I really hate D.E.I. My grandmother says never to use that word because Christian people don’t hold hate in their hearts. I agree with her, so let me rephrase: I dislike D.E.I. I distrust D.E.I. It represents, to me, a human failing on a massive cultural scale.
D.E.I. is a lawyerly solution to a human problem. My father used to say, “Once the lawyers get involved, then you’ve already lost. Nobody makes any money but them.” He’s right, of course; once things get to the point where lawyers have to tell you to do things you know you should do anyway, then you’ve failed.
D.E.I. stands for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. It’s the evolved form of “affirmative action.” “Affirmative Action” is a phrase from a 1961 executive order signed by John Kennedy, ordering government contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated fairly during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin,” That phrase, “race, creed, color, or national origin” became part of the American lexicon for the next sixty-five years. It would soon add “gender and ability” to the concept, and there have been attempts to add “sexual orientation” to it, but there are debates in the LGBTQ community about whether or not to add sexuality to people’s legal description.
Concerns about the racial divide in the Western World first surfaced in the years following World War One. The center of this cultural revolution was not the United States but Paris. Interrupted by the rise of fascism and an invasion from the National Republic of Germany, under control by the Nazi party, but returned with strength when Paris was again liberated.
Free of the oppression they felt in their native United States, writers like James Baldwin, Richard Wright, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Colson Whitehead, and musicians like Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, and Sidney Bechet found a freedom of expression they never imagined before. From their pens flowed letters home that were read by millions and fomented one of American history's most influential philosophical and moral evolutions.
Initially, only the Republican Party embraced these ideas. Eisenhower signed Executive Order 9981, effectively desegregating the military. He then sent federal troops to Arkansas to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Initially, the Democrat Party resisted the movement for fear of alienating their Southern members, but with the election of John Kennedy, all that would change.
Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 gave America a goal but no path to get there. After Kennedy’s death, Lyndon Johnson continued with Executive Order 11246, essentially replicating Kennedy’s order, and then repeated that language in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Again, the President’s office laid out a goal but not a path to get there. Facing a South absolutely determined not to change at all on the issue of race, the path became more important than the goal, but it would yet be a while before we would take it on.
Running against Richard Nixon after Johnson dropped out of the race, Hubert Humphreys promised that quotas would not be used in his civil rights agenda. The spectre of racial quotas was one of the most common criticism of the Democratic Party’s agenda on race. It proposed a system of quotas be used for hiring and student admissions until racial statistics in employee pools and student bodies match the racial makeup in the communities they serve.
I can’t imagine a more lawyerly solution. It offers clear goals and a clear path to get there, but it completely ignores questions of things like fitness for the position and turning away qualified white applicants because their quota is filled.
Humphreys lost, and Nixon won. How that happened is a matter of debate, even today. Quotas as a solution to the Civil Rights Act requirements weren’t enacted until Nixon took office. Nixon made noises against the idea but never took action.
In 1970, when the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Alexander v. Holmes County, the Nixon Justice Department gave the Department of Health Education and Welfare control of the Jackson Mississippi School District to enact racial integration “immediately” rather than “with all due haste.”
Lawyers sent by the Department of Health Education and Welfare (H.E.W.) never used the words “quota,” but they set up a system where they redrew educational maps and devised a system of bussing, moving white and black students around the map from school to school until every school reached a racial mix that matched the city.
They never had a chance; pretty soon, every white person who could afford it either moved their children to still-segregated private schools or moved their homes to whiter cities like Pearl or Madison.
I argued with a fella this weekend. He was convinced that quotas were still the scourge of the American Political landscape. I tried to tell him they were ruled unconstitutional in 1978, but he said it was fake news.
D.E.I. arose as a way to try to achieve Kennedy’s dream of racial equality without violating anybody’s civil rights. It ranged from effective but challenging civil rights issues on several points to completely ineffective.
