On the Death of DEI

This past Thursday, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein published document leaks from an extraordinarily high number of government staffers, detailing President Trump’s war on DEI initiatives within the purview of the federal government. The documents provided were all variations on the same theme, directives from department heads for their respective offices to report any attempt to disguise DEI initiatives by changing the names of programs or rewording contracts. The administration has already set up an email -DEIAtruth.org- for people to report any DEIs hiding in the attics or cellars of the federal government.

Reading these emails, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine Steven Miller showing up at the VA like Hans Landa to ask some beleaguered middle manager if they would allow rats in their home or serve said rats a glass of their delicious milk.

Before Trump took office, major companies signaled their intention to cozy up to the new administration by preemptively scrapping their DEI departments. Meta publicly announced its decision to allow people to be even more transphobic on their platforms than they already were.

Just like that DEI was dead. Its demise was swift and resolute. Perhaps dead is a bit of an overstatement, private companies and organizations are still free to do what they please (for now) and a few of them are maintaining some level of commitment to equity. But in the aggregate, the era of America making a concerted effort to address historical inequality as a matter of national principle is dead. Rooted out from the centers of American power and unceremoniously buried in the backyard.

But, had it ever really lived?

If you are a regular reader of this substack, you’ll know I am not a fan of corporate DEI initiatives. Specifically, I was mostly critical of DEI being positioned as the pinnacle of anti-racist praxis. It seemed that at its best, DEI was chiefly concerned with aesthetically diversifying the economic and institutional centers of power without meaningfully addressing the class-based problems that disproportionately affect minorities. At worst, it was a cynical marketing ploy to convince Black people to keep their streaming subscriptions or to sell overpriced swimsuits to trans women. And at its most devious, it was used as a bludgeon against class-based leftist politics as when Hilary Clinton famously asked how breaking up the big banks would end racism.

The problem is that DEI was never one universally recognizable thing. It meant very different things to different people. For some, it meant expanding applicant pools for hiring and higher education, including re-evaluating test-based metrics that contained some measure of built-in bias against otherwise qualified candidates. For others, it meant identifying and correcting institutional cultural practices that were alienating and harmful to people from minority backgrounds. We joke about touching Black people's hair around here, but these little things (and not an insignificant amount of big things) build up to create undue hardships for people who are just trying to earn a degree or get a job. You can say that people should have a thicker skin but having a thickened skin isn’t part of most job descriptions or college acceptance requirements.

For others still, it meant pure and uncut black tar representation. Black faces on TV shows and in movies, on billboards, and the covers of college admissions packets. It meant ______ voices tabs on every streaming service to cater to every kind of minority identity, and shaming the Academy Awards for not being able to find any melanin in their best picture nominees.

For the somewhat pessimistically inclined, it meant a kind of therapeutic segregation. Based on the notion that it should not be the job of Black people to educate white people on how white supremacy affects their lives, affinity spaces, and racially segregated workshops had a moment in the sun. Essentially, giving Black people a space to be a bit freer with their cultural expression without having to explain to their white colleagues and classmates how seasonings work, while giving white people a chance to perform penance for their sins in relative privacy.

There was a measure of cynical gatekeeping as well. DEI wasn’t just a practice, it was a distinct culture with its language and norms birthed from the austere halls of critical theory-minded academia. One need not have read all the theory, but to exist comfortably in spaces where DEI was a practice, you certainly had to master the aesthetic and linguistic rules that formed the bounds of acceptability. For those that didn’t, a new front in worker discipline was opened.

DEI was a lot of things. Some of them were pretty good. The fact is that America has existed as a hegemonic monoculture created for and by white people for a long time. There are real effects that come with existing in such a narrow social milieu for so long, and where DEI was at its most effective and helpful was where it tried to identify and address the systemic and cultural calcification making our so-called melting pot more of an antagonistic emulsion. People were able to effectively address hostile behaviors from their peers with management, people who had been previously passed over for opportunities finally got an honest shot at advancement, and spaces were made more accessible for people who had been denied basic considerations. These things were good.

