DEI and the War Against Multiracial Democracy

Beneath the Conservative long game to undo the gains of the Civil Rights movement

Interaction Institute for Social Change | Artist: Angus Maguire

After decades as an HR function and cottage industry, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is suddenly being portrayed by conservatives as a bastion of corruption and a threat to civilization. Trump and his mouthpieces have blamed DEI for collapsing bridges, plane crashes, and wildfires while purging leaders of federal agencies whom they call “DEI hires,” apparently because they lack the vital qualifications of being white and male. This is all quite shocking to those impacted and probably bewildering to anyone not tuned in to online culture war hostilities.

A Short History of the Woke and the Anti-Woke

What the heck is going on here? I’m going to try to answer this by unpacking the deeper motivations of the intellectual movement driving this attack. If you are an ordinary news consumer, you might see all this as just another wacky scheme to “own the libs.” It is that, but it is also the fruit of a long term project to transform how our society grapples (or doesn’t) with institutional discrimination and structural inequality.

Let's begin with how we got here. The controversies enveloping DEI have been brewing since the 1970’s, but I am going to start the story in 2020 because that year saw a major expansion and intensification of the attack on DEI. In the summer of 2020, the largest protest movement in American history erupted in response to the public murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Millions of people came out in the streets to express outrage over Floyd’s killing and police violence in general. Only two months earlier, Breonna Taylor had been killed in her bed by Louisville police in a botched drug raid. In response to this public outcry, major corporations were suddenly flying Black Lives Matter flags and promising to root out antiblack racism in their workforces. House Democrats knelt in the Capitol for a solidarity moment of silence (and photo op). Books by Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X Kendi shot to the top of bestseller lists, and the 1619 Project began to be adopted into school curricula. To those of us trying to bring attention to racial injustice, it all felt very promising.

While corporations made high profile commitments to racial justice, they had no real plan beyond opportunistic public relations messaging. So they left it to HR to figure it out. But few HR managers or DEI consultants were prepared to suddenly pivot from their standard fare of cultural competence and anti-harassment to racism. The sudden surge in interest, therefore, meant a shortage of qualified trainers. This led to many poorly designed and clumsily executed programs. Moreover, private sector corporations are probably not the ideal venue for addressing systemic racism.

Please don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe corporate DEI is the cause of the post-2020 backlash. It doesn’t have that much power or influence. Besides, it seems like what critics mean by “DEI” is actually the totality of race and gender-conscious politics. They had already tried other labels, such as “political correctness,” “identity politics,” “CRT,” and “woke.” I think they landed on DEI because anyone who‘s worked for a large institution has probably heard of it. Many may associate it with some annoying training they were forced to take. Anyway, I’m not blaming race or gender consciousness either. I don’t deny that too much of the social justice discourse after 2020 (and before) was about manners and language. Nor do I deny that some anti-oppression trainers and twitter activists are strident and scolding. Lots of decent people were no doubt hurt by twitter drags or so-called “cancel culture.” It’s perfectly fair to criticize moral righteousness and bullying. But one does not have to be anti-woke to articulate these critiques, as adrienne maree brown and others demonstrate. The left has always been willing to proffer good faith criticism to its own side.

The legitimate problems with DEI, however, were not the real cause of the backlash; they were merely an excuse for it. The backlash was the result of right-wing commentators and influencers, lavishly funded by conservative groups (not to mention Putin), fanning embers of resentment into a firestorm. The flames did not just incinerate the excesses, though. Once ignited, the conflagration was unstoppable. From police accountability to library books about the Black experience to transgender rights, anything connected to wokeness was doused with the combustible tears of white grievance and fed to the fire.

Now, here we are, the President who “brought free speech back to America” is demanding that public schools teach “patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation” and purging government websites of references to the contributions of women, people of color, or anyone else from a marginalized group. He has also ordered his administration to eradicate DEI initiatives and positions from across the Federal government.

Longer History - The Civil Rights Movement and the Right-wing Counter-movement

We may be tempted to see the current effort to cancel DEI as the raging of a few madmen and mad men. But the full story is more disconcerting. What’s happening with DEI is not some overcooked grudge spilling out of the President’s big beautiful brain. DEI has had a target on its back for decades. Project 2025 is shot through with calls to abolish so-called DEI offices and initiatives. And eradicating race-consciousness from US politics has been a conservative aspiration since Reconstruction. In the aftermath of the Civil War, conservatives saw racial equality as a threat to white supremacy. Now they see it as a threat to Western civilization. Spoiler alert: these are the same.

