Diversity, equity and inclusion isn’t discrimination. We need more white men’s voices | Opinion

Sen. J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate for vice president of the United States and a white man, is firmly anti-affirmative action. Many white people, including professors make claims about suffering from “reverse discrimination.” Diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are facing backlash across the nation, including inside university systems. Anti-DEI powerhouses have developed the concept of MEI — merit, excellence and intelligence — as a counter-protest.

Twenty years ago as a new university instructor, I felt anxiety discussing race. I tackled this fear by gathering information. I formed off-campus reading groups to better understand. Years later as an assistant professor, I participated in a faculty development offering for white faculty and staff members at my university. Motivated by the idea that white people have a responsibility to become racially literate and anti-racist, the course examined what it means to be white in our white-dominant society.

The course, Whiteness and Race, helped me to see how — of course — whiteness is racialized. Without whiteness, there is no white supremacy. And it let me see how, when occupying an oppressor status, the onus is on the dominant group to talk about that status, and to work against its persistence. I launched a series of Anti-Racism and Racial Literacy Dialogue Sessions in April 2020. These encounters were set up to cater to white people specifically, to address our fragility and our lack of racial literacy.

In my experience co-facilitating more than 70 sessions to hundreds of participants, I’ve noticed that white men were disproportionately absent from these forums. These findings trend with the data.

The relationship between white men and DEI work is fraught. White men are too busy to show up. They feel threatened. They feel unwanted. They feel the status of white men is unraveling. They are angry. They feel discriminated against. White supremacy survives off this complicity of white men in particular.

Anti-racist spaces challenge the sense of protection that white and male dominance maintain. And, because white men benefit from these systems, it is natural for them to want to avoid them. What do they, as a group, have to gain from actively working against their social positioning?

Martin Luther King Jr’s dream requires action

Shifting our culture away from white dominance — shifting the racial contract — is not easy. It is hard to turn away from our own pursuit of the ever-evasive, largely mythical American dream long enough to politic for another demographic.

And, yet social science is clear that racial categories affect nearly all life outcomes — and anti-Black racism is rising in the United States. Black Americans are stopped without just cause and incarcerated at five times the rate of white Americans. Meanwhile, police officers don’t justify bothering a suspected armed and mentally unstable dangerous white male, as we saw before Maine’s deadliest mass shooting ever last fall.

Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream. It wasn’t that white America would rather be anti-woke than wake up to things such as implicit bias and structural and racist violence; that white people would prefer to embrace explicit racist culture and decry anti-whiteness than change their actions to organize around social equity; that white supremacy would appear as aloof colorblindness.

To be sure, there will be those who argue that this viewpoint is reductionist, stifling, unnecessary — that a focus on race harms race relations, people of color and is, in fact, racist itself. And there will be those who argue that trying to disrupt white supremacy is reverse racism. It is not.

We can point these naysayers to the evidence. For example, work by Dr. Lacee Satcher shows that Black neighborhoods are nearly three times as likely to be resource deserts, lacking pharmacies, grocery stores and green spaces. If we look at social indicators — housing, incarceration, mortality rates, wealth, burial space, housing prices, education — the pattern is abruptly clear.

Renowned civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander writes that enslavement didn’t go away. Rather, it evolved. Black Americans, in particular, continue to experience barriers to upward social mobility. And, there are real structural reasons why these social statistics pattern this way.

We either understand that society is systematically racist, or we live as though people of color are deserving of ongoing and disproportionate dehumanization. Regardless, our status quo perpetuates racial harm. Our daily lives are invested in this maltreatment whether we realize it or not. White people — and in particular, white male educators — need to embrace and expand DEI and antiracist efforts. We can all do more to pursue sociological, antiracist and knowledge of related issues to bridge the racial gap.

Critical whiteness does not call for people to feel white guilt, nor is it anti-white people. It does call for white people to understand white privilege so that we can actively work to eliminate it.

We are not living a version of Dr. King’s dream come true. And, it’s time we willfully abandon the nightmare of racism. Everyone needs to embrace and double down on DEI work.

The correction for too much DEI is more DEI. If we establish anti-racist practices as though we are capable of redemption, we can align with the truth that white supremacy is always on the wrong side of history.

White men are needed — but will they apply?

Megan Thiele Strong was born in Kansas City and raised in Raymore, Missouri. She is a sociology professor at San Jose State University in San Jose, California, and a 2023-24 Public Voices Fellow at the 501(c)(3) nonprofit The OpEd Project.