On the Anatomy of DEI Bullshit

I promise this substack won’t become the “DEI is good, actually" blog. History is happening at an alarming pace and we’re going to talk about it as best we are able. But I wanted to go back to the DEI well one more time because out of the many different disastrous and demoralizing stories overwhelming the media cycle right now, there is one that I believe acutely demonstrates how poisoned our discourse has become.

In the wake of the tragic mid-air plane crash that claimed the lives of a high school skating team among others, Trump and his lackeys wasted no time in blaming DEI for the accident. They couldn’t specify exactly how the FAA’s diversity initiatives caused the crash, but Trump’s common sense told him that it had to have been a factor. He pointed to a policy wherein the agency was directed to hire people with severe cognitive impairments among other things as an example of DEI run amok. Of course, that policy had been in place since 2013, his first administration continued it, and the FAA wasn’t hiring people with cognitive problems to land planes, but let's not let the details get in the way of a good narrative.

This theory was offered without as much as a suggestion of evidence to back it up. However, to the MAGA faithful and a significant portion of the sympathetic centrist space, this is common sense. If you prioritize diversity over merit, things are bound to get bad. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that DEI at the FAA had been a long-simmering talking point in the online reactionary right.

You may remember that 50 years ago in 2024, there were several stories about Boeing airplanes suffering near catastrophic mechanical failures. There were also a few stories about an increasing number of near misses between aircraft in the sky. The right-wing commentariat wasted little time then in blaming diversity initiatives for these incidents, if not hiring for demographic quotas over merit then it was companies spending more time celebrating Pride month than focusing on keeping planes in the air. If you are keeping track, it must be said again that these accusations were not backed by any substantive evidence that efforts to increase diversity in commercial air travel were doing damage to the industry. Instead, almost all the evidence for this was based on an inferred causal relationship between how the right characterized DEI as prioritizing skin color over merit (without evidence) and any disaster or failure that occurred after companies started publicizing their DEI efforts.

However, there was one story that conservatives could point to that suggested that the FAA was discriminating against qualified white male workers in favor of hiring more Black people.

In 2014 the FAA drastically reworked its application process for air traffic controllers. This was done in response to a report on barriers to diversity within the FAA. Of particular interest was what the report had to say about the AT-SAT assessment that had been used to select applicants for air traffic controller jobs. The report found that the use of this test combined with where the FAA was looking for applicants created a barrier for women and minorities to get these jobs. The word “barrier” is pretty important. It’s a word that is left out of how the right talks about DEI and yet it's pretty foundational to the entire idea.

A bit of history: In 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired thousands of ATCs in response to a strike over pay, hours, and working conditions. Not content with just firing the striking workers, Reagan banned them from civil service for life. Many credit this action as the beginning of the end for organized labor power in the United States, which many conservatives in turn view as a great thing. Unfortunately, you can’t just eliminate thousands of experienced workers from a critical job without consequences. The FAA needed to replenish its ranks of ATCs quickly and in 1989 it established the AT-CTI program, where select colleges and universities would offer a fast-track program for people who wanted to become ATCs.

Graduating from an AT-CTI program and then passing the AT-SAT would allow an applicant to skip the first two weeks of the FAA’s in-house ATC training program and all but guarantee them a job. The FAA would still accept applicants from the general public but it prioritized hiring from the AT-CTI program because it alleviated the administrative burden of having to sort through applications. But there was a small problem. In the original weighting of the AT-CTI, only about 62% of fully certified and practicing ATCs would have passed the test. Since the 38% percent that would have failed the test were nevertheless performing their jobs up to standard and without incident, the test would have eliminated otherwise qualified applicants. So the test was reweighted with a passing score set at 70, but this created another problem. With the new weighting and passing score close to 100% of applicants were passing the test which defeated the purpose of streamlining the administrative workload for screening applicants.

So then the FAA decided to establish a “highly qualified” score of 85, applications with scores at or above this number would have to be considered for open positions before looking at applicants with a passing 70 score. And it just so happened that at the new highly qualified score, the pool of applicants became disproportionately white and male. The test along with the practice of favoring AT-CTI graduates, a population with a similar bias toward white men, created the context where the FAA was indeed the least diverse federal department.

It’s here that we should take a break from the exposition dump to understand what was happening here. One might read the report, especially the exhaustive number of tables detailing how diversity went down as the scores went up, and say “Who cares if they weren’t diverse, the people with the best test scores should get the jobs”. But there are a few issues with that. The report notes how much like the collegiate SAT, there were several test aids and practice questions floating around that constituted differential access to preparation for the AT-SAT. Also, it might be helpful to understand why white men were so overrepresented in the graduate classes of AT-CTI programs. Besides those two considerations, there just wasn’t any evidence to suggest that people scoring 85 or above on the AT-SAT were performing better than people who scored 70 in the actual job. The lack of diversity was not the cost of hiring the best but rather the cost of making it easier for FAA administrators to arbitrarily triage applications.

In 2014, the Obama administration decided to make a change to the ATC hiring process to address these diversity concerns. The FAA decided to draw equally from AT-CTI programs and the general public but the most notable thing they did was to add a new test to the process. This test was called a Biographical Assessment (BA) and it asked questions that seemingly had little to do with the nuts and bolts of air traffic. These questions were geared more toward assessing applicants' decision-making skills, ability to perform under pressure, and ability to adapt. Under the new process, applicants would have to take the BA first and those who passed would then be allowed to take the cognitive portion of the AT-SAT and continue toward getting a job.

