Q&A: A Trump-Endorsed DEI Program

with John McWhorter

Back in November of last year, after months of declaring my dissatisfaction with both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, I confessed that I was excited about Trump’s win. The Democratic establishment got a dose of reality, as I saw it. I shared some of Trump’s priorities—like border security and DEI—and I was looking forward to seeing him shake things up.

That appears to be one of those statements I’ll have to defend or explain every so often, possibly forever. So be it. In my latest Q&A episode with John McWhorter, subscriber Amy asks if Trump’s scorched earth approach to any program, organization, or individual that even hints at a commitment to identity politics—as he conceives them—has made me reconsider my enthusiasm. After all, didn’t I applaud the end of affirmative action? And haven’t I been a long-time opponent of identity politics?

As I reconfirm in this clip, yes, I’ve opposed affirmative action, and I agree with the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions. And yes, I think overcommitting to identity politics at the expense of all other values was a massive mistake on the part of progressives, one that’s had disastrous consequences.

But the reason I was so opposed to identity politics was not because I think we have nothing to learn from the serious study of identity, including racial identity. Rather, I objected to the use of identity politics as a form of coercive power disguised as a set of moral and ethical imperatives, one that insulated its wielders from legitimate criticism and debate by insisting on a puritanical and unbending acceptance of a set of a priori claims about historical violence, racism, empire, and economics. Those who accept the claims—“capitalism is evil,” “America’s least defensible actions delegitimize the democratic project,” “African Americans are still living under a Jim Crow regime,” and so on—are on the side of good and require no further defense of their precepts. Those who oppose or even question the claims are beneath contempt. There’s no point arguing with them—chase them out of the public square.

That’s raw power, not intellectual inquiry. It perverts the laudable desires that, I believe, most people feel: to do good, to defend the defenseless, to act righteously. Turning those impulses into proxies for the accumulation and misuse of unquestioned institutional power, whereby administrative functionaries determine who can say what, was the wrong turn identity politics took. That is what I mean when I say I’ve opposed identity politics—I oppose the politics (which is power in practice), not identity.

So I had hopes that the Trump administration would unlatch the two terms and block the avenues through which power attached itself to the legitimate study and debate around issues of identity. That would have freed up a stymied debate and, I hoped, allowed us to communicate with each other without fear of cancelation or harassment. Instead, I’ve seen the administration turn that power toward its own ends. As soon as Trump assumed the presidency, his administration began using an ostensible opposition to antisemitism to punish, fire, deport, and harass anyone it deemed to have the wrong position on its own a priori claims about Israel. Protesters, speakers, academics, and students with legitimate criticisms of Israel’s actions were targeted—and are still being targeted—in the name of protecting Jews and fighting antisemitism.

Protecting Jews and fighting antisemitism are laudable and necessary goals. When Jews are harmed by or threatened with antisemitic attacks, the full force of the law should be brought to bear on the assailants. But the message from the administration is clear: Criticize Israel on a college campus, and we’ll brand you an antisemite, or worse. Those in favor of this strategy say it is necessary to ensure the safety of Jews, and especially of Jewish students. Which is to say that voicing the “wrong” narrative about the State of Israel’s siege of Gaza equates to a kind of violence exercised against all Jewish people who hear it.

Does any of this sound familiar? Does it ring a bell at all? What can you call it but identity politics by another name? The insidious linkage between identity and power remains intact. I seem to recall that it was exactly this sort of specious equation between speech and violence that, when it was expounded by black social justice warriors, drew the ire of purportedly anti-woke defenders of conservative free speech.

And they were right! I was one of them! But now too many of those same self-described free speech advocates defend the suppression and punishment of critics of Israel. I’ve argued that this mode of operation would do the very opposite of what it claimed to do: protect supposedly vulnerable classes of people. I said there would be a backlash, and that those misusing their institutional power to intimidate others into silence were going to reap the whirlwind.

Well, the whirlwind has arrived, and it shows no sign of slowing. I am terrified by the prospect of a truly insurgent antisemitism animated not by legitimate criticism of a sovereign state’s military actions but by the feeling that they’re being prevented from saying anything at all against Israel. The more legitimate criticism is suppressed, the more extreme the pushback against it will become. Those of us who are friends of the Jewish people—not to mention Jews themselves—have much to worry about. Because identity politics is alive and well. It simply has another name.

