As the current administration ramps up efforts to stamp out DEI, Steve Nuzum considers what it is and why it matters.
DEI is the latest three-letter acronym anti-public education and anti-diversity efforts have used to define, essentially, everything vaguely bad (whether real or imagined) about efforts to make education, the workplace, and other facets of public life accessible to everyone.
In 2021, one of the current architects of federal anti-DEI efforts, Chris Rufo, famously wrote, “We have successfully frozen their brand—’critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”
Now that same sort of attack has been leveled against DEI. Nuzum considers what that actually stands for (diversity, equity and inclusion), and then turns to the question of what DEI programs actually do.
A long list of popular programs many of us take for granted could be labeled as DEI, and are therefore threatened by efforts to overturn or even outlaw DEI programs). These include everything from accessibility requirements (wheelchair ramps, private rooms for nursing babies, braille, language translators, sign language interpreters), to parental leave, to desegregation efforts.
For example, South Carolina’s House Bill 3927 is written vaguely enough as to threaten essentially any K-12 education program which seeks to provide equal access and accommodations for students based on “race, sex, color, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation”. This could include everything from explicit staff training on diversity, to active efforts to prevent discrimination against students and staff, to student organizations like GSAs (or any other organizations designed by or for specific groups). Even people who are against “DEI” in the abstract are likely to find that the bill, if passed as written, will outlaw or defund programs that they find positive or non-controversial.
And while there may, again, be legitimate critiques about the efficacy of specific programs, or about some approaches to achieving these goals, the worst anti-DEI moves are a thinly-veiled rebuke of societal progress. The rest, as South Carolina’s bill does, on the false assumption that racism can only be legally addressed after the fact, and that any attempt to make everyone feel safe and included in school or in the workplace, regardless of their race, gender, or sexual orientation, is somehow illegal.
You don’t have to support every specific effort labeled as DEI to believe that structural racism, or poverty, or the gender wage gap, or many other real societal problems exist and should be addressed.
In fact, many of the most strident anti-DEI measures demonstrate, effectively, why we do need these programs.
Calling a person a “DEI hire” because they are Black, or LGBTQ+, or a woman, as some of the loudest critics of “DEI” have increasingly done (even going so far as to target predominately Black employees with online lists), shows exactly why society hasn’t moved past its need for programs to address ongoing obstacles to everyone achieving.