Upholding DEI: Our Ongoing Moral & Practical Imperative

“You cannot kill the truth. You cannot kill justice. You cannot kill what we are fighting for.”
– Jean Dominique

Donald Trump and his supporters have launched a full-scale assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, portraying them as immoral, illegal, and divisive. They claim that DEI creates discord, banishes merit and excellence, and discriminates against white people, men, and people from other privileged groups.

This poisonous rhetoric is harmful enough, but the actions of Trump and his supporters have been drastic:

• Banning and attempting to “root out” all DEI programs and support for DEI in government agencies.
• Rescinding equal opportunity requirements for government contractors.
• Working to either collapse the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) or wildly distort them into zombie agencies that protect and serve those guilty of discrimination and labor repression.
• Weaponizing the power of the federal government to defund and demolish institutions and organizations that support DEI efforts.
• Pressuring and intimidating corporations with DEI commitments into condemning and abandoning them.
• And there will be more to come.

This coordinated assault is certainly not about any value for fairness – it is about rolling back many decades of hard-fought and hard-won DEI and human rights advances. It is about deepening and expanding oppression and attempting to obliterate and shame any attempts to address or even discuss inequity.

None of this changes the fact that, at its core, the fight for DEI is a moral imperative. DEI is about fairness, righting historical and current wrongs, and ensuring that the human rights of oppressed people are protected. Heartbreakingly, Trump and his supporters seek to distort this fundamental truth, forwarding arguments that portray the oppressed as the oppressors and the oppressors as the oppressed. This inversion is eye-rollingly absurd in the stark light of facts, figures, and reality – but it is nonetheless extremely dangerous.

Correcting Historical Wrongs is Not Oppression – It is Justice

For centuries, people of color, transgender people, women, queer people, immigrants, disabled people, and other oppressed groups have been subjected to violence, repression, economic and political tyranny, and denied full and meaningful personhood. There are many staggering and pervasive consequences to this reality. This includes members of oppressed groups being dramatically underrepresented in leadership and policymaking positions, denied access to critical opportunities, and beholden to narrow and bigoted dominant cultural standards. Ultimately, systems and practices have been designed to advantage white people, cisgender people, men, heterosexuals, U.S. born people, people without disabilities, and other privileged groups by extracting those advantages from oppressed peoples.

Addressing this gripping injustice is not about somehow “punishing” or “discriminating against” white people, cisgender people, men, heterosexuals, U.S. born people, people without disabilities, or other privileged groups. It is about demanding accountability and pursuing a world that honors, cares for, and affords full human rights to oppressed groups rather than forcing their ongoing subjugation.

All in all, equity is the cure we seek. It is the method of creating a whole and holistic society.

Rather than acknowledging the war they are waging, Donald Trump and his supporters instead posit the idea that it is oppressive to: discuss oppression; take proactive action to end oppression; or demand accountability for it. Framing equity so completely outside of itself is to engage in a very deliberate inversion of reality – one that erases the centuries of brutality, theft, and exclusion inflicted upon entire communities. Such a distortion portrays those who have been enslaved, displaced, barred, and terrorized as the “true aggressors” while both shielding privileged groups from accountability and laughably painting them as “victims” despite the ways in which they occupy undue and unjust benefit at every turn.

This is a terrible and outright lie. But, the aim is to make us believe that lie, and believe that there is – somehow – morality and validity behind it. As Adolf Hitler said, “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.” Tragically, those words define so many aspects of this presidency.

DEI Is the True Measure of Moral Authority

Donald Trump and his supporters assert that their attacks on DEI are grounded in moral authority. However, it does not require close inspection to recognize that they lack any genuine moral integrity. The stances and policies of Trump and his supporters prioritize targeting and terrorizing their oppressed neighbors, and they are busily fire-bombing any infrastructure of and support for social justice they can reach. All hyperbole aside, their white supremacy, anti-immigrant views, glorification of patriarchy, disgust for civil rights and social justice, and use of intimidation and violence make them values-aligned with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

Morality demands that we strive to create a society where people are free from oppression and harm and treated with dignity and respect. It calls for actions that foster accountability, ethical integrity, and empathy. The moral path is the path that upholds fairness, equity, and justice.