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GLENN LOURY: This next question is from Amy. She says,

Glenn, I remember after Trump’s election you were practically giddy about Trump getting rid of DEI. Now that how Trump plans to get rid of DEI is clear—from eliminating environmental justice reviews, to cutting funding on programs that research medical issues in groups (women, blacks, Hispanics, etc.) historically under-represented in research but with higher incidence of poor outcomes, to defunding the agency that ensures equitable access to libraries and museums in rural/intercity areas (to name a few that I have heard of)—are you feeling differently?

I’m curious if you now see that there were some positive elements of DEI, and that super-woke overreach perhaps just metaphorically blotted out the sun? Or is this a necessary correction, even if it may be another overcorrection?

It's a good question. Yeah. Amy, I have to confess it is a really good question. This is similar to something that came up I think, John, when you and I met face to face a week ago at Brown University for a program that has been published as an episode of The Glenn Show, maybe the most recent.

I do have some regret about my giddiness, about the getting rid of DEI. Because I think your last sentence—it's a necessary correction, but another overcorrection—is apt. One thing I'd say is some of my giddiness about getting rid of DEI had to do with my dislike for racial preferential affirmative action. I could go on for a long time about why I dislike it. And part of the reason I dislike it is that it's unfair to the groups that are disfavored by the preferential policies. And part of the reason I dislike racial preferential affirmative action is that it creates bad incentives for African Americans to achieve on the merits.

And part of the reason I dislike it is because it debases the currency of elite institutions, which should be, in the first instance, meritocracy. Part of the reason I dislike it is because it builds in a mid-late-twentieth century reaction to a long history of racial discrimination into the forward-looking twenty-first century and makes permanent a bandaid response. I call it a distraction from the real problem, which is developing African American capacities to compete on the merits.

It's condescending. It's humiliating to be thought of as a beneficiary of preferential treatment just on the basis of your skin color, and so on. I could go on. I didn't like affirmative action. I don't like affirmative action. I ain't apologizing for not liking affirmative action.

So I was happy to see the Supreme Court, in 2023, find as it did in the Student for Fair Admissions case. I'm sympathetic to the plight of the Asians who were rejected at Harvard because they were assessed as having not especially distinguished personality scores, even though their test scores on the academic merits were off the charts, and so on.

And I don't want to see my people patronized—that is, African American people patronized—by being presumed not to be able to perform according to the standards that everybody else is expected to perform according to, merely in virtue of the fact of descending from African enslaved persons here in the United States from 150 years ago. So I didn't like and I don't like affirmative action.

Thus, I was happy to see the triumph at the polling place of someone who also doesn't like affirmative action. However—and I'll be brief, John—I can distinguish between that on the one hand and not liking any consideration of the sensibilities of people based upon their ethnic, racial, sexual orientation or preference, gender identities. To not like affirmative action—preferential treatment, lower meritocratic standard for a favored group—is one thing. To not care about whether or not a person comes into my midst in these institutions with a set of concerns, identities, orientations and interests, affiliations and narratives, and to just ignore that. No black history month. No concern about the sensitivities of people and whatnot is another.

And the reason I know that those things are not the same thing is from another part of the Trump administration's anti-DEI zealotry, which is the combat against antisemitism and on behalf of the sensibilities of Jewish students who don't want to be made to feel less-than in an institution because of some people's attitudes about Zionism or about Israel or whatever. And the idea of an anti-antisemitism crusade is in fact a kind of—hold onto your seat there, John—DEI-in-spirit initiative on behalf of the legitimate purpose of the concern about the identities of our Jewish members of our community.

So I think you do indeed overcorrect when you try to wipe the slate clean of any programmatic reference to anybody's identity based upon race gender sexual orientation or whatever. In the spirit of being against DEI, you do overreact. It's far more than enforcing meritocracy and getting rid of special preferences for people based upon their race. It's in effect ignoring their identities, and you're not prepared to ignore everybody's identities, to wit, the Jewish students to whom I've referred just a moment ago

And there's a good reason why you're not prepared to ignore everybody's identity. Because identities are a really important part of the person, and we're dealing with the whole person when we invite them into the university community. That's my long speech, John.

JOHN MCWHORTER: I'm gonna leave you there, because I agree with most of it, and I gave an answer to a similar question when we did our Providence episode. So I think we can move on. Basically what you said.

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