Donald Trump recently issued an executive order that eliminates all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs in the federal government. While this act demonstrates Trump's unwavering dedication to white supremacy, it also reveals what is behind the smoke and mirrors of DEI.
Donald Trump, in his second presidency is keeping his campaign promises and sowing chaos by signing a sweeping Executive Order “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing” that eliminates what he says are:
“...illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), into virtually all aspects of the Federal Government, in areas ranging from airline safety to the military. This was a concerted effort stemming from President Biden’s first day in office, when he issued Executive Order 13985, “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.”
First, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs did not emerge from Biden’s Executive Order. Many corporate efforts at diversity emerged or were expanded following the 2020 uprisings against racist terrorism sparked by the murder of George Floyd. These corporate efforts claimed to have a goal of addressing the underrepresentation of marginalized groups within their workforces and supply chains. These moves were in response to yet another moment in American history where the deep inequality between white and Black people in the U.S. was exposed as an ever growing chasm, rather than the rose-tinted example of American progress on racism that many believed capitalist success is, or inclusion into the capitalist system that claims to produce equal success for all. But despite the existence of a handful of Black millionaires, racial inequality and injustice were clearly all too real and were never addressed.
As soon as these efforts were announced, conservatives pounced to dismantle them, calling them divisive, anti-American, and even discriminatory against white people, although they usually left the last three words out of their public condemnations. Which is brazenly false considering that white people have benefitted from institutional racial discrimination against non-white people in this country since its very beginning.
Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University and author of the book “When Affirmative Action Was White writes in a policy paper that the progressive policies of the New Deal era that were supposed to promote equality for all did not because of the racist implementation of those policies. Certainly affirmative action programs were insufficient to reverse the effects of 300 years of preferential treatment for whites, but Katznelson doesn’t deal with the entire period. Instead he focuses on the 30 years prior to the implementation of affirmative action programs, a period that includes New Deal legislation that maintained social and economic inequality rather than improving it. And when those affirmative action programs were implemented between 1960 and 1965, they were targeted at middle class Black people, which left millions of the working class and poor in the same economic and social degradation and oppression they were in prior to the programs’ emergence. These facts emerged in the discussions around racial inequality in America in 2020 as focus was deliberately shifted from racist police terrorism to the connected socio-economic legacy of discrimination that persists in the form of the ever-widening racial wealth gap that disproportionately cripples poor Black and other non-white people in this country.
This is the environment in which corporations either implemented or expanded efforts that focused on addressing these persistent inequalities through various types of programs widely known as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Biden’s Executive Order pertained to Federal agencies only. Pressure from the streets in the form of massive protests across the country against a grossly unjust society compelled corporations to say they would commit to working toward achieving a level of racial and social justice, but saying it is all they really did. Their rapid abandonment of these insufficient commitments began as soon as Conservatives attacked them. It intensified in 2024 with Conservative attacks on the legal framework of racism which was analyzed in law schools, Critical Race Theory. The attack included claims that this legal concept was a nefarious plot to make white public school students feel guilty.
Much of white America was and still is deeply propagandized and duped by lies about these efforts being antithetical to American meritocracy, which is a myth, and that undeserving (lazy) people (Blacks, Mexicans, women, gays, etc.) are using these efforts to take opportunity away from them. Many working class whites jumped on the bandwagon of demonizing these efforts as a threat to their interests. But the people they are agreeing with are beholden to white monopoly finance capitalist power who feed white workers these lies about others while they steal white workers’ wages, cut their benefits, limit their access to healthcare, and destroy the environment they live in.
The truth is that programs that purport to create a workplace that is more equal and inclusive of all people have existed in corporate America in some form since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The narrative today is that too much of that has been done and it is the resulting influx of unqualified Black people that is causing plane crashes and otherwise ruining the country. In reality however, these programs do not produce the influx of unqualified Black or brown or trans people running amok and ruining things. Instead, as this Forbes article from two years ago points out, these programs do not produce an influx of Black people at any skill level for various reasons tied to American capitalist corporate culture. Therefore, the belief that DEI today means “unqualified Black people” is not only racist, but it is patently false because Black people benefit the least from these programs. White women have been the major beneficiaries of civil rights/affirmative action/DEI legislation and programs at every level of society, including academia and corporate employment.
