The most recent point of contention in the conservative and far-right battle against what they refer to as “woke culture” is diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
Several GOP officials and conservative public figures have publicly attributed tragic incidents, such as the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, to “DEI hiring practices”. South African billionaire, X owner, and newly appointed United States “Administrator for the Department of Government Efficiency” Elon Musk has linked DEI to this month’s massive fires caused by climate change in Southern California, asserting in a video posted on X that “DEI means people DIE”.
In recent times, opponents of DEI have also targeted the organizations that support these efforts. From the Fearless Fund to Merck, from Walmart to McDonald’s, and from Meta to Amazon, certain nonprofits and major corporations are now retreating rapidly. They are either discontinuing or scaling back programs that they had implemented or significantly expanded following the protests over the 2020 killing of George Floyd by the police. In states like Alabama, Iowa, Utah, Missouri, Kentucky, Texas, and Nebraska, the dismantling of DEI structures in public higher education institutions reportedly started at the local and institutional levels over three years ago.
As anticipated, President Donald Trump utilized the first day of his second term in the White House to begin dismantling the federal government’s entire diversity and inclusion infrastructure. He ordered that all federal DEI staff be placed on paid leave starting on Wednesday – they will eventually be terminated.
So, why is ending DEI – which typically involves accepting and celebrating racial, gender, sexual orientation, and other differences and creating an inclusive environment for marginalized Americans in universities and workplaces – such a priority for Trump, his conservative supporters, and the broader far right?
They want to eliminate DEI because they believe these programs pose a significant challenge to their efforts to restore the “white man’s country” they long for. Their insistence on color-blindness in educational and employment practices is essentially a push to return to a time when only white men could benefit from supposedly unbiased practices for social mobility. They aim to do nothing less than close already very limited pathways for social and economic progress available to people of color and other marginalized groups in the US. They want to ensure that DEI or other anti-racist or “woke” programs cannot compel them to confront their own racism. For them, DEI is just a code for “Don’t Ever Integrate”.
None of this is by chance. Since 2019, the far right has been attacking critical race theory and African American studies in K-12 schools and colleges and universities across the country. In the cases of Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v Harvard University and SFFA v University of North Carolina in June 2023, the US Supreme Court ruled that race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions is unconstitutional, overturning decades of precedent. These were not isolated events. The efforts against DEI programs, affirmative action in education and employment, and critical race theory are all part of a larger movement to bring the US back to a state of quasi-legal racial segregation.
Well before the current efforts against DEI, opponents of race-based affirmative action routinely contested the idea that Americans of color – particularly Black individuals – required a boost in access to better educational and employment opportunities. They opposed President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Executive Order 11246 and its gradual expansion beyond government contractors to higher education and employment in all sectors of the US economy. Perhaps President Johnson also sensed this potential opposition. In his 1965 commencement speech at historically Black Howard University in Washington, DC, that June, titled “To Fulfill These Rights,” Johnson stated, “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 sought ways to create avenues onto an otherwise uneven playing field, one that had always favored white Americans and white men over all other groups. Trump’s Executive Order 14171, Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity, has officially rescinded Johnson’s order, and 60 years’ worth of anti-discrimination protections in the federal workforce with it.
Every movement has its advocates, even anti-social justice movements. For conservatives like Ward Connerly and Edward Blum, any measures aimed at counteracting the ingrained white supremacist racism of American systems and institutions – whether affirmative action, DEI, or even critical race theory – are viewed as excessive corrections. Connerly, an African American, opposed affirmative action in the 1980s and 1990s. He led the anti-affirmative action movement in California, and with the assistance of Republican Governor Pete Wilson, succeeded in overturning affirmative action in the state with the Proposition 209 initiative in 1996. The initiative’s implementation into law significantly reduced the number of Black and brown students attending California’s universities.
During an interview with Politico in 2023, on the eve of the end of affirmative action, Connerly once again laid out his reasoning for stopping any race-conscious admissions and employment efforts, whether affirmative action or DEI. “But ‘building diversity’ is just a euphemism for discrimination, because you’re race-conscious.” For Connerly, equality meant implementing 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 litigator over the years follows directly in Connerly’s footsteps. In explaining his many lawsuits against universities, law firms, and private companies, Blum stated, “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.” Discussing the SFFA’s Supreme Court victory in 2023, Blum reiterated his vision for a color-blind 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”.
The main issue with both Connerly’s and Blum’s work is that the US is not a color-blind society. It is a society where white supremacist racism, patriarchal misogyny, and significant socioeconomic inequalities are deeply ingrained. Fighting for “fairness” and “meritocracy” and “color-blind” policies essentially means that conservative and far-right individuals like Connerly and Blum are advocating for the end of opportunities for marginalized Americans to advance socially through higher education and middle-class jobs. If the main pathways for creating affirmative opportunities in a society dominated by white (and male) individuals are dismantled, it will lead to exclusion and segregation in higher education and the workforce. The effects of dismantling affirmative action are already evident in the reduced admission of Black and Latinx students to universities and medical schools over the past 18 months, and will surely impact hiring and promotion practices as well.
However, exclusion and segregation have never disappeared, with over 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies led by white men. Additionally, more than half of Black and brown children attend predominantly 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 close the small door that affirmative action and DEI programs have provided over the last six decades. Yet, with 43 percent of students at Ivy League universities being legacies, it appears that affirmative action is always welcomed for white Americans, even in Connerly and Blum’s vision of a color-blind society.
As Duke University sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva pointed out in his book Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, “color-blind racism” involves justifying minorities’ current status as a result of market dynamics, natural phenomena, and assumed cultural limitations of Black individuals. Individuals like Connerly, Blum, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk are simply exhibiting the narcissism that comes with their socioeconomic, racial, and gender status.
Like typical members of this group, they attribute setbacks and failures to individuals rather than to systems that primarily support white people and especially affluent white men. In reality, their justifications for attacking anything related to antiracism, antidiscrimination, and affirmative action are a cover for expressing their racism and silent approval of segregation and exclusion rather than the challenging road of inclusion.