DEI is fundamentally grounded in moral authority, both in the United States and around the world. It draws upon the present and the past, including the countless legacies and fights for justice championed by so many. Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Sitting Bull, Mother Jones, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Margaret Sanger, Ella Baker, Pauli Murray, Bayard Rustin, Grace Lee Boggs, Yuri Kochiyama, Shirley Chisholm, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr., Dolores Huerta, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Audre Lorde, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Wilma Mankiller, Marsha P. Johnson, Judith Heumann, Sylvia Rivera, Loretta Ross, Winona LaDuke, Ai-Jen Poo, Mia Mingus. The list of names, both known and unknown, stretches on and on from the past into the future. These advocates’ blood, sweat, tears, insight, brilliance, and sacrifice have challenged dominant societal understandings of morality and social good, and worked to reshape the United States into a country that may one day be able to reach both its moral potential and obligations through upholding equity and human rights.

Trump and his supporters promote the immoral violence of harming those who are already most harmed. They envision a society built on the ever-increasing exploitation and exclusion of the oppressed – a society that simply cannot be made whole.

True moral leadership does not come from denying harm or pretending that injustice does not exist. It comes from the courage to face, acknowledge, and correct it – as DEI calls us to do.

Meritocracy is Only Possible Through DEI

“Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.”
– W. E. B. Du Bois

The assertions made by Donald Trump and his supporters that they seek to prioritize meritocracy are as thin and preposterous as their claims to morality. A person needs only look at Donald Trump himself, as well as his cabinet and appointees. All of them are wildly, outrageously unqualified for the positions they have assumed. Not a single one of them is the most qualified choice, or even the 5th, 10th, or 20th most qualified choice. Not at all. Rather than actual merit, the emphasis for this president and the loyalists he has gathered emphasizes being wealthy, being white, and/or being men with a passion for destruction and the subjection of the oppressed. They are the posterchildren for demonstrating how, without DEI, privilege and discrimination wins out over merit every time.

Without DEI efforts, it is unqualified individuals – propped up by the advantages of whiteness, maleness, wealth, cisgender identity, and other privileges – who continue to secure jobs and opportunities at the expense of more capable, yet historically excluded and oppressed, candidates. True meritocracy does not exist in a vacuum; it requires intentional equity measures to dismantle the structural barriers that have long prevented qualified individuals from accessing the opportunities they deserve.

Trump and his supporters act as though the United States was a meritocracy prior to DEI efforts, and that DEI dismantled this noble system. Rather, the world before DEI made most jobs and positions available only to white men – a fact which was explicit and not hidden under euphemisms or political dog whistles. There were public and explicit pay differentiations based upon race and gender. As an oppressed person, there were no protections against discrimination of any kind. There was only the ubiquitous club of privilege, which had nothing to do with who was the best or most qualified for anything.

As a country, the United States emerged out of the genocide of Indigenous people, Slavery, the repression of women and disabled people, the exploitation and suppression of immigrants of color, and so on. It is not a cheery tail of the triumph of excellence. Positions of leadership and power in our government and every other system are not overwhelmingly filled by white cisgender, heterosexual men because they are somehow more excellent than everyone else. These groups are disproportionately represented in these positions because, since its founding, the United States has carved out the power they hold through other people’s flesh.

In the face of our history and current structures, the only way for meritocracy to exist is through DEI efforts. At the end of the day, it is rich people, white people, men, heterosexuals, cisgender people, U.S. born people, and other privileged groups who are the true beneficiaries of an entrenched system of unearned advantage that even Affirmative Action, when it existed, could not hope to counter.

To undo this damage, we must specifically name and correct for the racism, sexism, cissexism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, nationalism, and other oppressions that prevent targeted groups from ever getting their fair shot. We must name and talk about oppression. We must invite people from oppressed groups into spaces where they have been excluded and diminished. We must recognize the talent, value, and merit they bring, and restructure our systems of power so that they are true and just.

