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Corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion rhetoric has never counted as a meaningful step toward justice. “Identity politics” can be wielded in counterproductive ways. And some performatively “woke” people would do well to take an occasional nap. But whatever criticism “DEI” deserves, it’s got nothing to do with the crackdown coming out of the White House.
Since the inauguration, President Donald Trump has—in the name of banning “DEI”—forced federal agencies to gut labor and antidiscrimination protections across the entire government. He has directed agencies to ban books and cultural heritage months, reject grant applications, scrub thousands of government webpages of innocuous words like “equity” and “gender,” and remove visible honors or recognition for women and people of color in federal buildings. He has also directed the attorney general to threaten private companies that have DEI initiatives, creating a panic even outside of organizations that get federal funding.
At the same time, his administration has elevated candidates with scant qualifications to positions of power across the federal bureaucracy. (Many of them have very active disqualifications.) And Trump has fired women and Black officers from senior positions, including in the military, where he fired the Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to replace him with a white retired general, who is both significantly less qualified for the job by military standards and ineligible for the role by those same military standards.
That this is all being done in the name of “merit-based opportunity,” as Trump’s executive order put it, is patently absurd. But it’s also a very clever political trick.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are, at their simplest, practices that aim to make fairness and meritocracy possible in systems that have never attempted either. (In the U.S., before these practices existed, merit was one of the least important qualifications for societal advancement.) For much of the 20th century, diversity and inclusion efforts were the work of patient incrementalists who simply sought to standardize education opportunities and hiring practices.
But after 2020, DEI terminology took on a new valence. As a result of George Floyd’s murder, people around the world rose up against the police terror and violence to which they had been subjected for hundreds of years. The response from those in power was immediate. The World Bank established a “task force on racism.” Corporations rushed to hire DEI consultants who could help them pivot or diversify. Government agencies also worked to meet the moment; the CIA produced a dozen bizarre recruitment videos reaching out to multiple identity groups, including queer and Indigenous people.
Some of this work was well-intentioned. Some of it resulted in meaningful change. But there is no denying that it was also shot through with empty lip service—that on many levels, elite institutions and powerful organizations were performing symbolic identity politics to bolster their reputations without enacting meaningful material reforms. Many efforts were made to rebrand, but not replace, existing institutions. The new initiatives wrapped corporate entities in a shawl of faux progressivism, donned to placate societal demands for civil rights, even while these same entities continued to oppose unionization and other efforts to meaningfully empower the workers whose diversity they were so eager to acknowledge.
But the tides have shifted. In 2020, after police violently put down a protest in downtown Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser renamed that block “Black Lives Matter Plaza” and had those words painted on the pavement—a show of defiance to Trump during his first term. Now in 2025, Bowser has backtracked, announcing that Black Lives Matter Plaza will be no more. Corporations across the country began reversing course on their DEI-specific programming and commitments even before Trump took office again. In the wake of these hastily applied—and quickly abandoned—initiatives, all that was left, for so many, was the hollow perception that “DEI” itself was bullshit. And that concessions to “identity” were nothing but self-satisfied branding exercises and gatekeeping tools of the elite.
Though the higher education system in the United States is older than the country itself—Harvard first opened its doors to students more than a century before the 1776 American Revolution—women were still not able to earn bachelor’s degrees for the better part of the century that followed the founding. The admission criteria built up over the 20th century responded, on the whole, less to the question of how to maximize the merit of the admitted class of students than to the problem of, say, limiting the number of Jewish students in each class.
Ruby Bridges and her peers required extraordinary interventions, including armed federal agent escorts through violent mobs, just to succeed in attending newly racially integrated grade schools in the Jim Crow South. Meanwhile, John F. Kennedy, known for mediocre grades, famously penned a single paragraph to find himself at Harvard. (“I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college, but is a university with something definite to offer,” he wrote. “Then too, I would like to go to the same college as my father.”)
Kennedy’s essay was tacit acknowledgement of the fact that the system of opportunity that preceded Civil Rights was not even facially “meritocratic.” Elite institutions of higher education were essentially finishing schools for the well-to-do and well-connected: however neutral the letter of the admissions requirements, the “competition” between the Kennedys and the Bridgeses of the world had been won well in advance. Apartheid is not meritocracy.
Every single change to this non-meritocratic status quo—in education and in the workforce—was won against the dogged resistance of the very political legacies now claimed by the president and the Republican Party that has been reshaped in his image. The first women to earn bachelor’s degrees in 1836 did so at Oberlin College, an abolitionist institution that was also a stopover point on one of the many networks of the Underground Railroad that supported African Americans freeing themselves from slavery. That network faced violent opposition from Southern bounty hunters and Northern vigilantes alike, including “kidnapping clubs” run by members of the New York Police Department with the support of Wall Street financiers, judges, and politicians. The abolitionists succeeded only because of equally comprehensive efforts led by “Vigilance Committees” to raise funds, collect intelligence, and harbor fugitives.
The same goes for the more recent history that explains the very laws the Trump administration is undermining in its anti-DEI crusade. As Adam Serwer chronicled at the Atlantic, Trump’s efforts to replace high-level Black administrators echo the efforts of the Woodrow Wilson administration to resegregate the government in the 1910s. It took the full might of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union against the political backdrop of a world war to force President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to make the first executive orders prohibiting racial discrimination by federal contractors in 1941. The right wing of this country had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the most basic commitments to even consider job applications and admissions applications from people with the wrong race, religion, or pronouns.
The values of diversity and inclusion descend from this fight, and represent the closet thing we have to a political movement for meritocracy. The opposition to “DEI” that occupies the White House is a smokescreen for a step in exactly the opposite direction, plain as day: make sure the rich get richer, and that no pesky standards of fairness or rules get in the way.
The fact is, the battle over “DEI” has always been a fight about labor, work, and who has access to the jobs and political institutions that build and protect wealth. If we ever forgot that, we’re learning it again now. We know that the administration’s problem with our institutions is not their insufficient commitment to the underlying values of the Civil Rights Movement. Trump and Elon Musk are enraged at even the half-measures taken in the general direction of fairness. (That those half-measures can be lumped together under a bureaucratic-sounding acronym—DEI—probably makes Musk and his cohort feel they have even greater license to paint them as tools of the nanny state.)
Musk and the other tech CEOs who are bankrolling the right wing today began a crusade against DEI because it represented a modicum of control they didn’t have over their employees. And they are winning that control back by a campaign for seizing total power: not just over their workers, but over all of us. We are already seeing how a game that only billionaires can afford to play will be rigged against the rest of the population. Amazon’s Whole Foods, for example, is openly declaring that it will defy a labor election and labor law since the president has illegally undermined the National Labor Relations Board that enforces the law. And many of the powerful who once embraced DEI are also now delighted to disavow it. They are free of accountability. It no longer serves their hold on power.
The trick of Trump’s rhetoric is to look back at the moves elites made to cover their DEI bases, hail those moves as hollow, then channel the resentment created by those moves to turn around and solidify actual elite power, which lies in money—and the political institutions that control who has access to earning it.
If meritocracy is to be won in this country, we have to create the possibility for lasting change first. Accomplishing this task is directly at odds with “restoring” a mythic past. No matter how many times the president or his party use the word “meritocracy,” it is clear that the game rigged for the Kennedys and against the Bridgeses of this country is the America they want to return to “greatness.” And no matter how they phrase it, the case for that is meritless.
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