Are We Responsible for Anti-DEI Overreach?

with John McWhorter

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Donald Trump is making good on his word and eliminating from the federal bureaucracy any program, office, phrase, or symbol that even hints at DEI. He’s cutting funding to external programs and institutions that do the same. The directive has led to cuts to programs that, in my view, needed to go. DEI was and remains a bad idea because it elevates values like “diversity” and “equity” above competency and merit. It may well be a good thing to have a racially diverse staff at the Department of Defense, but not if it comes at the expense of hiring the most competent and qualified people to do the job.

For years, John and I have been saying that progressives lowering standards in the name of racial equity were shooting themselves in the foot. Their insistence that they weren’t lowering standards or that the standards were the problem in the first place harmed the very people they claimed to help. Hiring an under-qualified minority employee for a sinecure in the name of diversity might not do much harm in itself. But everyone else at the company likely knows that person is under-qualified. Meanwhile, qualified minority employees have to deal with the suspicion that they, too, are affirmative action hires. Black students quickly figure out that they don’t need a 4.0 if they want to get into an Ivy League school—a 3.5 will do.

The effects of this kind of policy travel back through the education and professionalization process. If you tell some people —explicitly or implicitly—that they don’t have to work as hard as everyone else, guess what will happen? Most of them won’t work as hard as everyone else. They won’t learn as much. They won’t push themselves. That’s just human nature. Meanwhile, those who could get by with a 3.5 but earn a 4.0 anyway have to deal with the stigma of underachievement conferred upon them by a policy that says all the work that went into that extra 0.5 doesn’t matter.

John and I have always maintained that, in the long run, DEI policies are not good for African Americans. They were necessary for a time, and that time is long gone. We both want an environment where black people can earn their place without stigmatization—that’s why we’ve been so critical of affirmative action.

But a viewer, Stan, wrote in to suggest that, in criticizing DEI and affirmative action, we are somehow complicit in the overreach that has come along with it. In his view, Trump’s allies “have been pushing the idea that any minority with a job might not deserve their position.” He wants to know if we’re concerned that we’ve contributed to the “atmosphere” that enables such a belief.

I understand what Stan means, up to a point. The administration is working with a sledgehammer when a chisel would be more appropriate. The reader cites Trump’s baseless allegation that the pilots in the recent mid-air collision over the Potomac were “DEI hires.” According to several sources, information about Native American Code Talkers has disappeared from government websites. But Code Talkers weren’t “DEI hires.” They were assembled, trained, and deployed because they had unique skills that derived from their culture and language, not because they added to the military’s “diversity.” We could list other eye-rolling examples.

That has nothing to do with our critique of DEI. It’s wrongheaded, as is anyone who would pervert our critique in order to justify firing minorities simply because they’re minorities. That’s just another, cruder stigma, which is what John and I were criticizing in the first place. If our words and ideas are being used to fire minorities because they’re minorities—and I seriously doubt anyone in the Trump administration is taking their cues from us specifically—then they’re being misused, misunderstood, and misappropriated. But I’m not going to back away from my valid criticisms because some government functionaries are using them as cover. Contest the stigma where you find it, wherever it comes from, left or right, woke or MAGA.

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