DEI: A Bumpy Road Ahead

As we ease into the new year, all of America, well at least 51% of us are excited about the changes which may be made as a result of a new national administration coming into power on January 20^th. The election came down, in my view, to “change” vs. “more of the same”, and not to simplify the results, it appeared that enough people were willing to look past the obvious deficiencies of Donald Trump, to give what we think his ideas are, a chance.

Most urgently, Americans are looking for a change at the southern border, stopping inflation, lowering crime, and conquering Greenland (I made that up). However, I would suggest that before Greenland, another simmering cultural issue is in play that may have more of an effect on how we live with each other in this society. That issue would be racism or in its current form, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

We, white and Asian folk, have been told over the last few years that we are all racists (and bad). We have been given the opportunity by our betters, the DEI consultants and trainers, to confess our racism sins or if we deny it, claiming to be color blind, we are told that these denials serve as conclusive proof that we are certainly racists; thereby requiring more DEI education and training to convince us of our true racist nature which hopefully will lead to us confessing our racist sins putting us on the path to redemption and reparations.

The DEI movement began in our universities, expanded into the entertainment industry and then into secondary and primary education. The business community got on board believing it was what their customers and elite society demanded. With the murder of George Floyd, the pendulum swung hard left as we were all told that Black Lives Matter but canceled if we dared to suggest that All Lives Matter. Progressive state and local governments came on board, and with the election of Joe Biden, DEI protagonists went into full ramming speed mode.

On “Day 1” Biden issued Executive Order 13985 “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government” and Executive Order 13988, “Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation.” On February 4, 2021, he followed up with a National Security Memorandum “Revitalizing American Foreign Policy and National Security Workforce Institutions and Partnerships” and Executive Order 14020 on March 8, 2021, “Establishment of the White House Gender Policy Council”. Finally on June 25^th, 2021, another Executive Order was issued on “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce.”

These and other Executive Orders, memorandums, regulations, guidance letters and not so gentle nudges, established race, ethnic, gender and sexual orientation policies that were designed to create equal results for individuals based on their skin color, gender or sexual preference regardless of merit. They infused a race, gender, sexual orientation victim consciousness throughout all federal institutions and every aspect of human interaction. With the federal government going all in on reverse racism and environmental justice theology, we moved to an era which included “racist” highways where infrastructure decisions were based on perceived past racial injustices, to newly designated disadvantaged communities all tied to the amount of melanin in our skins.

For a few years, we were cowed by DEI bullying and canceling and just “took it” sitting through DEI briefings and hectoring. A misworded tweet, email, casual remark or joke could end up with a person being “canceled” with a job termination or shunned by woke members of society. Self-described victimized groups secured promotions, college positions, and roles in every TV commercial to the exclusion of non-victimized groups. Colleges began developing safe racial spaces, segregated dorms, and segregated graduation ceremonies. But as the DEI industry did not see enough “progress”, or as I believe, they didn’t have anything else better to do, they created new victimized groups and tightened the screws on employers, workers, parents, comedians or anyone who would oppose their “we are better than you” philosophical admonitions.

Racism and sexism became more prominent and blatant when Biden announced during the 2020 Presidential campaign that he would only consider and then selected a black woman for the position of Vice President, the person one heartbeat away from becoming the most powerful person on earth, and then announced, that he would only consider a black woman for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

As more and more people were canceled, lost jobs and were denied positions in our colleges, trouble was bubbling under the surface. Philosophical questions were being raised by normal people as to whether we were a nation that fostered equal opportunity or equity (equality of result), and what mattered more, work, merit or skin color?

In April 2023, Dylan Mulvaney, a trans Tik Tok influencer, cut an ad for Bud Light to appeal to the trans community in an attempt by Budweiser to move away from “fratty” and “out of touch humor”, i.e. the majority of Bud Light drinkers. The public response was negative and fierce, far in excess of what one would think would be to a stupid ad. Sales of Bud Light dropped 23% and the stock price went down 20% causing a drop in market capitalization of $26 billion. Bud Light, which had been the number one beer for a number of years, lost its place to Modelo and has not recovered.

Then in June of 2023, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court confirmed what most people already knew that Harvard, the premier Ivy league school, had discriminated against Asian kids who had worked hard, studied and played by the rules in order to favor others with a different skin color, and that this conduct was illegal. By this time, the term “woke” which arose on by the left as a positive term recognizing tolerant enlightenment had morphed into a societal slur signifying petty intolerant racists, even as the left tried to portray themselves as “good racists”.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump made DEI a campaign issue vowing to remove it from the federal government. The argument for its elimination was not only for the return to equal opportunity and merit rather than equal results and skin color, but there was a monetary component as well. Estimates in 2022 were that the DEI industry had exploded to a $9.4 billion affair; estimated to grow to $24.3 billion by 2030. As the country suffered through inflation and the national debt approached $36 trillion, state and local budgets were also tight, and university tuition was out of control. As an example, the University of Michigan has 241 employees and spent $250 million on DEI since 2016. As a result, elimination of DEI was not only an attractive social policy but a fiscally conservative one too. America had had enough.