But in the end, we have to acknowledge that DEI was the product of neoliberal capitalist thought, and as such it was never the revolutionary project that some believed it to be. At the end of the day, DEI was an individualist-minded initiative masquerading as systemic change. The core proposition was that putting more people from diverse backgrounds into positions of power would trickle down benefits to those who remained in the working and impoverished classes. We asked for the police to be defunded and we got an increase in Morehouse grads working for Fortune 500 companies. We wanted universal healthcare and housing and instead got a niche million-dollar industry for upper-middle-class, college-educated minorities to make white people feel bad. No, we didn't break up the big banks, we just forced them to put diversity statements on their websites while they continued the same predatory business practices that have been draining resources from minority urban neighborhoods for time immemorial.

Many people who championed DEI, pushed their schools and workplaces to adopt it, worked in DEI offices, and even those who built workshops and trainings, did so because they wanted to meaningfully address the lingering effects of white supremacy on people from minority backgrounds. Say what you want about the means and methods, and I most certainly do, I don’t think it’s a stretch to believe that most of these people's hearts were in the right place. And it's not even the case that DEI professionals were blind to the limitations of these efforts. Corporate and university diversity offices were notoriously underfunded, not given a clear mandate, and were limited by guardrails that prevented them from making fundamental changes that would have interfered with core market priorities. By and large, these were people trying to make the best of what they were handed, in service of what they believed was a worthwhile cause.

This is why, despite my criticisms of the enterprise as a whole, I still find its demise at the hand of reactionary white supremacist backlash a tragedy.

When I criticize DEI, I do it out of a genuine commitment to Black liberation and ending white supremacist cultural hegemony as a whole. When Elon Musk does it, it's because he’s a dipshit edge lord who cosplays as a fascist for the lulz and because he doesn’t want to do anything about the rampant racism and worker abuses at his vehicular homicide factories. They not like us.

There is a notion floating around the leftist discourse, verbalized by people like Ryan Grimm, that in the end, Trump’s scorched earth campaign against DEI will be a good thing for the left. Whatever good came out of DEI initiatives was vastly overshadowed by the animosity it created with the white working class who felt that progressive liberal elites cared far more about boutique issues of identity than they did about material issues facing working people. Furthermore, it functioned to absorb dissent that could have been channeled toward more materialist solutions for underserved and overpoliced populations and redirected that energy toward laundering the image of institutionalized power.

While I agree with these criticisms, the fact that DEI’s end came at the hands of people like Chris Rufo is categorically bad for the left. Rufo earned his fame and influence in conservative politics as a crusader against “radical liberal” education, specifically critical race theory. Unlike the uncouth and unwashed MAGA base, he was able to project himself as a perfectly reasonable and educated interlocutor. He’d read people like Adorno, Crenshaw, and Bell, so when he appeared on cable news to warn against the dangers of critical race theory, it seemed like he knew what he was talking about. The media took him seriously, so seriously in fact no one seemed to question his qualifications for taking the education system to task despite having once worked as a research fellow and program director for the creationist Discovery Institute.

Teaching critical race theory is dangerous leftist indoctrination, but teaching intelligent design is just giving students options I guess.

The right-wing backlash to DEI was always itself a form of identity politics, as also helpfully communicated by Ryan Grimm. It was just a form of identity politics with much deeper roots in America’s collective subconscious than anything to do with Black people or the LGBTQ community. The history of conservative political expression is the history of the grievances held by white male property owners and whether or not companies invited a Vassar-educated DEI specialist to give training on the reason why white people can’t rap all of the lyrics to their favorite Kendrick Lamar song never had any bearing on whether that white grievance could be weaponized.

We know this because, while the anecdotes of excessively woke DEI programs (many of which were described dishonestly or without important context) continued at a steady stream, very quickly the right-wing narrative around DEI was that it existed primarily to elevate unqualified Black people far beyond their natural place. Every single bad thing, from uncontrollable forest fires, to train derailments, to mid-air plane crashes was blamed on Black people or other minorities being too stupid to effectively run the white man's world. This was racism, plain and simple. There was no useful critique to be had here, there was no careful consideration of how people interacted with society or how to improve lives. Just people looking for any opportunity to justify their racist worldviews.

While the compendium of legal analysis and arguments that formed the core of critical race theory was never taught in elementary or high school classes, it was certainly true that many teachers were adopting a more critical approach to pedagogy. Despite anecdotal examples of some people applying critical theory in the dumbest forms of praxis imaginable, the impulse to question hegemonic ways of thinking and interrogate how social norms shape how we view the world was a correct one. And it’s indispensable to building any sort of successful leftist political project.

