Restoring quasi-legal racial segregation in the US is the true objective of the far-right’s campaign against affirmative action.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are the most recent target of the conservative and far-right battle against so-called “woke culture.”
Many conservative public figures and GOP leaders have openly attributed disastrous incidents, including the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, to “DEI hiring practices.” In a video released on X, South African billionaire, X owner, and recently appointed U.S. “Administrator for the Department of Government Efficiency,” Elon Musk, has accused DEI of causing this month’s devastating fires in Southern California caused by climate change, saying that “DEI means people DIE.”
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The organizations that back these initiatives have also been targeted by individuals opposed to DEI in recent months. Some large firms and NGOs, like Amazon, Walmart, McDonald’s, and the Fearless Fund, are currently retreating headlong. Following the protests over the 2020 police shooting of George Floyd, they are discontinuing or scaling back programs that they either started or greatly expanded. The breakdown of DEI infrastructures in public higher education institutions in states including Alabama, Iowa, Utah, Missouri, Kentucky, Texas, and Nebraska is said to have started more than three years ago at the local and institutional level.
As anticipated, President Donald Trump started demolishing the federal government’s entire diversity and inclusion infrastructure on the first day of his second term in office. In order to prevent their future layoffs, he insisted that all federal DEI employees be placed on paid leave beginning Wednesday.
Why, then, are Trump, his conservative followers, and the far right as a whole making ending DEI—which generally refers to the acceptance, even embracing, of racial, gender, sexual orientation, and other differences as well as the establishment of a welcoming environment for marginalized Americans at workplaces and universities—such a top priority?
They feel that these programs pose a serious obstacle to their attempts to restore the “white man’s country” they so desperately desire, which is why they want DEI to terminate. Their insistence that educational and employment practices be color-blind is actually an attempt to go back to a time when social mobility was supposedly objective and only white men could benefit from it. Their goal is to completely block the already highly limited opportunities for social and economic growth that people of color and other marginalized groups in the US have. They want to make sure that they are not forced to face their own racism by DEI or other antiracist or “woke” programs. DEI just means “Don’t Ever Integrate” to them.
This is not a coincidence. The far right has been throwing grenades against African American studies and critical race theory in K–12 classrooms as well as at colleges and universities across the nation since 2019. Overturning decades of precedent, the US Supreme Court declared in the June 2023 cases Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard University and SFFA v. University of North Carolina that racial affirmative action in college admissions is unconstitutional. These were not isolated occurrences. A broader push to restore the US to a condition of quasi-legal racial segregation includes the opposition to DEI programs, affirmative action in the workplace and in education, and critical race theory.
Opponents of race-based affirmative action frequently criticized the notion that Americans of color, particularly Black people, required an onramp to greater educational and career prospects long before the current campaigns against DEI. They opposed Executive Order 11246 issued by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 and its progressive expansion beyond government contractors to include employment in all facets of the US economy and higher education. Maybe President Johnson also sensed this possible resistance. 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,” in his commencement address, “To Fulfill These Rights,” given in June 1965 at Howard University, a historically Black institution in Washington, DC. In order to improve an otherwise unfair playing field that has historically favored white Americans and white men over all other groups, Johnson sought to develop ways to establish onramps. Johnson’s directive, along with 60 years of anti-discrimination safeguards in the federal workforce, has been formally canceled by Trump’s Executive directive 14171, Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.
Even movements that oppose social justice have their supporters. Conservatives like Ward Connerly and Edward Blum believe that any remedial measures, such as affirmative action, DEI, or even critical race theory, that aim to combat the systemic white supremacist racism of American institutions and systems are overcorrections. In the 1980s and 1990s, Connerly, who is African American, opposed affirmative action. He spearheaded California’s anti-affirmative action campaign and, with Republican Governor Pete Wilson’s assistance, oversaw the state’s 1996 Proposition 209 initiative, which effectively ended affirmative action. The initiative’s enactment into law significantly decreased the proportion of Brown and Black students enrolled in California’s institutions.
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