The way that Donald Trump and his supporters talk about merit and identity implies that no person of color can possibly be as qualified as a white person, no woman can possibly be as qualified as a man, no transgender person can possibly be as qualified as a cisgender person, and so on. But this has no relationship to the truth. It is another reality distortion that reinforces very old and very destructive ideological myths that members of privileged groups are always smarter, better, and more capable than their “inferior” oppressed counterparts. To believe this is to buy into and justify oppression – hook, line, and sinker. It also relies on never scrutinizing the privileged people pointing that ludicrous, red herring of a finger.

Every oppressed group occupies its own profound brilliance and merit. Of course they should be recognized for it, as privileged groups are and always have been. Forwarding oppressed people and stopping oppressive practices is not an attack on excellence; it is the way to ensure that true excellence is possible.

DEI Isn’t a Set of Throwaway Letters

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
– Alice Walker

Some people in the DEI field, feeling cowed by Trump and his supporters, have declared that the terms “DEI,” “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” do not matter in and of themselves. That the terms can be thrown out and replaced by euphemisms like “community building” or other bland, indescript language. Many are even taking the lesser-known framework of “belonging” and trying to hollow it of its equity and anti-oppression basis to make it an innocuous version of something that doesn’t quite reach diversity, inclusion, or equity. But of course this approach of trying to save a thing by forsaking it will not work.

We cannot accomplish changing the very nature of our society in secret without ever overtly naming, discussing, or publicly recognizing the changes we seek. That is nonsensical, particularly for a mission that has required centuries of struggle, fight, and demand to get us where we are. Particularly for a mission that will continue to take generations, and must push back against dominant cultural structures and narratives that have considerable powers to erase memory and reality. Moving us forward will not be accomplished by polite and fearful negotiation in which we are willing to give up our souls and beg for mercy where there will be none.

Social justice and equity movements in the United States emerged in the 1800s. It is these movements for human rights that ultimately gave rise to DEI. The concept of a diversity framework and bringing it into the government and workplace was birthed by the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement so many decades ago. Later, the inclusiveness approach grew out of the existing diversity framework. And, while equity, diversity, and inclusion are ultimately different frameworks with distinctions, they have been regularly grouped together as the acronym “DEI” for over 10 years.

The movements that used and created these terms certainly didn’t pick them randomly. They used and created them because these words mean something – they describe the world we seek to actualize.

Equity is the project of social transformation, of achieving social justice and fairness for oppressed groups. We desperately need equity. And, as elements of that much larger concept, we need the meaningful representation and leadership of oppressed groups (diversity), and a society where oppressed groups are recognized, valued, and have a genuine place (inclusion and belonging).

As advocates for DEI, we must claim our internal and external power. We must say what we mean, and mean what we say. Both as it relates to all we seek to create, and all that we must defeat (oppression, discrimination, prejudice, etc.). If we relinquish ourselves and speak in pleasantries and code, we will have forgotten who we are – the power we hold – and all that we have achieved through DEI will collapse. Instead of rising to this moment, looking it in the eye, and calling it what it is, we will find ourselves apologists for the trauma, violence, and extreme repression being directed at oppressed peoples.

The Path Forward

“Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth. To make love is to make justice. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk.”
– Carter Heyward

The importance and necessity of DEI cannot be overstated. It is about ensuring that our workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, institutions, and society reflect the values of justice, dignity, and wellbeing.

We are facing a horrible and dangerous backlash to DEI and all that it seeks to achieve. Donald Trump and his supporters are maligning and villainizing DEI at every turn. But equity was never about what was popular or supported by the people in power. Rights for Black people were and are not popular. Nor were or are rights for other people of color, or women, or poor and working class people, or people with disabilities, or LGBQ folks, or transgender folks, or immigrants, or any other oppressed group. We cannot wait for a consensus that oppressed people matter, that we deserve to have high quality lives, and that we should not die younger and at higher rates due to oppression. The popularity of human rights, nor its support by those in power, have absolutely nothing to do with their moral or practical imperative. We are committed to what is just because this is what is right.

Rather than pulling back from what we know to be true, what we have committed ourselves to, we must continue to move it forward. We must name DEI for what it is, and we must publicly support it personally and professionally. We must be prepared for the fight that is here and that is going to keep on coming. Because this is what we believe in. Because we have one another. And because this is our path to a righteous, joyful, and sustainable world.