THE PERVERSE DEFENSE OF DEI

National Review

 

The Perverse Defense of DEI

By Rich Lowry

February 5, 2025 2:35 PM

 

Colorblindness supposedly equals race-consciousness.

 

If you think meritocracy inevitably means white domination, you’re either a white racist or a supporter of DEI.

 

Stephen A. Smith, the sportscaster, is the latter and is convinced that talk of neutral standards is a tool of white supremacy.

 

Riffing off President Trump’s comments about DEI at the FAA after the Reagan National crash, Smith opined, “The way that the Trump administration is handling it — ‘we want the most qualified, we want the smartest, we want this, we want that’ — what you’re really saying is we want white dominance again. That’s what you’re really saying. You want white dominance!”

 

“You’re always using the word qualified, qualified, qualified,” Smith continued scornfully, objecting to the notion that “everybody that got a position through DEI is not qualified.”

 

“We know what you’re implying,” he added. “We know what you’re insinuating!”

 

Smith’s position amounts to saying, “How dare you suggest that a system to hire and promote people based on race and gender and other characteristics is hiring and promoting people based on race and gender and other characteristics.”

 

This is a common trope in the DEI debate, where the defenders of an overtly race-conscious ideology perversely impute race-consciousness to the defenders of colorblindness.

 

The New York Times ran a story on Trump’s attacks on DEI in the wake of the midair crash above the Potomac River, asserting: “The meaning behind his words was clear, that diversity equals incompetence. And for many historians, civil rights leaders, scholars and citizens, it was an unmistakable message of racism in plain sight at the highest levels of American government.”

 

This, of course, conflates opposition to DEI with opposition to any diversity as such, in what is a ridiculous smear.

 

The critics of DEI have no problem with qualified — to use the word Smith finds so offensive — people of all backgrounds filling various jobs or getting accepted at elite universities. It is the DEI ideologues who care deeply about the racial and gender composition of every institution.

 

The Times quotes Margaret Huang, who is, sad to say, the president and chief executive of the Southern Poverty Law Center, declaring that the message of DEI’s enemies is “that women, Black and brown communities are inherently less capable, and if they hold positions of power or authority in government or business, it must be because the standards were lowered.”

 

No, the contention is that if standards are lowered in the name of DEI, then standards have been lowered to the detriment of the institution that has lowered them.

 

If proponents of DEI want to stop having a debate about qualifications, they could simply support across-the-board, race-neutral standards — but then they wouldn’t be proponents of DEI.

 

There is another, opposite tack of DEI’s defenders, who want to portray it as a form of meritocracy itself.

 

On This Week with George Stephanopoulos last weekend, Donna Brazile said that DEI “includes every American, women, minorities, people with disabilities, veterans” — apparently not noticing that she left out a large category of Americans, white males, in her list of “every American.”

 

For Brazile, DEI is “a tool that enables the government or corporations or individuals to open the door, to remove barriers, to bring in the best and the brightest.”

 

In her account, DEI is simply equality of opportunity. Obviously, if the DEI regime meant nothing more than opening up doors to hire the best applicants, contract with the best companies, and admit the best students, there’d be no controversy over DEI.

 

Brazile’s version of DEI runs counter to the welter of quotas, race-conscious trainings, and race-exclusive programs that actually make up the regime.

 

If she opposed all of that, she’d indeed be a staunch defender of meritocracy, but, again, then there’d be no disagreement.

 

It’s a sign of the growing political and intellectual fragility of DEI that its defenders steadfastly refuse to cop to what they’re defending.