DEI is done, writes Coleman Hughes in The Free Press. President Donald Trump pledged in his inaugural address to "forge a society that is color-blind and merit-based” and went on to order the executive branch and its agencies “to terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements.”
When Hughes' book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, came out in February, he didn't foresee that his call for racial color blindness was so close to fulfillment, he writes.
"Trump’s executive order accurately describes the enormousness of the DEI bureaucracy that has arisen in government and private industry to infuse race in hiring, promotion, and training," he writes.
Among other things, Trump repealed President Lyndon Johnson's 1965 executive order requiring government contractors to take “affirmative action” to ensure that employees are hired “without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin,” Hughes writes. In that era, affirmative action "meant that companies had to make an active effort to stop discriminating against blacks," which had been the norm. "Only later did the phrase come to be associated with the requirement to actively discriminate in favor of blacks and other minorities."
"Trump’s executive order gets closer to the original intent of the civil rights movement than today’s DEI policies," he argues.
"Affirmative action has long been unpopular with the public, which is why it lost two separate referendums in the solid-blue state of California," writes Hughes. When the 2023 Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, the ruling "was met more with resignation than with protest on the left."
Donald Trump didn't go after DEI or affirmative action in his first term, he notes. But the vibes have shifted.
It's not clear how colleges and universities will be affected, reports Jessica Blake for Inside Higher Ed. However, the order designates any institution that receives federal financial aid -- nearly all colleges -- as a subcontractor, and states that colleges’ employment, procurement and contracting practices “shall not consider race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin in ways that violate the nation’s civil rights laws.”
“The general counsels for every major corporation and university are going to be reading President Trump’s executive orders on DEI and figuring out how they can avoid getting ruined by federal civil rights lawyers,” tweeted Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute. “Huge changes imminent.” He wrote about the campaign to defeat DEI in City Journal.
"Many Americans, including plenty of people who didn’t vote for Trump, won’t mourn the end of tedious corporate D.E.I. trainings and have little sympathy for radical student protesters," writes New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg in a column on Trump's plan to crush the academic left.
“I’ve been talking with executives in Silicon Valley, investors on Wall Street and administrators within the universities,” Rufo told her. “They’re all telling me the same thing: The resistance to Trump’s agenda is at an all-time low.”
Corporations are dropping DEI. Companies should admit that "DEI programs don't work," writes David Millard Haskell in Quillette. He is a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University and senior fellow at the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy. There's no evidence for the claim that these programs help diverse people work together, he concludes in a scholarly report. To the contrary, "a substantial number of studies are consistent with the opposite conclusion: that DEI training actually increases bigotry, foments division, and possibly even imposes psychological harm by seeking to convince otherwise tolerant and liberal-minded trainees that they harbour hidden forms of hatred."