As Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said nearly two decades ago, “The way to stop discriminating based on race is to stop discriminating based on race.”
President Donald Trump’s sweeping order shuttering every federal office related to DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — and signaling a decision to lay off staffers who worked there is an overdue step toward that goal.
Oh, it could have been done with more finesse. The effort needed to include language telling minority workers in and out of the federal government that they remain valued. But Donald doesn’t do nuance.
Trump’s decision has been met with the usual howls from the civil rights community. NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson wrote in a statement:
“It is outrageous that the President is rolling back critical Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. DEI programs help ensure that everyone can prosper. It’s clear that President Trump does not value equal opportunity.
“His appalling executive order will only worsen America’s racial hierarchy and benefit the oligarch class. This executive order threatens public services that benefit all Americans; it’s an attempt to consolidate power and money to a few wealthy individuals. And poor and working-class people will pay the price.”
Johnson has the insidious and divisive nature of DEI exactly backward. DEI has no impact on the oligarch class. Elon Musk doesn’t have to worry about whether he is being fairly considered for a job or a contract because of his race. Poor and working-class white people bear the costs of DEI — and it is that cost of quotas, set-asides and minority-only programs and spaces that divide the working class into racial blocs.
And Johnson’s complaints would have been just as apoplectic if Trump’s order were more measured and included all the nuance reasonable people would want. Because the civil rights-industrial complex doesn’t do nuance either, no amount of moderation and good intentions protects a Republican from accusations of the -isms and -obias.
The LGBTQ advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign released a statement saying: “Every person deserves to be treated with dignity and respect in all areas of their lives. No one should be subjected to ongoing discrimination, harassment and humiliation where they work, go to school, or access healthcare.”
Tell that to the men and women at the worker bee level who have had their fill of the DEI industry’s product in mandatory trainings on microaggressions, the idea that the most minor of insensitivity is part of a larger systemic oppression that must equally systemically be curtailed. The hyper-sensitivity that DEI engenders fuels division on racial and other lines while making common American ideals such as the immigration “melting pot” into sources of animus.
Being forced into training that contradicts closely held ideals and targets members of the majority based on their race and sexual orientation is “discrimination, harassment and humiliation” where we work and go to school.
DEI, at its worst, imports tendentious and partisan sensitivity fanaticism from campus into the workplace, worsening relations among different groups of people. Indeed, research shows that diversity training does little to advance the cause of interracial comity and can divide people more than it unites them.
In the federal government, DEI melded with an older culture of racial quotas and set-asides to create a brew poisonous to Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a country where our character is more important than our skin color, our ability or our choice in sexual partners. That’s a goal that unites people of all kinds.
Whatever flaws Trump’s DEI order has — for instance, the overreach of promising to launch a specific number of investigations of corporate DEI practices — he has the big picture right.
When more Black, Hispanic and young people than ever before pulled the lever for Republican Trump, they weren’t naive or clueless. They knew exactly the politically incorrect blunderbuss they were getting and they knew his ire was targeted directly at the DEI they had experienced in college and the workplace.
Big, previously unthinkable changes are what they voted for. Now they’re here.
(David Mastio is an opinion columnist for the Kansas City Star/McClatchy Newspapers.)
