Is DEI the New N-Word, Pretending to Be the New Equality Standard?

Is DEI the New N-Word, Pretending to Be the New Equality Standard?

"We know what the tools of domination look like. More of our future hinges on this election than at any point, and more of our future will depend on what even happens if Harris wins or the Democratic Party secures the White House — it's not over. It ain't over… There's way more to come, much more work to do, and looking at what's happening at the state-level tells us all we need to know about [how the 1025 Project reflects the Heritage Foundation’s] vision is for the entire nation." 

 Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a Harvard University professor of history, race and public policy

I recent read a study (Slaveholder ancestry and current net worth of members of the United States Congress by academics Neil K. R. Sehgal and Ashwini R. Sehgal, published August 21st in PLOS) that examined the entire 2021 Congress focused on a truly interesting question. Is there a lasting link between those whose lineage traces back to the era of slavery in America, notably slave-owning families, and their subsequent generations… looking at that clearly identifiable and measurable cohort. The results paint a stark picture of wealth disparity. The median net worth across all 535 Congress members was $1.28 million. However, legislators whose ancestors enslaved 16 or more people had a median net worth of $5.62 million – more than five times the overall average.

In a recent study at the Yale University Institution for Social Policy Studies (ISPS), published on September 12th, reacted to an earlier statistical analysis of demographics in major cities from Harvard-based nonprofit group (Opportunity Insights) that found that: “recently published data linking parent and child tax records, [showed] a significant gap in economic mobility attained by Black males compared with white males. However, data for females showed no racial mobility gap. And the racial mobility gap between Black and white males varied from city to city….

“[ISPS fellow researchers] Rourke O’Brien, an associate professor of sociology, and Manuel Schechtl, assistant professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill… found that the racial mobility gap increased in relation to the per capita size of a city’s police force — for males but not females. In addition, they found that the increased exposure to police personnel during the teenage and young adult years of people studied led to a higher likelihood of incarceration for Black males compared with white males.

“‘For other groups — Black females, white males, and white females — there were better outcomes,’ Schechtl said. ‘For them, more policing might have primarily meant less crime. But our findings are consistent with a large body of research showing that where there is more intensive policing, Black males are more likely to make contact with the criminal justice system, negatively impacting their levels of educational attainment and ability to secure a good job.’” Convict a Black man and kill his future and his family. These results pushed my mind in a different direction. All this controversy over whether the vestiges of long passed slavery is long gone – where even the US Constitution held a slave to be 3/5th of a person for Census purposes – may instead have been perpetuated racism way beyond Reconstruction and Jim Crow restrictions and been preserved into the present day. Some folks have an advantage that never ends; others have a disadvantage that never ends.

It appeared that even other darker skinned minorities (ethnically from India, Latin America, etc.) were effectively dumped into this “less than a full person” paradigm. As immigration mounted and the number of African American and other darker-skinned minorities became significant voting blocks, it seemed that white Christian traditionalists began to amp up their demands on police specifically in neighborhoods with darker-skinned minorities, increased their pressure to exclude voters of color with voting requirements that would cull the darker-skinned herd, created new pressures to rewrite or even ban history books and lesson plans that dealt candidly with slavery and the continued discrimination that was anything but eliminated by an era of civil rights legislation. White Christian nationalism was reborn and slowly usurped an entire political party, which became a MAGA dominated GOP. Civil rights were being reversed by the courts and legislated away by state legislatures and even by our own GOP members of Congress.

But touting white supremacy was now socially unacceptable – no one wanted to admit to being a racist – so new “wink-wink” buzzwords were developed. It seemed that obvious racial bigots, even marching with torches chanting “they will not replace us” were “fine people.” Any books, politicians, teachers or journalists that presented an accurate history of slavery or modern-day discrimination against all sorts of minorities were labeled “woke,” a word that was left without a clear definition, although everyone understood it to support the supremacy of white Christian nationalism. Efforts to assist those who faced inferior schools or were raised within a community which had been treated as second class citizens were also labeled as “woke” and unacceptable.

And for those people of color who rose to level of success that negated those assumption of inferiority (the 3/5th of a person feeling that still lingered) were now cast with a new label to reinforce their assumed inferiority to whites. As Kimberly Richards, writing for the September 15th Huffington post notes: “Conservatives have turned the term DEI — which refers to programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion — into a disparaging dog whistle, and use the phrase ‘DEI hire’ to suggest members of marginalized groups don’t actually earn their achievements… During the 2024 presidential campaign, Republicans have lobbed attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic presidential nominee, referring to her as a ‘DEI hire.’” And so, for those believing that as long as they did not directly use the “N” word, and thus that they were not racists, a new improved “N” word came into being with sufficient plausible deniability that racists could hide behind it.

But these words underpin efforts to add voting restrictions to keep those non-white minorities away. Efforts to require a birth certificate may seem innocent, but so many Indigenous Peoples and Blacks were born in backwater venues or reservations, not in hospitals, where birth certificates were never secured. It does not take much more than a mild scraping of history to know what these voting restrictions are intended to effect. “Woke” and “DEI-hire” – and actions based on the underlying assumptions – are racism: “Still, if United States history has imparted anything, it’s that this language isn’t isolated to just words. It often materializes in action that works to the detriment of the people the language is meant to exclude. Against a backdrop of a national effort to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion policies in schools, universities and corporations, the right's mobilization around ‘DEI’ and ‘DEI hire’ appears all the more dangerous.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and simply put, the embrace by legislatures and courts against DEI opportunities or Woke books and lessons enables, justifies and perpetuates racism pretty much the way the discriminatory words and phrases were used to justify the Jim Crow era racism.