This new process maintained the goal of mitigating the administrative burden of screening ATC applicants, but crucially the BA showed negligible differences in passing scores between racial and gender categories. A 2012 paper by the Civil Aerospace Medical Institute of the FAA in collaboration with San Diego State University studied the BA’s fairness and efficacy in evaluating candidates and found that the BA may have been a better indicator of job performance than the AT-SAT. The paper notes that these types of biodata assessments are not new and have been in use and studied since WWII.

Another issue with the AT-SAT raised by the FAA diversity report was that the questions related to applicants' ability to absorb training were not counted in the final weighting for scores. This didn’t make much sense because all new hires would have to take the FAA’s training course regardless of score. The BA not only took this into account but actually screened for candidates who showed high aptitude in picking up the needed skills.

To recap, the new process sought to increase diversity within the ranks of ATCs. They did this by implementing a new screening procedure that was less biased toward white men and seemed to be a better indicator of future job performance. For reasons that will be clear in just a few moments, I need to reiterate that the BA was not biased against white men, nor did it favor Black people or any other demographic.

So now we get to the bullshit.

The FAA could have rolled out this new process in stages. Grandfathered in those who had already taken the AT-SAT and established a period of time where people currently in AT-CTI programs could adjust and prepare for the new process. They didn’t do that.

Instead, in January of 2014 they notified AT-CTI grads that their AT-SAT scores had been thrown out and they would need to pass the BA before they could be allowed to continue. Understandably, this left a lot of people who spent time and money on AT-CTI programs pretty pissed off. People like Andrew Brigida, who in 2018 filed a class lawsuit against the FAA claiming that his test was thrown out and his application denied because of his race.

Brigida’s attorneys presented evidence that the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE) had been in contact with the FAA and had passed information to its members on how to pass the BA. This was dumb and bad, but it also kind of undercuts the idea the BA was instituted to be biased in favor of Black candidates. In 2016, Obama did what he does best and backtracked. He deprioritized the use of the BA in screening candidates, Trump eliminated it in 2018, and in 2020 congress passed a bill reinstating the preference toward AT-CTI graduates.

Despite the changes being completely rolled back by 2020, the class action lawsuit continued. Notably, both the Trump and Biden administrations continued to fight the lawsuit because the BA never mentioned race and was, in fact, more race-neutral than the AT-SAT. While the way the process was implemented left a lot to be desired, there wasn’t any evidence that the test itself was biased, nor that it represented a drop-off in quality for those who achieved AT certification. That didn’t stop JD Vance from pointing to this story as evidence that DEI had made flying untenably dangerous.

"If you go back to just some of the headlines over the past 10 years, you have many hundreds of people suing the government because they would like to be air traffic controllers, but they were turned away because of the color of their skin. That policy ends under Donald Trump's leadership because safety is the first priority of our aviation industry."

Just to be clear, this is the only point of evidence that conservatives have offered to substantiate the claim that DEI has ruined air travel in America. There are no stories of negligence or incompetence that can be directly attributed to an employee hired under a DEI initiative. The recent collision in DC was the first crash involving a US airliner in 15 years. Even with recent stories of near misses between planes in the air, flying remains incredibly safe, especially in this country, something even Trump had to admit when pressed on it.

We need to be honest about what this DEI panic is about. The clear implication is that white men are hired on merit and everyone else is suspect. This is not an implication that DEI itself created, this is an implication that lies in the heart of American white supremacy and DEI is just the excuse to make it public. No one was worried about DEI when Trump nominated Sean Duffy as his transportation secretary. The only qualification that Duffy has on his resume concerning America's transportation infrastructure is that he was once a cast member on MTV's Road Rules reality game show.

It’s almost like he was hired for his ideological background over his merit to do the job.

The FAA’s plan to increase diversity wasn’t a bad idea. The implementation was stupid and almost perfectly designed to invite right-wing backlash. However, they did identify a barrier that kept minorities and women from ATC roles. The thing that we need to keep in mind is that this barrier was not explicitly racist. The AT-CTI program wasn’t implemented to keep minorities out of ATC jobs, although with Reagan and Pappy Bush you never know. The goal was to streamline the application selection process and as a result, an unintentional bias was created favoring white men. This doesn’t mean that people like Andrew Brigida were privileged racists, or that minorities couldn’t have also participated in the AT-CTI program, but at the same time there just wasn’t much reason to keep a biased system in place when you could easily address the inequities in the selection process without changing the standards.

There could be substantive conversations around selection tools like the AT-SAT, as well as other assessment tests that keep people from all walks of life out of certain jobs and institutions. Sometimes a bias is unavoidable and the barriers to diversity are justified. But in most cases, these are created in a context where white men are seen as the default subject of societal construction and that leaves a lot of people out in the cold. There’s no good reason to not interrogate these structures, other than weaponizing white grievance against any political project to the left of Hoover.

As so we are left with the bullshit. Unable to talk about reality because the narrative is too beneficial. Time will tell if Trump has bit off too much for him to chew with blaming DEI for everything. It's exceedingly clear to anyone other than his most devoted sycophants that scapegoating minorities during a tragedy is an extremely gross move predicated on nothing more than pure politics. But resistance liberalism is pretty weak and adrift at the moment, and Trump’s flooding the zone strategy has kept both the media and the opposition party in a constant state of bewilderment. I honestly don’t know what else to do right now.

Except for calling bullshit.

Solidarity Forever.