With Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the long-held conservative grudge against affirmative action and programs designed to upend the effects of racial discrimination has transformed into a witch hunt. In the past decade, conservatives have cycled through attacks on wokeness, affirmative action, critical race theory, and the diversity-equity-and-inclusion initiatives known, now pejoratively, as D.E.I. The target has moved, but the message is the same: anti-racism is divisive and discriminatory and should end at all costs.
Today, D.E.I. is in the crosshairs. Its elasticity has made it vulnerable to a wide-ranging blame game. D.E.I. can be many things, from efforts to increase the diversity of a workplace through hiring initiatives to the creation of affinity groups that bring underrepresented workers together. It may also include workplace trainings on topics such as racism, gender discrimination, and sexual harassment. Undoubtedly, there has been ham-fisted D.E.I. programming that is intrusive or even alienating, making workers feel that they are being told what to think or how to feel. But, for the most part, it is a relatively benign practice meant to increase diversity, while also sending a message that workplaces should be fair and open to everyone.
And yet, in the hands of the right, D.E.I. has been twisted into something nefarious, becoming the discrimination it seeks to weed out. Trump said as much in an interview this past spring: “I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country. . . . I don’t think it would be a very tough thing to address, frankly. But I think the laws are very unfair right now.” The comment reflected the apparent mood of the fifty-six per cent of Republicans who, in a poll, said they believed that white people are discriminated against on the basis of their skin color. (Numerous studies have shown that most of the benefits of D.E.I. have accrued to white women. A report on board diversity from the consulting firm Deloitte and the Alliance for Board Diversity found that “white women made the largest percentage increase in board seats gained in both the Fortune 100 and Fortune 500.” According to recent data by the job-search site Zippia, more than seventy-five per cent of “chief diversity officers” are white, and more than half of them are white women.)
What critiques of D.E.I. tend to imply, but never quite openly say, is that competent white people are being replaced with incompetent Black people. Just as universities were blamed for displacing qualified and deserving Asian American students with unqualified and undeserving Black students in the lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court’s sacking of affirmative action, liberals are now accused of compromising the health and safety of the public to appease the special-interest demographic of incompetent and unqualified Black workers. D.E.I. has been blamed for the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, the wildfires in Los Angeles, and the midair collision of a helicopter and a plane that killed sixty-seven people in Washington, D.C. Trump is using D.E.I. to scythe through the federal government’s disproportionately Black and female workforce and to upend programs that he and his adviser Elon Musk declare to be wasteful and superfluous. Among federal health workers, Black employees have reportedly been the focus of a right-wing “D.E.I. watch list,” which published their names and salaries alongside their alleged D.E.I. crimes.
The veracity of the claims should be considered in light of who is making them. That Trump and Musk are suddenly the voice of anti-discrimination efforts makes a mockery of the idea. Throughout Trump’s first Presidency, he made racist and disparaging comments about people of color. He once denounced a Black member of Congress, the late Elijah Cummings, as a “bully,” while describing his district in Baltimore as a “rat and rodent infested mess” and a “dangerous and filthy place.” More recently, Trump appointed Darren Beattie to a State Department position; Beattie was fired from the first Trump Administration, in 2018, for speaking at a conference attended by white supremacists. Two of Musk’s government staffers were found to have made openly white-supremacist comments; one resigned and, a day later, Musk said that he intended to rehire him.
Musk’s Tesla has faced multiple lawsuits for workplace discrimination during the past decade. In 2024, a California state judge ruled that a class-action lawsuit against the company, involving almost six thousand Black workers, could move forward to determine whether Tesla had a “pattern or practice of failing to take all reasonable steps necessary to prevent discrimination and harassment from occurring” at its plant in Fremont. In the original case filing, sworn statements from more than two hundred Black former employees and contractors characterized the production floor as a “hotbed for racism,” including bigoted graffiti and the use of slurs. This led the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to also sue Tesla, alleging that the company had subjected Black employees at the Fremont plant “to severe or pervasive racial harassment and has created and maintained a hostile, race-based work environment.” This past March, a federal judge ruled that the E.E.O.C.’s lawsuit could go forward. (Tesla has denied wrongdoing.)
Nearly ten months after the E.E.O.C. lawsuit was filed, the Trump Administration has removed two of the agency’s three Democratic commissioners, leaving it without the quorum necessary to function. One of those commissioners was Jocelyn Samuels, who was appointed by Trump in 2020. She has said that she was told she was removed because “my embrace of radical ideology and my position on D.E.I. and the permissibility of it make me unfit to serve.”
The dismantling of the E.E.O.C. appears to be the fulfillment of a grudge. In other ways, these attacks are the crescendo of a long campaign to undermine federal protections against racial discrimination. This is what was significant about Trump’s decision to reach back to 1965 to rescind Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246. Issued just weeks after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, and little more than a year after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the order extended the prohibition against racial discrimination in employment to federal contractors. Unlike D.E.I., which is typically voluntary and aimed at changing company culture or social dynamics, Johnson’s order required private contractors doing work on behalf of the federal government to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”
Months before Johnson signed the executive order, he delivered a commencement address at Howard University that underlined the meaning of the civil-rights legislation he was signing into law, and the additional measures his Administration was to undertake. Having been pushed every step of the way by the civil-rights movement and uprisings in Harlem, Philadelphia, Rochester, and beyond, Johnson connected the Voting Rights Act to his efforts to pursue legislation that would foster economic opportunity for Black people. He described freedom as “the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school.” But, he continued, famously, “Freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.” In what he considered to be “the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights,” Johnson went on, “We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”
