DEI was Built to Fail

Staying woke is more important than ever

Fascism places emotion over reason. Words are to become just tools to achieve the vision of the Leader. In our post-truth world, this takes the very special form of the inversion of meaning: fascists call other people "fascists" and antisemites call other people "antisemites." This is taking place right now, in the United States, before our eyes, at the highest levels of our government.”

So wrote Timothy Snyder, one of our foremost authorities on fascism, in his newsletter, recently. It immediately made me flash back to the fall of 2014. I was a graduate student talking to an undergraduate student we’ll call Jay. Jay and I were discussing the intersection of racism and higher education from the student perspective. We landed on what was still a new name for an old thing: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI. While DEI had been around long enough to generate its own backlash, it was just the latest coinage for efforts to address racial and cultural inequality, from schools to society at large. I was old enough to know that while this was new to Jay, I had lived through at least a couple of previous iterations of this culture war; backlash against anti-discrimination (whatever its name du jour) is as common as apple pie.

That said, in the kinds of campus contexts I was embedded in, I recognized an unusual kind of sprawl to the DEI “era.” There seemed to be an over-reliance on interpersonal interactions, microaggressions, implicit bias—essentially, individuated ills to be fixed by individuated correctives—and an under-reliance on the kind of education people needed: evidence-based insights about the history and contemporary reality of inequality in the U.S. Already, people were painting a picture of DEI as a collection of useless trainings meant mostly to make White people feel bad or to shame anyone who didn’t already know the “right” answers. Stories circulated about excessive tone and identity policing in so-called progressive campuses and organizations. People like Jay had stories. Jay’s bad DEI story was one I heard students recount many times: the horrible DEI experience during New Student Orientation. In Jay’s case, a peer facilitator clumsily silenced him during discussion based on his being “a White man.” This was despite the fact that Jay was one of the first-year students who had voluntarily joined programming designed to build multiracial and multicultural understanding during Orientation. Jay was incensed this had happened “in a supposedly safe circle she sat us in, precisely so we could be ourselves and open up.” He also felt vulnerable as a brand-new student in a new institution, just looking to connect with like-minded peers. “I thought, whoa, this is so unfair—I just got here, I don’t know anyone, you know? No one here knows me… Yeah… it was downhill from there.” Then Jay said something I have remembered often since 2014:

“The day the right wing understands that rather than try to respond, they could just turn this vocabulary completely against us, we’re doomed.”

Title page of a transcript of the last New Year’s speech delivered by Amilcar Cabral in 1973, the year he was assassinated. It reads roughly, “more thinking so as to act better, more action so as to think better.”

DEI Was Built to Fail

I did not at the time understand Jay to be prophesizing the last 5 years of so, but I shared his concern about the shaky ground on which DEI. But for different reasons. I thought we were in trouble because DEI was a set-up, or as I told him, it was“built to fail.”

To explain this, I must go back to a most illustrious ancestor, Derrick Bell. Bell wrote extensively on what he considered the persistent problem of interest convergence. Bell argued that all civil rights gains and social justice advancements for Black people only happened when the policies also benefitted White people. Put in lay terms, every gain oppressed people make is only allowed when it benefits the dominant group in the process. For an admittedly simplistic illustration: it benefitted Target to have culturally-specific product lines and be a visibly woke brand but then… it didn’t anymore so all those products are gone. Too bad for the actual people who actually needed the products.

The accuracy of his analysis is clear in the emergence of what was once known as the diversity rationale in higher education. The rationale, first introduced by Justice Powell in the Bakke (1978) affirmative action case, holds that diversifying a student body would bring overall educational and cognitive benefits to all students, augmenting the quality of education by incorporating diverse perspectives. Successful affirmative action cases between Bakke (1978) and the early aughts relied on extensive social scientific evidence supporting this rationale. Rather than plainly argue for racial reparations in a climate that was increasingly hostile to the idea, this was, we were told, a strategic pivot: away from a direct, historic, and clear anti-racism and repair, and towards the more palatable idea of the benefits of “diversity.”

The first moment I heard of the diversity rationale, I thought, to use Jay’s phrase, “we’re doomed.” It seemed obvious to me that if we argue that the main incentive to care about the well-being and access of marginalized groups is that it benefits the dominant group, the day will come when the dominant group will say, We’re good on diversity. The current backlash to racial progress—disproportionately violent, nasty, and cowardly, as all such backlashes have been, is not happening because DEI went too far. The policies now deemed illegal and discriminatory sought merely to ensure job announcements reached all communities, college recruiters visited all high schools, and interviewers didn’t disqualify candidates based on braids, accents, ability, gender or sexuality. These policies aimed only to diversify organizations and to nudge organizations with majority people of color staff to start having more people of color in leadership. For these reasonable attempts at fairness—none proportionate to the discriminatory harm they were meant to undo, we are being beaten back to pre-Civil Rights Act conditions. We are being told that words describing who we are and how we’ve lived are “illegal.” No, the backlash is not happening because DEI went too far, it is happening because we never go far enough.

To Go Far Enough

“America is not unique in its sins as a country. We are not unique in our evils. I think where we may be singular is our refusal to acknowledge them, and the legends and myths we tell about our inherent goodness, to hide and cover and conceal, so that we can maintain a kind of willful ignorance that protects our innocence.” —Eddie Glaude, MSNBC, 2020

Before we could go far enough, they successfully flipped the script, like my friend Jay predicted. Let me remind us that the Black Lives Matter movement achieved an incredible feat of public pedagogy between its emergence after Trayvon Martin’s murder (2012), the first uprisings (2014-2015), and the global protests of 2020 in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Before that, the event that rattled white supremacy’s cage was the election, through a broad multiracial and multigenerational coalition, of a Black person to the presidency.

By the start of the 21st century, the U.S. population showed signs of increasing racial literacy—the ability to read and comprehend how racism moves through one’s life and world, and to combat it. Racial literacy is just a flavor of critical thinking; critical thinking is just a name for the ability to decipher how, in any society, all is not what it seems. In that decade-long mass education effort that Black activists and their allies conducted, we saw how knowing more and thinking more accurately about racism moved a majority of people living in the U.S. (and in some instances, all over the world) to want to act better, or at least, act differently. That connection between better understanding and better behavior is the problem that the DEI backlash, from its fits and starts over a decade ago to its apotheosis these days, is trying to make go away.

As long as racism has existed, people’s critical thinking has always been the problem it has tried to make go away. Racists have never won an argument fair and square. Throughout history they have attacked knowledge, information, and critical thinking (remember the demonization of critical race theory?). They’ve attacked schools, universities, and libraries. They’ve banned books. This attack is not incidental; it is foundational. Their onslaught on the people, communities, and institutions where we teach and learn will not relent—nor will their attack on the press. They know that an informed and conscious population cannot be dominated. The work, to paraphrase Amílcar Cabral, "of thinking better to act better, and acting better to think better,” is the most crucial work and the hardest work.