When a small commercial jetliner crashed into a military helicopter a few weeks ago, killing 67 people, Donald Trump responded with a glaring non-sequitur that was also, somehow, predictable, coming from him. He blamed “DEI”. There was no evidence DEI was a factor in the crash, and Trump using a negative catch-phrase to score political points in the wake of a real human tragedy was a typically gross bit of opportunism. You could just see him flipping through the small list of stock insults stored in his short-term memory and landing, half-arbitrarily, on “DEI”. Why not? He’d been saying it a lot lately. It was already on the tip of his tongue.
So it was gross, but it was also symptomatic of something bigger, something real. One thing Trump understands is people’s dislikes. He has an expert nose for the simmering resentment, the latent energies of discontent suppressed by polite opinion. And a lot of people really don’t like DEI — which stands for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and refers to the regime that manages relations among the various identities of ethnicity, sexuality, and gender, and prescribes proper attitudes and behaviours regarding those relations and identities, in organisations, businesses, universities, and schools.
When Trump uses the term, though, he’s usually, implicitly, talking about race, and media outlets and progressive commentators have been quick to characterise popular discontent with DEI as some mix of delusions and aversions grounded in racism. This reflects an important failure of simple political perception. To respectable figures, the idea that one might oppose diversity initiatives is something like a category error. Affirmation of diversity is merely a given, a necessary assumption — not needing to be argued one way or another — of respectable living in modern society. DEI people often say that “whiteness” is systematically normalised and depoliticised, legitimised by being removed from discussion. You might say the same thing about DEI. In its way of moving through bureaucratic channels where authority is effectively irresistible, the diversity regime has both depoliticised and radicalised racial discourse in many areas of American life. That is, it has removed several core racial issues from public contestation while imposing a decidedly Left-wing understanding of those issues on everyone it rules. This is a recipe for populist reaction.
Strange as it may sound now, there was a time when people talked and argued about race and racial preferences in America without saying or even thinking the word “diversity,” much less the initials “DEI”. Before the dull, bureaucratically depoliticised trope of “diversity” took over, that is, America had the openly, virtuously public and political concept of “civil rights”. For the 25 or 30 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, people argued about whether racial preferences — “affirmative action”, racial quotas in hiring, racial set-asides in government contracts, and so on — were a legitimate application of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or if they were a violation of it. The idea that they were a legitimate application of the Act was articulated most famously by the man who signed that Act, Lyndon Johnson. Johnson worried that, given the historical disadvantages black people faced, merely removing the overt legal obstacles before them would not be enough. In a 1965 graduation speech at Howard University, Johnson said, “You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, ‘You are free to compete with all the others.’” According to Johnson, something more than just removing barriers — something “affirmative” — had to be done.
There was a live debate here. On one hand, the dilemma that President Johnson dwelt on was real. Merely making overt discrimination illegal would not correct the many historic wrongs against black Americans, and it would not remedy their deeply unequal material status. On the other hand, openly discriminating in favour of black people was still discriminating based on race, and it was thus a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, in the most literal and obvious readings of those documents.
There were other ways of addressing the issue as well. The black conservative economist Thomas Sowell, for example, wrote several books arguing that racial discrimination was not the main problem black Americans faced, and so civil rights remedies such as affirmative action were misplaced (as well as illegal and unconstitutional). He argued that other American ethnic groups — most notably Jews, Chinese-Americans, and Japanese-Americans — had also faced serious discrimination in America and yet out-performed the white Christian majority by substantial margins in education and income. Sowell’s critics argued back that what the black descendants of the victims of chattel slavery had experienced was far crueler and more hobbling than what other ethnic groups had experienced. And so on, back and forth.
My point is: it was a debate. The debate was largely contested in the terms of public law and public policy. Were racial preferences a legal and legitimate extension of civil rights legislation? Were they needed? Were they effective? Were they fair?
But as this debate went on, something else was happening that, by the Nineties, would make that debate largely obsolete and irrelevant. An increasing number of powerful institutions were aggressively employing racial preferences, but these racial preferences weren’t really an extension of civil rights law, as Lyndon Johnson imagined they might be. In the view of the U.S. Supreme Court, they were a strange exception to civil rights law, operating directly in tension with it. This exception arose from the 1978 case California vs. Bakke, in which a white medical school applicant named Allan Bakke sued the University of California for rejecting him while admitting several black applicants with inferior academic records. In its ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Bakke, finding that the sort of racial preferences that resulted in his rejection are illegal because they amounted to a race-specific “qualification” or quota, and these violate both the text of the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
But — and this is one of the most consequential buts in American history — the court said universities could consider race in admissions, to some small degree, if it served some “compelling interest”. The admissions department at Harvard, for example, considered race as one part of its broader quest to compose diverse incoming classes — on the belief that human diversity of background and geography and, yes, race might contribute to a richer educational experience for its students. (A core element of this approach to diversity at Harvard, at the time, was the quaint practice of striving to admit at least one student from every U.S. state.) As New York Times writer Nicholas Confessore wrote in an explosive 2024 article on DEI programs at the University of Michigan, “the Supreme Court outlawed racial quotas in college admissions, while allowing a narrower form of racial preferences.”
