Trump War on DEI Promotes Not Merit But Racism

March 13, 2025

In 1972, as a young Public Service Commission lawyer, cross-examining a utility company executive in a rate hearing, I asked how many employees they had.

He gave a number. Then I asked, “How many are Black?”

Was I an early social justice warrior, ahead of my time? Or just a wise guy? It did not go over well.

Oddly enough, I was a conservative Republican then — though cognizant of historic racial discrimination. “Affirmative action” was new and highly contentious. The idea was to make up for past unfairness by giving its victims favorable treatment now. But the policy’s beneficiaries would not usually be the same individuals who suffered in the past. While other individuals would be disadvantaged.

However, individual redress was not the real aim. Instead, it was societal redress — giving ethnic minorities not so much a preference as a fair representation in classrooms and workplaces.

The 2020 George Floyd killing raised consciousness about persisting racial disparities; while the Supreme Court, which had previously okayed some forms of affirmative action, now backtracked on that. But meantime many major corporations nevertheless felt obliged to be responsive to social concerns and the zeitgeist, so adopted a DEI policy — “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

The three words, taken at face value, all stand for good things most people endorse. Though promoting those ideals while avoiding reverse discrimination might have seemed like trying to square a circle. Awarding non-white applicants extra points remained problematic — discriminatory against whites. But things aren’t so simple. Hirings are not typically matters of totting up points, but judgments based on diffuse considerations. If a white and a Black job seeker stand pretty equal, there’s nothing wrong with choosing the latter for the sake of workplace diversity and inclusiveness.

Especially as an antidote to the discriminatory biases that still lurk (often below the radar) even among people of goodwill. Studies have shown that Black-sounding names on resumes (and females too) tend to get shorter shrift.

That’s why DEI as a general policy objective — as opposed to constituting an explicit hiring heuristic — is a worthy concept. Helping us become a more just and admirable society overall.

Enter Mister Trump. To curry favor with him (and reflecting what seems a new zeitgeist), corporations all across the country have scrambled to scrub DEI words from their websites and mission statements.*

So much for diversity. So much for equity. So much for inclusion. Don’t want none of that no more. Gimme that old time religion.

The Supreme Court, in its decisions on affirmative action, at least notionally wrestled with the difficult fairness issues. Not at all simple, as this posting might suggest. Trump however is a black-and-white kind of guy, not a shades-of-grey guy. And he stands squarely on the white side.

Thus his war on DEI — and “wokism,” linked with it. Democrats overdo their ethnic and sexual/gender identity politics, but identity politics is actually bigger in the Trump cult. Thus all the weird insistence on only two genders; non-conforming people freak them out.

And the cult’s deepest core is white tribal anxiety over the societal ascendance of previously subordinated minorities. A non-white president really freaked them out.

So Trump blames DEI for everything from plane crashes to wild fires to the Baltimore bridge disaster. The hardly camouflaged racist message is that DEI has meant hiring non-whites who are presumptively inferior. All the verbiage invoking “merit” caters to the prejudice that Blacks don’t have it.

It’s nonsense. But such is the belief of white supremacists — too dumb to realize that this ignorant belief itself proves they’re the inferior ones.

* Though Apple’s shareholders voted 97% against a move to expunge DEI.