I am going to unpack these claims, but first we need to establish a couple basic facts. People of color in the US, especially Black people, have been systematically denied opportunities for housing, (paid) employment, decent education, and wealth accumulation for centuries. They were also denied the right to vote, the right to a fair trial, and most of the other rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights. White supremacy was essentially the law of the land from the 17th century until 1965. The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Acts finally made racial discrimination illegal, but they did not vanquish all forms of systemic racism. By the time these laws were passed, racial hierarchy had already become baked into society by three centuries of legal white supremacy buttressed by racial terror.

As a result, Black people in this country today enjoy the smallest share of positive social value (e.g., wealth, health, leisure time, education) of all racial groups. The average Black household holds less than twenty percent of the wealth held by the average white household. Black people are more likely to be born into concentrated poverty, in a neighborhood where crime is endemic, policing is excessive, yet ineffectual, and schools are segregated and underfunded. Their lives tend to be harder and shorter than a white person with the same level of ability and drive.

Needless to say, entrenched racial inequality is unfair and generates needless misery and hopelessness. Ironically, the racial stratification corrupts the very thing most people, especially on the right, claim to want - genuine meritocracy. Just to be clear, by meritocracy, I simply mean a system that fairly rewards effort and enables everyone to reach their full potential. But in America in 2025 white men like me still don’t compete on a level playing field with people of color (or women). Competitiveness remains systematically warped by factors such as public school funding disparities, legacy college admissions, segregated social networks, name discrimination, affinity bias, and run of the mill racial animus.¹ As a result of these distortions, racism costs the US economy trillions of dollars.

The moral, political, economic, and spiritual costs of our failure to unleash all the untapped genius in our population are incalculable. Liberals recognize that America cannot tap its full collective genius without race-conscious structural reforms and a commitment to equity. The “equity” part of DEI means acknowledging the structural barriers faced by individuals from historically disadvantaged groups and taking deliberate measures to level the playing field. I am not claiming that equity efforts have always been perfectly targeted or executed. My point is that the liberal vision of a flourishing and equitable multiracial democracy is worth pursuing. So, what is the conservative rationale for opposing DEI? What is the social vision to which the right is committed?

The Social Vision Underneath the Backlash

The best way to understand the conservative social vision² is to examine their opposition to affirmative action. I want to start with an argument advanced by Hoover Institution scholar Thomas Sowell and Justice Clarence Thomas because it reveals a key limitation in their outlook. Sowell and Thomas argue that affirmative action is actually unfair to the individuals who benefit from it. They suggest, perhaps based on personal experience, that both its actual and perceived beneficiaries are stigmatized because the perception of affirmative action as unfair racial preference gives (white) people an excuse to assume that any person of color (or woman) in a high status job didn’t really earn it. This is not wrong. After all, the actions of POTUS47 to scapegoat and push out people he considers “DEI hires” show that the stigma is real. But their analysis is upside down. The stigma they decry is not caused by “reverse racism.” It is just regular racism. And here’s the tell. The sort of racism that presumes Black men are unqualified for their jobs is reinforced by the very racial inequality that affirmative action is intended to reduce. Perhaps Sowell and Thomas really hate affirmative action because it makes it harder for them to portray themselves as better than “those other black people.”

The conventional argument against affirmative action and other equity efforts is that they discriminate against white people. Chief Justice John Roberts leaned heavily on this notion in his majority opinion in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District. Roberts wrote, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

This idea of “reverse discrimination” flows directly from the principle of colorblindness, which is the cornerstone of the entire conservative approach to racial politics. It is extremely appealing because it sounds like fairness. Conservatives relish quoting Dr. King’s line about not judging people by the color of their skin. But he obviously wasn’t describing how to end racism. It was a dream. So, it’s more than a little ironic to hear powerful white men use King to proclaim that the real racism is against them. Anyway, the reason colorblindness feels like commonsense, I think, is that it fits well with our conception of racism as interpersonal bias. This approach erases history, power, and society. It’s like trying to understand a viral disease by studying an isolated virus particle.

Conservatives insist that their opposition to race-conscious politics is principled. They argue, for example, that policies promoting equality violate the principle of liberty, citing Alexander Hamilton’s statement that “Inequality will exist as long as lib­erty exists. It unavoidably results from that very liberty itself.” This is true enough, but it’s telling that he said these words while debating the US Constitution - a document originally designed to protect the liberty of rich white men to own Black people. So, sure, making society more fair may impinge on individual liberties. So does jury duty. So did the military draft. So does needing to work multiple jobs to afford rent.

