DEI activists are plotting a comeback
After decades of defeats in courts, governments, and business establishments, Americans who oppose discrimination on the basis of race and gender – including “compensatory” discrimination against non-Hispanic whites, men, and heterosexuals – have celebrated major victories.
In 2014 in Schuette v BAMN, the US Supreme Court held that the constitution allows states to ban racial and gender discrimination in university admissions. In June 2023, in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v President and Fellows of Harvard College, a 6-3 majority on the US Supreme Court banned the overt use of race as a factor in college admissions.
On the state level, Florida and Texas have led the way in banning “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs in their public university systems. Politicians in many other areas dominated by the Republican party have enacted or introduced similar legislation.
Will the vision of colour-blind law and public policy favoured by traditional integrationist liberals along with conservatives and libertarians finally prevail over the attempt to use race and gender quotas to rebuild every major social institution? Unfortunately, the answer is probably no. The alliance of cynical business elites and far-left ideologues that underpins “woke capitalism” may be routed on some fronts, but those special interests can be counted on to undermine attempts to ban discrimination in favor of some favored demographic groups at the expense of others.
At the time that the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act that outlawed white-supremacist segregation in the US was being debated, concerns were raised that its implementation would involve mandatory racial quotas in firms and other institutions. One of the champions of the bill, Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, declared: “I will eat my hat if anyone can find language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to colour, race, religion or national origin.”
Almost immediately, however, many businesses, universities, and government agencies adopted or expanded the use of thinly-disguised racial quotas in hiring and promotion for purely cynical reasons – to avert lawsuits or picketing by ethnic activists. Next came mandatory “diversity training” for employees, followed in the last decade by even more radical compulsory DEI sessions, which institutions adopted because such instruction could be used as a defense in lawsuits that claimed they discriminated against minorities or women and sexual minorities of all races.
From the 1970s onward, major corporations often submitted briefs in court cases in support of what came to be known as “affirmative action” – that is, reverse racism and anti-male discrimination. The majority of America’s economic elite, which remains overwhelmingly male and non-Hispanic white, views this as low-cost public relations.
During the last half century, the cynicism of elite American supporters of race-and-gender tokenism has been remarkable. The original justification of affirmative action policies was to help African-Americans whose families had suffered for generations from slavery and then segregation. But a 2007 study showed that 41 per cent of black students at four prestigious Ivy Leage colleges – Columbia, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania – were children of mostly-affluent immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa.
Far from being “underserved,” in the Orwellian language of DEI, Nigerian-Americans in 2018 made up 25 per cent of black students at Harvard Business School, even though they make up less than one per cent of America’s black population.
Among Nigerian-Americans over 25 in 2015, 29 per cent held a graduate degree, compared to only 11 per cent of Americans as a whole, while their average household income was greater than the national average as well. Noticing their under-representation, some black Americans whose ancestors suffered from American slavery and segregation have begun distinguishing themselves as “American descendants of slaves” (ADOS).
The rationale for affirmative action as redress for anti-black racism in American society collapsed completely when its beneficiaries were extended to Hispanic Americans, many of whom are recent immigrants or their children whose foreign ancestors never suffered from discrimination in the United States of yesteryear. Confusing matters further, many of the individuals classified as “Hispanic” tell America’s census takers that they are white, so the federal government must distinguish between “Hispanic whites” and “non-Hispanic whites”.
“Hispanic whites” are treated in practice as “people of colour” eligible for affirmative action. At the same time, Asian-Americans do better on average at standardised tests than all other groups in the US and are punished for it. Intended to compensate for centuries of anti-black discrimination, affirmative action today means artificially limiting the number of Asian students on college campuses while artificially inflating the numbers of Hispanics.
Meanwhile, America’s disproportionately-white ruling class cleverly has shielded its own privileged children from harm by anti-white affirmative action programs, by means of preferences in university admissions for “legacies” – the children of graduates of a university. Mostly-white legacy students made up 36 per cent of Harvard admissions in 2022.
As the nonwhite share of the US population increases, thanks to immigration, and as the white legacy share of elite student bodies remains stable, non-Hispanic white young men and women are forced to compete with each other for a dwindling share of admissions slots between racial minorities and white legacies. This produces an incentive for non-Hispanic whites to emphasise or invent nonwhite ancestors to benefit from affirmative action. Harvard University hired and publicised Elizabeth Warren, a law professor who is now a Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, as “nonwhite” based on her claim to be Cherokee.
In 2019, after a successful career as a “Pretendian,” Warren apologised to the Cherokee nation after a DNA test showed that she was possibly 1/1024 native American in descent. Under the bizarre rules of American reverse racism, however, Warren and Harvard did nothing wrong when proclaiming that she was nonwhite. Under the “one-drop” rule, any American who has minimal DNA from any ancestral “race” can claim to be a full-fledged member of that race for affirmative action purposes.
Half a century has passed since major American institutions cynically adopted racial tokenism, but the chief beneficiaries have been affluent and educated members of minority groups, not working-class black and Hispanic Americans. Was there an alternative? In 1967, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, organisers of the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, proposed “A ‘Freedom Budget’ for All Americans,” consisting of colour-blind social and economic policies that sought to help disadvantaged Americans of all races.
Conservatives, libertarians, and social democrats would disagree on the details of a race-neutral program of social reform as an alternative to race-and-gender tokenism. But any attempt to reduce class inequality in the US by colour-blind methods would be disruptive and costly, while appointing more rich minority members to corporate boards is cheap. Indeed, race-and-gender tokenism is perfectly compatible with a high degree of social inequality. According to the logic of woke capitalism, social justice will be achieved when every income group – rich, middle class, working class, poor – has the same distribution of race and ethnic groups and sexes or sexual orientations as the national population as a whole.
Dependent on donations from socially-liberal rich people and the foundations that they endow, the campus left and the nonprofit left quietly dropped “class” from the left-wing trinity of “race, class, and gender” between the 1990s and the present. According to the ideology of DEI, a rich Hispanic American woman from Argentina’s upper class is “underserved” while a poor white man who grew up in a trailer park in Appalachia is “privileged.”
But putting more black or Hispanic millionaires on corporate boards does nothing for the majority of black and Hispanic Americans, who are working class and whose struggles with wages, debt, and the welfare state are similar to those of working-class fellow citizens who are non-Hispanic or Asian-American. Diversifying the elite is the mission of progressive racialism, not uplifting the disadvantaged.
Opponents of affirmative action and DEI ideology may win occasional victories in courts and state legislatures. But the well-organised and powerful supporters of society-wide race-and-gender tokenism, including its upper-middle-class black and Hispanic beneficiaries and the mostly-white corporate elite that supports reverse discrimination for public relations purposes, can be counted on to do their best to evade or roll back any limitations.
In some cases, DEI may be reborn under a different name. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) now has a Strategic Action Plan for Belonging, Action and [demographic] Composition. Universities may drop standardised tests, on which Asian-Americans and non-Hispanic whites do best, in favor of personal statements, in which well-coached applicants can talk about their experiences, thus signaling their racial identities to admissions committees.
Indeed, in Students for Fair Admissions (2019), the same Supreme Court majority that banned overt use of racial preferences in college admissions winked and nudged, providing this very loophole, holding that “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise... A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination” – as suggested by the student’s application essay. Through this giant loophole, the coalition that supports race-based policy in all realms is likely to escape, to regroup and win new victories under new aliases.