But bureaucrats at American colleges and universities resisted this narrowness. They did this not by seeking other justifications besides diversity for enacting racial preferences, but by convincing themselves that diversity was more fundamentally important for education than anyone had ever imagined it to be, before 1978. The result was a thematic reordering of campus priorities, so that diversity — a minor consideration before Bakke — became a sort of institutional fetish, rising to number one on official lists of campus “values”. These days, someone from an alien civilisation visiting the administrative offices of an American university might assume it’s a religious institution, and the object of its solemn devotions is this word, this holy concept, Diversity, whose earthly incarnation is the small collection of different-coloured young people pictured on the pamphlet they handed out.
In other words, not only did administrators keep the deeply unpopular and legally suspect practice of racial preferences alive at American colleges and universities, they redefined the very purpose of their institutions so that this pedagogical novelty — diversity? the most important thing? since when? — was now at its very centre. Not coincidentally, this brash and peremptory centring of diversity in their institutional missions also resulted in a pleasing centring of them, the administrators of diversity, in the power structures and institutional goings-on of their schools.
The diversity story is a thus lesson in the self-empowering ingenuity of bureaucrats. Remember, the Bakke case had ended in a ruling against the racial preference at issue. But one Supreme Court justice felt bad about telling a medical school its well-intentioned racial quotas were illegal, and then he remembered Harvard liking those different kinds of diversity, and so he threw in some stuff about diversity — and those college functionaries ran with it. The rest is history.
“Merely making overt discrimination illegal would not correct the many historic wrongs against black Americans.”
Racial politics on campus was now a bureaucratic project. The operational appeal of the diversity framework to campus bureaucrats should be obvious. Within this framework, students were understood as belonging to specific types. When students of different types came into conflict, that conflict would be understood not as a conflict of individual students, something regular that’s going to happen on any campus, but as a conflict of types, two categories within the administrative rubric of diversity. For those administrators such a conflict was always a sort of wonderful crisis. It was right in their wheelhouse. They were administrators, and here was something they could administrate the hell out of. And every such administrative occasion was a chance for the bureaucrats of diversity to enlarge their claims of importance over campus life in general. In other words, they had an incentive to make a big deal about it.
The legal origins of diversity power were different in employment settings, but the institutional dynamics have been somewhat similar, especially in large corporations. The origin of much diversity oversight in workplaces was the “hostile work environment” framework laid out by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. By making the amorphous network of human interactions that constitute a “work environment” a possible site and source of legal trouble, the EEOC gave employers a strong incentive to set up an apparatus of monitoring and training that would control the risk of such trouble.
I’m more favourably disposed toward the hostile work environment framework than I am to the campus diversity framework, for a couple of reasons. First, it emerged out of good-faith efforts to enforce duly passed legislation, specifically Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — as opposed to the uncanny power-grab by campus administrators that founded the diversity empire in higher education. And, second, the Civil Rights Act did in fact outlaw employment and workplace discrimination, and an environment of persistent, low-level racial torment is both all too easy to imagine as a fact of life in a workplace and clearly valid as an enforcement target under that Act.
It’s probably the case that the urgent diversity propaganda on college campuses informed the self-understanding of people in other institutions, such as Human Resources professionals charged with managing corporate work environments. The term itself carries such pleasant connotations — human variety and everyone being nice about this variety, not just tolerating it but celebrating it. The happy nomenclature spread easily, everywhere, into marketing and NGO-speak and all levels of education. And, for Human Resources departments, the diversity framework was a natural, deeply administrative way to visualise the human field of the workplace. The administrator of people begins her task in search of ordering categories, and the diversity framework hands her an array of categories, ready-made.
But in both university and workplace settings, the administration of diversity took on a disciplinary edge that people seriously resented. Where the civil rights framework drew on older liberal models of rights as the possession of individuals against government and other institutions, the diversity framework empowered institutions over individuals, rendered individuals prone to the disciplinary whims of those institutions. This is obvious and notorious in the case of universities, whose diversity bureaucracies often double as star chambers, secretive judicial bodies that punish students and professors for violating both imperiously written and mysteriously unwritten codes of speech and conduct.
It’s a little different in the workplace. There you can still imagine an individual seeking to vindicate a legal claim against real racial harassment by his boss or his colleagues, and this does happen from time to time, such as in the recent case of a Tesla factory in California. But, in the hands of corporations, with their governing interests in risk-management, the threat of such complaints about hostile work environments tends to result in an extension of employers’ surveillance over their employees, rather than an expansion of employees’ rights against unlawful discrimination. Indeed, the sorts of corporate diversity initiatives inspired by the hostile work environment framework are likely to be aimed not at enabling but at preempting civil rights claims by employees: “We can’t be guilty of maintaining a hostile work environment! We do diversity training! We brought in Robin DiAngelo last year! We paid her thirty grand!”
