:
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is being challenged, as President Donald Trump recently enacted an executive order that requires his administration to crack down on and remove diversity-oriented offices and policies across the federal government.
To many liberals, Trump’s order is distressing.
“I have to assume that ‘pursuing DEI efforts’ means hiring anyone who isn’t a white man?” asked The New York Times’s Jamelle Bouie about the administration’s new initiative to crackdown on DEI.
Indeed, the term DEI has at times become a sort of racist shorthand for corners of the online far-right, where people who in some cases were elected to office by the voters are derided as DEI hires simply because they’re nonwhite Democrats.
But not every critic of DEI is motivated by white resentment. Many people criticize these programs because they have little positive impact on diversity, anyway, and there’s a bunch of evidence that diversity trainings can actually make people more prejudiced.
The outcomes of Trump’s maneuver, however, remains to be seen because the devil is in the details.
Does removing DEI from the federal government mean eliminating potentially discriminatory programs? Or will the order end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater as it guts organizations that do have some proven benefit, like government teams that help protect the rights of disabled employees?
I would argue that the anti-DEI efforts we’ve seen pop up across the country over the past few years are capable of doing both things, and only time will tell what the Trump administration ends up achieving with its new anti-DEI directive.
But something is lost in this debate, where you have conservatives on one side railing against programs and practices they believe discriminate against white men and promote mediocrity and liberals on the other side defending DEI as an extension of the civil rights movement that guarantees the rights of minorities.
The reality is that DEI is only tangentially related to the rights and opportunities of minorities. The civil rights movement was not about diversifying corporate or government offices with a few black or brown faces in places of power.
It wasn’t about diversity trainings where employees roll their eyes as someone hired by HR lectures them for three hours about their privilege.
It was about redistributing power to the masses of people who don’t have it, including white people.
Read more here.