On “Day 1” of Trump’s presidential term, he issued two Executive Orders (among a whole bunch of others). The first banned DEI throughout the federal government including DEI of all federal contractors, subcontractors and grantees. The same financial bribery that was used to expand DEI requiring among other things diversity statements for all job promotions and projects throughout all government contractors was now being used to eliminate it. This is the same technique that has been used by governments for time immemorial to use taxpayer money to foster social goals. Want our money? You have to play by our rules.

A number of corporations including Walmart, Meta, Ford, John Deere and Target, fearing litigation or concluding that non-merit-based employment practices were just not a good idea backed away from their DEI programs which doesn’t necessarily mean they are all gone. Let us be under no illusions that governments, corporations or educational institutions will abolish DEI and convert to nondiscriminatory color-blind equal opportunity practices as required by the anti-discrimination acts, the Constitution or current cultural views which support a color-blind society over a race conscious one by 70%-20% margin (with the other 10% buried in their Tic Tok accounts). As it took years to desegregate the deep south and get those communities to comply with the civil rights acts, it won’t be easy to root out all of the DEI discrimination that has infiltrated government, business, education, and entertainment.

For example, the Iowa state legislature previously banned DEI in its public colleges only to find out that not only was the former DEI head merely transferred to HR, but that the University of Iowa medical school was keeping it’s DEI practices claiming it had to maintain DEI because it did not want to lose its accreditation. The accreditation association required DEI to be “considered” in order to achieve accreditation. This non accreditation threat has delayed passage of DEI bans in Tennessee and Missouri.

Then there is the name game. As the bureaucracy prepared to avoid the anticipated anti-DEI regulations from the Trump administration, some DEI offices had been given new generic names like “community outreach”. The University of Colorado changed the name of its DEI office to the “Office of Compatibility” (whatever the hell that means) which raises another question of do they have such little respect for us that they think we would be so stupid as to miss this? Summarizing this concept, even before the Executive Orders were issued, Raven Soloman, CEO of Raven Soloman Enterprises, a DEI education and consulting firm has said,” The names may change but diversity, equity, and inclusion work is here to stay.”

Also let us remember as stated above, that with the termination of DEI and all of its programs, a lot of money (billions) will not be available for the current DEI industry and its employees. These are people who have mortgages, car payments and kids in overpriced schools, and they will not take losing their jobs lying down. It’s not like all of the black and gender studies majors will have another place to be employed. There are only so many barista jobs to go around. Also, to be fair, there are a substantial number of people in the DEI movement that actually believe in what they have been pedaling, that whites are inherently racist and jobs, student slots and wealth needs to be forcibly redistributed to persons of color as well as the LGBTQA2+ community.

There is still a battle to be fought, and the question of can we achieve a non-racial society where one day we will live in a nation where we will not be judged by the color of our skin but by the content of our character is yet to be settled.

Apparently, Trump has been reading the same stuff that I have, and these Trump Executive Orders are not mere aspirational goals and prescriptions to achieve a non-racial merit-based society sometime in the utopian future. The orders seek to counter the name change game by terminating all: “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”

The Order requires all federal agencies to put all DEI staff on paid administrative leave immediately, getting them out of the workplace ASAP with ultimate layoffs to be decided later. All DEI websites were to be taken down by 5 pm that day. In addition, a federal hiring freeze was instituted which would prevent DEI employees from reappearing elsewhere in the federal bureaucracy. In case anyone thought there was any ambiguity from these directives, notices went out to government agencies where employees were warned that the agency, DHS in this case, was aware of the efforts of some government employees to disguise the DEI programs by using “coded or imprecise language,” and setting up a network of that instructed “anyone aware of a change in contract or personnel position description change made since Election Day to report it within 10 days” assuring whistleblowers that “there will be no adverse consequences for timely reporting this information” but then revealing a stick… “However, failure to report this information within 10 days will result in adverse consequences.” Wow!! This shows this initiative is not just about DEI, but the anticipation by the Trump administration that the federal bureaucracy will resist and frustrate its programs and initiatives.

Of course, the DEI race based, gender based, disability-based structure is not limited to the federal government practices alone. The Executive Order also created goals for administrative agencies to identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations of publicly traded corporations, large non-profit-associations, or foundations with assets of $500 million or more, state and local bar and medical associations, and institutions of higher education with endowments over $1 billion, or in other words, we are coming after you.

Additionally, focusing on academia, the source and most entrenched of DEI institutions, the Executive Order directs that within 120 days the Attorney General and Secretary of Education jointly issue guidance to all State and local educational agencies that receive federal funds, (notice the money again) as well as all institutions of higher education that receive Federal grants or participate in the Federal student loan assistance program (which is just about everybody) regarding the measures and practices required to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc, v. Harvard which many universities have currently either ignored or were trying to find ways to avoid. In the last administration, days after the Students for Fair Admissions case came out, the third ranking member of the Justice Department wrote a letter to Harvard actually suggesting how universities could manage student diversity by getting around the Supreme Court decision. Looks like those days are over.

The pendulum, favoring the woke/DEI/CRT/equity over equality movement based on skin color, moved quickly and radically after the George Floyd riots and the Biden race-based policies of his administration. The Trump administration as evidenced by his Executive Orders and their implementation tells us that the pendulum is snapping back, fast. Rapid changes whether in the weather, revolution, or a change of administration always cause conflict, uncertainty, and distress. In the days and months ahead, we are in for a bumpy ride, and we will be activists or witnesses to how it will all turn out. Put on your seat belts!