There’s a bit of a loggerhead here. You won’t find many people willing to say they don’t believe in the idea of racial equality regarding hiring, spending, and education. Still, there are massive disagreements over how to accomplish this.
Some people don’t believe in racial equality. They don’t much care what happens to non-whites or any of the other people described in Kennedy’s proclamation, but they’ve learned not to say so, making “do nothing” their favorite option.
D.E.I. happened because we failed as a culture. Everybody in America knew we shouldn’t judge or exclude people based on their race, gender, religion, or ability, but we failed to do it, so the lawyers stepped in to try and find ways to force us to.
After several drinks loosened his resolve, Republic Operative Lee Atwater admitted the thing everybody knew, but nobody owned up to. The Republican party learned using the old language of racial hatred would hurt them, so they developed a system of using replacement words. A dog whistle makes a sound only dogs can hear. Dog Whistle Words use racist language in a way that only other racists can hear. Atwater admitted it was part of the republican strategy.
Radio, television, and now the internet have made Americans a race of people who can only think a few seconds at a time. Since you still have to get people to vote, both parties have resorted to using memes, which are tiny bits of information that represent much larger ideas. It becomes a system that is not unlike Russian Nesting Dolls, where you eventually get to the nut at the center, but you have to go through several iterations to do it.
Atwater said what he said in 1981, so you know the idea had been in action for at least fifteen years before that. Dog Whistle politics have been part of America since I grew out of diapers.
The level of vitriol between the parties has increased in the past ten years. I have many ideas about how this happened, but only yours matters here. In this era of increased aggression, there are plenty of people now saying the quiet part out loud.
“You know what D.E.I. means, don’t ya? It means Didn’t Earn It.” The first time I saw that was on Twitter, which went from being pretty rambunctious to an absolute cesspool. Elon Musk admitted in an interview recently that he did it because his child was trans, and he felt betrayed. I wish that were something I made up.
Whatever D.E.I. initially represented, it has become a dog whistle for pretty much any word you can think of for uppity negros being handed things they didn’t deserve.
Kamala Harris, even though she was the Vice President of the United States, was always a bit of a sideshow in the war between the parties. Their main targets remained Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton, even with Joe Biden as president.
More and more, the GOP's talking point is that Harris achieved her position through D.E.I. With her being Indian, African, AND Female, their accusations might make sense, but—if you look at her career, they don’t.
Harris attended Howard University, a Historically Black University. She then applied to Ivy League law schools but was turned down. Her Law Degree came from UC’s San Francisco campus, a state school.
After graduating from law school in 1990, Harris moved from one elected position to another. She first ran for office in 2004. Whatever positions she had been appointed in her career, she soon stepped up to the big leagues and began winning elections to get new jobs.
Ironically, even though Kamala Harris didn’t receive benefits from Affirmative Action or D.E.I., Clarance Thomas, who spent his life fighting Affirmative Action, was only admitted to Yale after it had enacted a 10% quota on non-white admissions. He became part of that ten percent.
I’d like to believe that people like Kennedy, Johnson, Regan, or Carter could lead us to do what we already know we should about equality in America without bringing in teams of lawyers to devise a plan that forces it, but we’re not there yet.
Once lawyers get involved, nobody is gonna be happy with the result. That’s where we are now. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion make a great slogan, but once you try to boil it down to a plan, you’re gonna start pissing people off, and right now, people are pissed off.
When I was a student, I spent a great deal of time in the principal's office because nobody knew how to deal with the brokenness that came with my learning disability. Disciplining a broken student almost never produces the results you want. It happens because “something must be done.”
That’s what happened in America. We knew we had a problem. We knew we had to fix it—but nobody knew how, so we brought in the lawyers and the bureaucrats, and they gave us an imperfect solution to a very painful problem.
I’m not ready to give up on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as a goal. I think most Americans feel the same way. Translating that goal into a plan is where things break down. We can either step up and do the hard work ourselves or the lawyers can step in and give us their vision of a plan. The choice is yours.