The other principle that concerns conservatives is formal equality. Formal equality is a fancy way of saying everyone has equal rights, but only in the abstract. As such, they construe equal rights in exclusively legal terms. In a world with genuinely equal rights, though – where no one faces extra barriers due to their race – we’d expect to see substantive equality. The prison yard would have roughly the same racial makeup as an Ivy League quad.³ The obvious reason it doesn’t is racism, current and historical. But colorblind conservatives refuse to accept this. They decry liberals for pursuing “equality of outcomes” by lifting up the undeserving. Anyway, traditional conservative thought regards group hierarchy as natural and inevitable. For them, the reality of racial stratification needs no explanation.

For the right, in other words, racial equality is not worth pursuing because America is already fair, or at least as fair as we can make it. Racial hierarchy is just part of the natural order of things. This view has remained mostly implicit, but the quiet part is increasingly being said out loud. The quiet part is that racial inequality is natural because it reflects real racial differences in IQ and/or culture. Race and IQ is a central concern of scientific racism. Defenders of this pseudoscience frame it as forbidden knowledge. They complain that we’re not allowed to talk about it because of wokeness. The fact is, these ideas were long ago discredited on moral, empirical, and logical grounds. The culture argument is more complicated to discredit because unlike race, culture is a real and complex. Still, the fact remains that there is no evidence for the cultural pathology theory that isn’t better explained by structural racism.

The lack of rigor that characterizes conservative racial arguments doesn’t discredit them for the right because the belief in “group differences” is an article of faith. Sadly, since 2015, the faith has been spread by far right figures like Charles Murray, Steve Bannon, Stefan Molyneux, and right wing think tanks like the Claremont Institute. Needless to say, POTUS47 played a major role in mainstreaming these ideas.

Why was it so easy? The sad answer is that this ideology has long been at the heart of right wing discourse. How else to explain Pat Buchanan accusing David Duke of stealing his ideas, George HW Bush race-baiting in his 1988 presidential campaign, and Ronald Reagan’s routine racial dog-whistling? And it didn’t start there. Reagan expanded the war on drugs, which was launched by Nixon’s as part of his Southern Strategy. The strategy’s success at making Republicans out of white Democrats (Northern as well as Southern) was a key moment in the reactionary postwar counter-movement to Black Civil Rights that began with the Dixiecrat revolt.

While no serious person believes that every effort to increase racial equality has been perfect, it is noteworthy that conservatives oppose virtually every policy. They do propose ways to make inequality worse, of course, such as defunding public assistance and building more prisons. The real goal is to roll back the gains of the Civil Rights movement.

Some Final Thoughts

I believe that most liberals and progressives would be happy to have a good faith debate about the best way to ensure that membership in a racial group no longer predicts a person’s access to wealth, health, and education. But this requires honesty. When the right accuses the left of socialism or Marxism, they are being dishonest. The accusation implies that the left is trying to eliminate individual inequality. This is idiotic! And it is bad faith. It’s hard to believe that conservatives really can’t distinguish between individual inequality and racial hierarchy. And nobody denies that individual inequality is natural. Not everyone can win a decathlon or cure cancer. Racial hierarchy, however, is not natural because race is not natural; it is a lie told to justify racism and white supremacy. Not to put too fine a point on it, but all the conservative talk of Marxism is really just a ploy to avoid talking about their own belief in white superiority.

DEI is not about enforcing equality. It is simply about making the system less unfair. Besides the Marxism bullshit, conservatives often warn that DEI will have dangerous unintended consequences. Also bullshit. What they’re worried about, as is clear from their own writings, is that DEI will succeed. They are correct to be worried. Even the moderate reforms of the Civil Rights era have opened the floodgates to an unstoppable tide of Black and Brown excellence which has enriched the world, intellectually, culturally, and economically. This success is precisely why the right wing panic over DEI has become so urgent. White supremacy is on the ropes, and it’s not going down without a tantrum. Sadly, as we are witnessing, it would rather torch liberal democracy and the planet than give up dominance.

1. I benefited personally from all of these, except legacy admissions.

2. When I refer to conservatives or “the right” throughout this piece, I am referring to movement leaders and their intellectual enablers, not the grass roots. I make no assumptions about the political beliefs of ordinary conservatives.

3. Conservatives insist that progressives want compulsory equality. False. Progressives see “inequality of outcome” as a symptom that the system is rigged. It’s really not that complicated.