When a bridge collapsed in Baltimore in March 2024, Mayor Brandon Scott was derided as a “DEI Mayor,” a reference to diversity, equity, and inclusion. While the wildfires in Los Angeles were still burning earlier this year, some people looked at Karen Bass, the city’s first Black mayor, and Kristin Crowley, its first woman and openly gay fire chief, and blamed DEI for the disaster, with presidential sidekick Elon Musk declaring on his social media site, X, that “DEI means people DIE.” After a plane collision in late January killed sixty-seven people in Washington, D.C., blame was placed on the Federal Aviation Administration’s diversity programs.
Why? What would cause people to automatically think that an individual who is Black or brown or disabled or female did not meet the qualifications for the job?
Moreover, will my identity as a Black first-generation college student from a low-income Haitian household now be seen by some as the sole reason I achieve any morsel of success?
Conniptions over DEI are not really about understanding what causes bad things to happen. They are about using slurs and division to increase power and control. Having diverse workforces and picking the best people for the job are not mutually exclusive.
Malcolm X once said that “racism is like a Cadillac, they bring out a new model every year.” DEI is just another effort to put down people who are not white and male. The corruption of the concept of DEI is similar to that of critical race theory (CRT), defined by the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund as “an academic and legal framework that denotes that systemic racism is part of American society.” And then there’s “woke,” a term originally rooted within the Black community, which merely means being aware of social injustices and systemic inequalities.
Yet these terms have been co-opted, weaponized, and blamed for problems that they have nothing to do with. They’ve become dog whistle slurs hurled at anyone advocating for change. This is a deliberate strategy to undermine our progress and maintain our depressing status quo without having to say the quiet part out loud.
Why say an outright racial slur and be labelled as an outright racist bigot when you can have plausible deniability and be given the benefit of the doubt instead?
When people hear “DEI,” they’re no longer thinking about creating spaces where everyone has a fair shot at success. Instead, they imagine a group of unqualified individuals being handed opportunities that they didn’t earn, all in the name of diversity.
But who gets to decide what being qualified looks like? Why is it so hard to believe that someone who doesn’t possess the usual demographics of people in certain roles may be just as capable, if not more so, than someone who does?
These biases don’t just harm individuals; they harm society as a whole by perpetuating systems that exclude talent, innovation, and unique viewpoints based on appearances and prejudice.
The attacks on DEI are part of a larger pattern of pushback against societal progress. Every movement toward equality, whether it’s civil rights, women’s rights, or LGBTQ+ rights, has been met with resistance.
The White House, echoing many Republicans, claims that diversity is divisive, that it pits people against each other. But the real division comes from refusing to acknowledge the inequalities that exist and our need as a society to address them.
And until we address the biases behind the words, the cycle will continue. Malcolm X was right: “Racism is like a Cadillac, they bring out a new model every year.” But we don’t have to buy what they’re selling.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.