And then there’s that diversity training. The most notorious versions of diversity training take the form of searing interrogations from which the white employee can’t escape without admitting unearned racial privilege and indelible racial guilt. But corporate diversity training doesn’t always come from fanatics like DiAngelo, author of the now-notorious tract White Fragility. It doesn’t always resemble a suffer session from China’s Cultural Revolution, with workers set upon to confess their despicable privilege, and told their dubious attitudes toward the DiAngelo paradigm only prove their guilt, and humiliated for crying “white tears” in the face of the interrogation and accusation. But even the more innocuous forms of diversity training can feel like another of those spiritual burdens that today’s employers force their employees to bear, like “team-building” retreats that are meant to convince workers to invest not just their efforts but their inner selves in the make-believe community of their job.
That is, the average person experiences institutional DEI efforts mainly as the expression of institutional power. It’s not something done in public by a righteous movement for racial justice. It’s just something done to her, in private, on her boss’s orders, on the assumption that there’s something wrong with her soul that needs to be fixed by a consultant. And it can only embitter the resentful employee even further to learn that there’s no practical point to the soul-sucking hassle and/or humiliation of her diversity training sessions, that they don’t even work. But it’s now widely known that this is the case, that most diversity training programs don’t reduce internal bias or improve external behaviour. Sometimes these programs increase bias. Sometimes they make people more racist in their behaviour. About this there’s now a sort of reckoning, so to speak, everyone realising that businesses and organisations are paying millions of dollars to diversity consultants who don’t appear to know what they’re doing.
One other area in which people encounter diversity and DEI as blandly depoliticised in their form — borne to them by functionaries, a fait accompli of institutional practice — and yet politically very radical in their content is their children’s schools. This is not surprising. America’s education establishment — public schools, teachers’ unions, schools of education — has been on a Deweyan quest for over a century. That is, it is constantly trying to extend its portfolio from training students in academic subjects to using schools’ daily possession of those students as a way to influence the nation’s handling of its larger social problems. The stubborn problem of race is both useful as an object in this broader quest and an ongoing dilemma that schools themselves have to deal with. Racial differences in academic performance present themselves to educators every day. They’re a festering legitimation problem for the entire education establishment, but also a rich opportunity for the many activists within that establishment. No one knows quite how to close those differences, and so the default approach for educators is a righteous busyness of themes and symbols, an official belief in racial oppression as the main problem, and an official embrace of anti-racism as the remedy.
“They’re a festering legitimation problem for the entire education establishment, but also a rich opportunity for the many activists within that establishment.”
Neither is it surprising that schools have been the focus of the most prominent and successful agitating against DEI. People don’t like their kids being politically programmed during their school days, and they really don’t like their kids being programmed in ideas that they themselves find obscure and obnoxious. And education is one area where the ideas that animate DEI regimes can’t be buried in administrative procedure, presented to people merely as obligatory workplace operations or unargued dictates of unseen university bureaucrats. In education, the animating ideas have to be stated outright sometimes, often in formulas simplified for children, which reveal just how radical they are. When your 10-year-old’s teacher says she joins Black Lives Matter activists in “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family”, or tells you that she learned how to deconstruct her white privilege in school today, you might suspect that some aggressive politics is happening somewhere, that public issues are being decided via private channels. You might not like that the people involved have also involved your kids.
It’s easy and affirming for liberals and Leftists to ascribe this parental suspicion to a “desire…to protect whiteness”, in the words of one Slate writer. This familiar smugness betrays a failure to even think about what DEI is, in both its basic pragmatic details and its political nature and origins. In its pragmatic details DEI is a collection of disciplinary practices that institutions deploy on people in order to manage risk and enhance their own power. In America, it’s often lamented that courts are often used as a dubious end-run around democratic decision-making. The DEI regime does this one better. It originated in large part as an end-run around both democratic decision-making and courts. It is the creation of functionaries working under cover of bureaucratic darkness, who directly harry people and drizzle agitprop into their children’s education. It has the weak and hollow legitimacy you would expect in a bureaucratic creation that does those things. I’m sure some people don’t like it because they’re racists or afraid of change or whatever. But they have deeper reasons than that not to like it. They are citizens, and it insults their status and their prerogatives as citizens.
For my part, I find many of the background ideas that inform DEI — the academic arguments often described as Critical Race Theory — to be some mix of partially plausible and occasionally stimulating and eye-opening and, also, tendentious and wilfully pessimistic, readily challenged in both analytical and practical terms. They are far from a settled science of social relations. They have not earned the standing to be taught as unquestionable fact in schools, or to form the theoretical basis for peremptory regimes of behaviour management and attitude adjustment and secret punishment in workplaces and universities. They are part of the intellectual mix, one interesting side of the vital debate that once happened about race and racism in America, before that debate was rendered moot by enterprising bureaucrats who don’t do debate, who just give orders.