Rufo and others were able to characterize this phenomenon as identity politics run amok, or as we more commonly know it, wokeness. Some leftists were willing to concede this, believing for some reason that separating conversations around socially constructed identities and histories from material issues of economy and production was a savvy strategy. But it wasn’t. There was never any amount of “I’m not like those other leftists” books and articles that would have successfully cleaved off the kind of class reductionist materialism they supported from the Idpol excesses made infamous by LibsofTikTok types. At best, some sufficiently cowed left figure might get an invite to go on a conservative podcast to solemnly agree that wokeness has gone too far without ever getting to make a case for economic socialism.

I’m not saying that I have some magic pill that would have neutralized the reactionary backlash to CRT, but I do believe a better rhetorical strategy would have been to own the underlying premise while rejecting some of the ways it manifested under neoliberalism. At the end of the day white supremacy doesn’t actually benefit most white people, despite the name. This was a crucial mistake made by a lot of social justice-minded people and even some of the academics they drew from. White supremacy is a social currency that is given to the white working class in place of actual fair wages. If you want to understand why White people always vote against their own self-interest, it's because of these wages of whiteness as described by W.E.B DuBois.

If ideas like DEI and CRT alienated white people from a leftist political message it was because reactionary conservative media was poised and well-trained to lie and distort reality, because liberals don’t understand how to do mass politics anymore, and because the left was either too anemic to reframe the conversation in a way that included white people or just gave up even trying.

I’m not too particularly keen on conversations around problematic white leftists. Not because there isn’t a section of the left that is class reductionist in ways that are problematic, there certainly is. But there is also a strain of race reductionism in progressive circles that similarly misses the mark. Call me a centrist I guess, but despite such vulgar epithets I simply don’t believe that issues of racial identity, gender, or any other demographic composition that isn’t straight, white, Christian male can meaningfully be separated from discussions around class. Stuart Hall, a Black Marxist thinker, once said that “race is the modality in which class is lived, the medium in which class relations are experienced”. It’s a quote that’s stuck with me for years since I first read it because it so perfectly and succinctly captures what is missing from most left critiques of DEI.

If we could wave a wand tomorrow and create the fully automated luxury space communism that we all deserve, it wouldn’t mean much if these new systems of Marxist distribution treat the concept of DEI (not the unhelpful ways it manifested under neoliberalism) as irrelevant. We desperately need new ways of economic thinking but it's not simply enough to say we just need more socialist economists, there is a diversity of experience that also needs to be brought into conversation. For instance, women, who have historically been underrepresented in the field of economics, might have some interesting things to say about unpaid care work and how that should factor into whatever social safety nets we want to construct in a socialist paradise. Disabled people probably have some good ideas about accessibility, religious minorities might have something to add about cultural acceptance and solidarity, and Black people can show yall how to season the food at the free meal programs.

I can’t stress enough how annoying and counterproductive some of the ways DEI was implemented were, but at the same time, I fear that its demise at a counterrevolutionary movement that disfigured it in a grotesque caricature, mostly by lying, means that we stand to lose something valuable from the general leftist political project.

Historically, abandoning racial justice to not alienate the white working class hasn’t worked out, either for the left or the white working class whose feelings they were worried about. The labor movement accepted a New Deal architecture that contained real improvements for factory and manufacturing jobs but preserved a measure of exploitation for service work and agricultural labor mostly performed by Black people, not to mention explicit discrimination in access to federal programs. This is what Stuart Hall meant about the modality of class. Years later when capitalists figured out how to send those manufacturing jobs overseas, the white working class found themselves ravaged by the social effects of deindustrialization. Relegated back to the indignities of a class position they thought they had foisted on the lesser races.

It's one thing to make fun of or critique the ladies who grifted rich white ladies out of thousands of dollars to host expensive dinner parties for racial justice, it's another to pretend as though this grift is the extent of what racial justice looks like. That’s Matt Walsh’s job and he is unfortunately good at it. We shouldn’t be helping him or conceding anything to his project.

Rest in Piece DEI, you lived just long enough to become the villain, but I’m hoping you get a better reboot in a few years.

Solidarity forever.