What is DEI?

In recent months, the term “diversity, equity, and inclusion” — or “DEI” — has been getting thrown around a lot amid the Trump administration’s purge of anything related to the topic. 

I first learned about DEI last year when the Francis Scott Key bridge collapsed and Baltimore’s mayor went on television to make a statement regarding rescue efforts.  A tweet went viral claiming that things were going to get “so much worse” with Baltimore’s “DEI” mayor overseeing search and rescue operations. 

Appropriately, many of the comments quickly clocked that the term DEI was a stand-in for Black and also compared the use of the term to “woke” and “critical race theory” — CRT. Anything revolving around the inclusion and visibility of minorities has been reduced to unfair DEI efforts. 

Much like CRT, many people’s understanding of DEI has been warped by negative portrayals in the media. Subsequently, this led to some individuals believing that DEI provides minorities with an egregiously unfair advantage in corporate America, government and academic spaces. 

The main function of many DEI programs is to provide people of marginalized groups with equal opportunities in said spaces by providing them accommodations. Rather than providing us with an unfair advantage, it levels the playing field for people who otherwise would have never been able to get their foot in the door. 

This can take form in different ways. For people with disabilities, it looks like making work and public spaces more accessible. For racial minorities, it often involves programs that exclusively hire ethnically diverse individuals to compensate for racial discrimination in hiring and acceptance processes. 

In academia, there are a multitude of scholarships and financial aid programs dedicated to ensuring minority students have the resources necessary to obtain a higher education. Considering how race is a huge factor in examining a person’s socioeconomic status, having these programs are important to allow everyone to have equal opportunity education, regardless of their income level. 

One of the most common misconceptions is that people accepted under these programs are taken on solely due to their marginalized status and thus underqualified for the positions they were selected for. A recent example of this is the public’s reaction to Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination. 

Despite having graduated from Harvard, served as a federal judge for years, participated as a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission and worked as a public defender, much of the outcry concerning her nomination revolved around the fact that former President Biden explicitly stated she was nominated in an effort to diversify the Supreme Court.

The term DEI wasn’t as popularized at the time. People were trying to establish a connection between Justice Jackson and CRT to discredit her ability to remain impartial. Many of those arguments mirrored the same ones used to attack DEI practices under Trump’s administration. 

This idea that minorities hired due to their marginalized status lack the proper qualifications for the jobs they’re expected to perform is indicative of a broader problem. I think it’s time to start calling a spade a spade. 

Trump’s current attack on DEI-related programs and institutions is an attempt to further alienate marginalized communities and restrict their access to positions of power. Claiming to enforce true anti-discrimination practices, Trump’s current administration has convinced its voter base that minorities accepted under DEI programs are underqualified and stealing opportunities.  

The infamous “Dear Colleague” letter, written by the assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education, states that DEI is a form of racial discrimination that disadvantages “white and Asian” students of lower-income backgrounds. The letter fails to acknowledge the disproportionate wealth gap between white and Asian Americans and other racial demographics that prompted many institutions to enforce DEI in the first place. 

It’s clear that the end goal is to erase minorities from government and academia, but the enforcement of these policies also contributes to the erasure of history and resources for those minorities. 

Recently, the Department of Defense deleted a page on their website about Charles C. Rogers, a Black Medal of Honor recipient who served during the Vietnam War. In a similar fashion, Arlington National Cemetery is in the process of removing articles and photos pertaining to Black, Hispanic and women veterans from its website. 

While the United States is no stranger to censoring the history of marginalized groups, seeing it happen under the guise of trying to promote true equality is what makes this far more terrifying. 

Trump’s administration is purposely targeting its talking points to demographics of working-class individuals who don’t have the resources to succeed and fail to qualify for DEI programs due to their ethnicity. However, instead of establishing social programs that would remedy that issue, Trump claims that minorities are the cause of those issues as a means of escalating division within the working class. 

The fact that we live in a system where DEI is needed is the problem. While I do think that these programs are essential, it can easily be interpreted as a Band-Aid for the different types of oppression deeply embedded within our country’s foundation. 

Rather than addressing the issue at its root and providing a solution for everyone regardless of race, the government refuses to provide accommodations for people experiencing poverty and attacks the programs that are designed to help those that are disadvantaged. 

The aftermath leaves lower-income and working-class Americans feeling resentful toward one another, preventing solidarity and hindering strides toward creating a better nation.