Interestingly, this indoctrination into the mythology of colorblind American meritocracy is also supported by the few among the marginalized who believe their material success makes them an example of that fantastical American Dream, rather than the agents of the petit bourgeois buffer class. The finance capital dictatorship uses them to convince the masses to prop up this system of racialized oppression so that one day they can become a member of that class, rising above the rest of the unwashed masses. And sometimes they are also opponents of these programs for the same reasons others cite. However, they know that those reasons are lies because they were probably always the only Black in most positions they are or were in.
But even these moves are not new. Conservatives have been working to dismantle every effort to achieve social and racial equality and justice in this country every time such an effort is advanced. They have done so long before DEI existed and have had repeated successes in halting any progress that has been made. But they also had wide popular support for throttling racial and social progress among segments of the American population.
Resistance to any efforts at creating a more equal and just society in the United States was a widely held sentiment among most white Americans. Even among many white Americans who identified with the Democratic Party and as such did not consider themselves racists. What’s worse, these sentiments were also shared among some Black people who were fully indoctrinated into the idea of American meritocracy because they believed they had “made it” to the amorphous group known as the “middle class.” But they also bought into the white supremacist ideology of natural social hierarchy, or what we might call today “classism.” This can be seen in this archive broadcast of a 1963 Young Americans for Freedom presentation featuring a young Black woman making the case for American conservatism as a counter to civil rights legislation.
The legacy of slavery and discriminatory institutions, disparities in credit access, discriminatory housing practices are the historical foundations of this inequality that produced material profits for individuals, and created some of the corporations that still exist today that are participating in this equality bait-and-switch. But modern issues connected to finance capital such as high home prices and mortgage rates and white families benefiting the most from investment and capital gains continue to ensure that this gross and destructive inequality persists. It maintains a class and racial hierarchy where everyone who is working class and poor are exploited for the profit of the rich, and the white working class are conditioned to believe that their enemy are their non-white counterparts, not the corporate bosses stealing their wages.
So Black and other non-white working class and poor people are burdened with the additional pressure of racial antagonism against them from white workers of their class, from white politicians using them as scapegoats for their blanket anti-worker policies, and from Black and other non-white petit bourgeois gatekeepers who uphold the conservative “freedom over racial and social justice” mantra to protect their small corner of comfort. If you want to know how race is inextricably linked with class, in a nutshell, this dynamic shows how it is done.
The swiftness with which corporations that were not required to do anything about their DEI efforts capitulated to the slightest pressure from the right wing in this country should have signalled that these entities were not serious about these efforts at all. If they believed them to be beneficial and vital to representing the so-called diversity of America in their portfolios and staffing decisions, they would have stood by those programs and resisted political bullying to not only maintain them but to make them meaningful and not just public relations window dressing. Had they done so they would probably have earned the eternal support of those marginalized communities they claimed those programs were implemented to help. Instead we see once again that American institutions at every level of society will do only what is politically expedient in relation to their bottom line, and will only change course when they are pushed by external social forces that pose a threat to that bottom line.
Because the Left in the US is so weak at this moment, in large part because of its own internal contradictions around the question of race in the struggle for class solidarity emerging from the same 2020 uprising, there is no threat of an organized mass effort that will negatively affect profits from the Left in response to this rollback. But there is cohesion among the Right, even if their message and points of unity are insane, illogical, ahistorical, and blatant lies. And, they have the power of the presidency behind them. When did the Biden Administration publicly project the power of presidency to advance not even Left policy, but merely real progressive policies that produced tangible material benefits for workers and the poor? Trump’s empty policies are appealing to the mass of white workers because Democrats provided them absolutely nothing, so even a façade of a benefit from Trump looks like something.
The current political climate and the weakening of Left movements through domestic repression, much of which occurred under the imperialist anti-progressive policies of the Biden Administration, pose significant challenges to achieving a more equitable society under this administration and beyond. But Trump’s Executive Order eliminating DEI programs is not the primary contradiction in this situation. Rather, the absurdity of trusting the people who profit from our oppression is the primary contradiction that the end of ineffectual DEI programs has exposed. This proves once again that capitalism cannot reform itself, and that the people cannot achieve justice and liberation through trusting our oppressors to punish and correct themselves.
Jacqueline Luqman is a radical activist based in Washington, D.C.; as well as co-founder of Luqman Nation, an independent Black media outlet that can be found on YouTube (here and here) and Facebook.
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