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DEI Deserves An Accurate Eulogy
As President Trump’s executive orders have mercifully begun dismantling discriminatory and illegal DEI and CRT programs throughout the government and our educational systems, we see a sharp increase in companies and organizations joining the already snowballing trend of dumping DEI programs. Perhaps more importantly, because these orders are merely following through with his successful campaign promises, they indicate that Americans themselves finally understand and reject the damage wrought by DEI.
If you needed further evidence that DEI is in its death throes, note how the DEI Industrial Complex defends DEI as they cover its rapid demise, feeling the need to proclaim anew the baseless tropes they used to help launch it originally. CBS, ABC, Time, Reuters, and others have been including something like a “What is DEI?” section to their latest articles, reasserting that DEI is an extension of civil rights, that it is about helping disadvantaged groups, or telling us that STEM research and underrepresented scientists will suffer if DEI is eradicated.
Reuters offered this typical definition of DEI, “DEI programs have been part of workplace diversity efforts to ensure fairer representation for groups seen as historically marginalized, such as African Americans, LGBTQ+ community members, women, disabled people and other ethnic minorities in the United States.” Fortunately, despite the propaganda push, the DEI fairness mask has come off — and it is hopefully being fitted for a death mask.
The hypocrisy of DEI begins with the very words represented by that acronym — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Christopher Rufo has observed that, in practice, the policies bearing these labels usually promote precisely the opposite of what the words would imply. Diversity almost always involves implicit and explicit racial discrimination excluding or limiting some groups by their skin color or identity. Equity involves disparate and often unfair treatment of various identity groups (typically based on race, color, gender, and sex) in an attempt to equalize not opportunities, but outcomes. And Inclusion usually restricts ideas and people who oppose the prevailing doctrine of oppressed and oppressors.
DEI defenders commonly offer similar excuses as those for other failed attempts at Marxism. You might think that a piece titled The Failure of the DEI Industrial Complex in Harvard Business Review offers a sweeping indictment of DEI in general. Not quite. While admitting its undeniable failures in desired outcomes, it blames its downfall on the “lack of standards, consistency, and accountability among DEI practitioners.” In other words, the argument seems to be that it was a good idea, poorly implemented. Sound familiar?
The litany of slaughters, famines, gulags, and world wars was created by supposedly good ideas poorly implemented. If you start with flawed premises, things like standards, consistency and accountability only enhance the flaws. Such defective thinking includes believing that unequal outcomes are de facto evidence of discrimination; that diversity, not unity of shared values or esprit de corps is our strength; and that privilege and guilt are a function of DNA/skin color. In brief, poor implementation is the wrong epitaph.
As we close the casket, it is important to set the record straight. DEI is being buried today because enough Americans have finally realized that it has little to do with treating people fairly, combatting racism and sexism, helping the underserved, being more tolerant, or leveraging our differences. They now see that it is first and foremost about pitting groups against each other, lowering standards and eliminating meritocracy, and finding and magnifying perpetual grievances to benefit favored identity groups — and their facilitators.
They see that it grew into a multi-billion dollar self-serving industry that was worse than ineffective; it was actually counterproductive — damaging all of those areas it promised to improve — often involving active discrimination and racism.
They see that our military was most profoundly impacted by DEI because, unlike the civilian world, the command structure requires immediate implementation of the destructive policies, that in just a few short years the damage done there was nothing short of tragic — lowering standards, morale and combat readiness, and creating the biggest recruiting crisis in half a century.
They see that even in academia, the cradle of DEI, the multi-year, largest and most expensive DEI effort to date ($250m) at the University of Michigan utterly backfired per the New York Times.
They also see that in reality DEI is simple racism — institutionalizing the favoring and disfavoring of certain individuals and groups based solely on their race and/or skin color, gender, or identity group.
Scholar and author Victor Davis Hanson noted the beginning of DEI’s demise a year ago and rightly predicted, “In the end, DEI will implode because of its many contradictions: it is racist to the core; it is illegal and violates court decisions and the Constitution; it destroys meritocracy; and it is utterly incoherent in adjudicating who and who not deserve racial preferences.”
No, DEI is not dead yet, but it will likely be forced into academic hospice for a while — hopefully never to recover. The correct epitaph for DEI is that it is warmed over Marxism camouflaged as improved sensitivity and fairness. It is not on its death bed because of too much success too fast — too much fairness, too much racial harmony, too much improvement in outcomes of all forms. No, it is dying because, like all Marxism, it aims to foment distrust, chaos, resentment, guilt, hate, discrimination, and ultimately revolution; and most Americans have woken up to and reject that. Like every other attempt at implementation of Marxist principles, it may sound good in theory, but ultimately succumbs to reality.
Like all tyrants, DEI should not rest in peace because it should serve as yet another warning for what can happen even after the failings of countless other attempts at Marxism have been demonstrated. But regardless of how it leaves us, through burial or cremation, let’s get the eulogy right so that future generations may feel less inclined to resurrect its corpse.
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Dr. Greg Salsbury is former president of Western Colorado University, on the Board of Advisors for STARRS, and author of “Retirementology – Rethinking the American Dream in a New Economy.”
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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