What Anti-DEI Politicos Get Wrong

A previous version of this publication appeared at Forward Kentucky, in response to state-level anti-DEI legislation; this version is updated to include the Trump administration and Project 2025.  Part 1 is available here.

“Diversity” represents all cultural sub-groups, including gay and trans, white and non-white, differently abled (both physically and mentally), religions, classes, ages, and genders.

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Decades ago I worked as a multicultural educator and saw first hand the ability to bring diverse people together and promote understanding, acceptance, and unity.  To see the concept today so maligned is disheartening and deflating.

Anti-DEI rhetoric essentially promotes the elimination of anti-discrimination policies.  Most conservatives I know are not bigots.  But many have bought into the anti-DEI rhetoric propagated by far-right extremist media outlets without realizing its origins in and continued connection to white supremacist ideology.  Let’s examine that:

The broader conspiracy

Investigative journalists at Vox, The New York Times, and others revealed that anti-DEI legislators across the country are pawns in a much greater scheme:  A white supremacist movement to end multiculturalism, exposed in manifestos and other writings from organizations like the Claremont Institute.  These documents describe not only their War on Multiculturalism and all of its sub-genres—CRT, Social Justice, Wokism, plus DEI—but also their legal work to feed sample bill language to legislators in states with conservative super-majorities, creating soldiers for the movement.  Internal documents show the creation of talking points and reframing language to create negative connotations, such as describing “diversity-training concepts” as “divisive/discriminatory concepts”, which we see in the Trump 2025 administration policies.

Nick Confessore, the journalist who broke the story for The New York Times, explained in an NPR interview that the anti-DEI⁺ movement is a direct reaction to both the Black Lives Matter and subsequent Social Justice Movements, which they see as having a deleterious societal influence.  The Claremont Institute refers to BLMers as “corrupt, anti-American grifters.” Furthermore, they believe that public universities are training grounds for these activists.

Their publications explicitly express a white nationalist/supremacist (not substantively different) doctrine as well as condemning “radical” feminists and gay/trans activists.

Here’s a sampling:

“Our society worships the false and pernicious view that diversity is, somehow, our greatest strength.” “Diversity is not a source of strength, but of alienation, hatred, and violence.”  “White Nationalists aim to end multiculturalism” and aspire to “ethnically homogeneous homelands.”  DEI makes people “see racism where none exists” and causes “reverse discrimination” against white people.

Propaganda

All written materials use propaganda techniques extensively, most notably:

• Fear mongering:  “Radical DEI is a mortal and existential threat to our American way of life and will cause the fall of our democracy.”
• Doublespeak & false logic, creating confusion:  “People who talk about race are the real racists.”  “Diversity causes division.”
• Disparaging education:   Accusing higher education, often the target of anti-DEI legislation, of “liberal indoctrination,” because critical thinking and freedom of thought threaten white power.   (Liberal means free thinking.)
• Race Baiting:  Proclaiming that “systemic racism doesn’t exist,” to provoke non-whites.

It’s quite striking, if you read through many of Trump’s Executive Orders, that the language is not remotely neutral;  it is incendiary in tone, full of pejorative adjectives, meant to create a picture of the failing America he wants us to see.  On just one page devoted to ending “illegal DEI,” you will find DEI described as:

Fostering intergroup hostility and authoritarianism, amplifying prejudicial hostility and exacerbating interpersonal conflict, anti-constitutional and deeply demeaning “equity” mandates, illegal, radical, and biased and unlawful employment practices.

An obsolete vision for America          

The antidote to multiculturalism, these groups suggest, is the long-abandoned Melting Pot metaphor, with assimilation at its core; it was rightly abandoned, because it expected relinquishment of one’s cultural identity.  One of America’s worst experiments with assimilation was Indian schools, which resulted in unimaginable heartbreak, little assimilation—and little diminishing of indigenous peoples’ cultural identity nor pride.

Parallel to this aspiration is the truly colorblind society.  This sounds noble, but researchers assert that we are hard-wired to see differences;  it’s what we do with that information that counts.

Another utopian ideal, hammered by the Trump administration as well as Kentucky legislators, is meritocracy, which condemns “conferring privileges based on race” and instead holds that individuals should be judged based upon their merit, not considering their minority status.  The fallacy here is the implication that all sub-groups have been given the same opportunities to achieve equal merit with their wealthier white (mostly male) counterparts, and that racism and bigotry no longer exist, so minority groups don’t need a leg up.  If that were true, systemic racism and achievement gaps would not exist.

Although the notion that “systemic racism doesn’t exist” is popular within some people’s echo chambers, it isn’t based on fact.  There is a plethora of historical documentation, with supporting numerical data, showing that systemic racism has been and still is a barrier to achievement for non-white groups in the United States.  If you’d like to go down that rabbit hole, start with these eye openers: