For US Conservatives, DEI is code for “Never Integrate” Racism

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

Numerous GOP officials and conservative public figures publicly He blamed tragic accidents such as the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, on “DEI recruiting practices.” South African billionaire, owner of X and newly appointed US “Administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency” Elon Musk blamed the DEI For the massive climate change-induced fires in Southern California this month, a video posted on X claims “DEI means people die.”

In recent months, those who oppose the DEI have also gone after the institutions that support these efforts. From Fearless Fund for MerckFrom Walmart McDonald’sand from Meta Amazon, some nonprofits, and large corporations are now pushing back for a long time. They are either abandoning or canceling programs they have implemented or significantly expanded After the 2020 riots over the police killing of George Floyd. Demolition of DEI infrastructure in states such as Alabama, Iowa, Utah, Missouri, Kentucky, Texas and Nebraska public higher education institutions It was reported that it started at the local and institutional level three years ago.

As expected, President Donald Trump took advantage of the first day of his second term in the White House to begin his presidency dismantling of the federal government’s entire diversity and inclusion infrastructure. All federal demanded OF THE workers will be on paid leave starting Wednesday – they will eventually be fired.

So why is ending DEI—the acceptance, even assimilation, of differences that typically involve race, gender, sexual orientation, and other differences and creating welcoming environments for marginalized Americans in universities and 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 programs pose a real challenge to their efforts to rebuild the “white man’s country” they long for. Their insistence on colorblindness in educational and employment practices is really an insistence on a return to the days when only whites could positively benefit from allegedly objective practices for social mobility. They want to do nothing but close the extremely narrow paths to social and economic advancement 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 face their own racism in the process. To them, DEI is just code for “Never Integrate”.

None of this is accidental. As of 2019 the extreme right uses grenades in critical race theory and African American studies in K-12 and colleges and universities across the country. In June 2023, in the cases of Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard University and SFFA University of North Carolina, the US Supreme Court ruled that race-conscious 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 part of a larger movement to return the United States to a state of quasi-legal racial segregation.

Long before the current efforts against DEI, opponents of race-based affirmative action routinely rejected the idea that Americans of color, especially Black people, needed expansion for better educational and employment opportunities. They were in opposition to President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 decision Executive Order No. 11246 and its gradual expansion beyond government contractors for higher education and employment in all sectors of the US economy. Perhaps President Johnson sensed this potential opposition. In his 1965 commencement address In June of that year at the historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C., in a paper titled “For the Fulfillment of These Rights,” Johnson said, “You don’t take a man who has been in chains for years and set him free, pick the starting line of the race, and then ‘You are free to compete with all the others.’ say and you still believe that you are completely fair. Johnson always wanted to find ways to create ramps to a level playing field that favored white Americans and white men above all other groups. Trump’s Executive Order No. 14171Ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity formally overturned Johnson’s order and with it 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 reforms intended to work against the entrenched white supremacy of American systems and institutions—whether affirmative action, DEI, or critical race theory—are reforms too far. Connerly, an African American, opposed affirmative action in the 1980s and 1990s. He led the anti-affirmative action movement in California and successfully managed the repeal of affirmative action in the state with the help of Republican Governor Pete Wilson. Initiated by Proposition 209 In 1996. He helped the initiative become law Severely reduce the number of black and brown students He studies in California universities.

during Interview with Politico in 2023on the eve of the end of affirmative action, Connerly reiterated his rationale for ending any efforts at race-conscious admissions and hiring, whether affirmative action or DEI. “But ‘diversity’ is just a euphemism for discrimination because you’re race-conscious.” For Connerly, the path to equality was through race-blind policies because “the government had to be color-blind. I think we as humans should try to be color blind – we shouldn’t care about a person’s color at all.”

Edward Bloom’s decades of work as an anti-affirmative action and anti-DEI plaintiff following directly in Connerly’s footsteps. in his explanation for his blizzard of claims “I’m a one-trick pony,” says Blum, who has spent years challenging universities, law firms and private firms. I hope and care to end these racial classifications and preferences in our public policy… The race or ethnicity of individuals should not be used to help them or harm them in their life activities.” In explaining SFFA’s 2023 Supreme Court victory, Bloom doubled down on his vision for a colorblind United States. “In the culture war this nation fought to wake up to, SFFA’s opinion was like the Allies landing on the beaches of Normandy.” According to Bloom, “SFFA’s claims have received overwhelming support from individuals and organizations across the country who share our belief in the importance of meritocracy and colorblind admissions policies.”

This is the main problem with both Connerley’s and Bloom’s work. The US is not a color blind society. It is a society with white supremacist racism, patriarchal misogyny, and massive socioeconomic inequalities encoded in its cultural DNA. Fighting for “fairness” and “meritocracy” and “colorblind” policies only means that conservatives and far-right people like Connerly and Bloom are fighting to end any steps toward social mobility for marginalized Americans through higher education and middle-class jobs. . . If the initial ladders to positive opportunity in a white (and male) dominated society are destroyed, a default against segregation and segregation in higher education and the workforce will soon follow. The impact of repealing affirmative action is already apparent at a reduced Black and Latino university and admission to medical school over the past 18 months and will undoubtedly affect recruitment and promotion practices as well.

But the truth is that neither segregation nor discrimination has ever gone away. Not with more than 70 percent of Fortune 500 corporations with white men at the head. And definitely Not with more than half of black and brown children Most attend Black and brown schools, while 76 percent of white children attend predominantly white schools. Only in higher education, employment, and entrepreneurship have Connerly and Blum made it their mission to end the small loopholes afforded by affirmative action and DEI programs over the past six decades. But with 43 percent of students attend legacy Ivy League universitiesit seems that affirmative action is always welcome for white Americans, even in Connerly and Bloom’s vision of a color-blind society.

As Duke University sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva points out in his book Racists Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, “colorblindness” consists of rationalizing the modern status of minorities as products of the market. dynamics, naturally occurring events, and cultural limitations assumed by black people”. People like Connerly, Blum, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk are simply exercising the narcissism that comes with their socioeconomic, racial, and gender status.

Typical of this set, they place the blame for failures and failures primarily on individuals, not on systems that affirm white people and especially rich white men. Indeed, their pretext for attacking anything related to anti-racism, anti-discrimination, and affirmative action is a smokescreen for expressing one’s racism and silently endorsing segregation and exclusion on the difficult road to inclusion.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.