This commentary was originally published by the San Antonio Express-News.
Diversity, equity and inclusion are words that appeal to American values, but DEI programming departs from American tradition.
Both President Donald Trump and Gov. Greg Abbott have pumped up their efforts to end diversity, equity and inclusion, known as DEI, programs everywhere they find them — in public schools and universities, government agencies and the military.
Trump’s Jan. 21 order also targeted publicly traded companies, and in Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton has focused on Costco and its support for DEI.
But I wonder if its executives really know what DEI is.
A lot of people don’t exactly know what DEI is, and that is intentional. DEI sounds like a good thing. Diversity and inclusion are strong American values, and as for equity — that’s like equality, right? Even U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders doesn’t know the difference.
But equity is not the same as equality. Equality means everyone must be given an equal chance to enter the race. The DEI crowd often frames equity as providing the resources that ensure equal opportunity, but it often comes across as everyone who enters the race must win it, regardless of how they perform.
Whatever the framing, Americans don’t like DEI. In 2023, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, where I am a senior fellow, polled Texans before Senate Bill 17, which outlawed DEI programs at public universities, and found that almost 70% of respondents, including a majority of Black and Hispanic Texans, did not want special programs to help minority students succeed.
Texans want every student to be treated the same. That’s equality.
The U.S. Constitution, as well as laws created in the 1960s to prevent discrimination on the basis of race or sex — Title VI and Title IX — remain in full force, and university programs for students, including mentoring, tutoring and counseling programs, continue across every campus.
But that is not what DEI is about, and it never has been. DEI’s mission is to change America’s sense of who we are by challenging our values and rewriting our history.
Contrary to what pro-DEI advocates are saying today, DEI was not part of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Martin Luther King Jr. was motivated by a dream that someday his children would be judged on the content of their character, not the color of their skin — a “color-blind” America. Today, DEI proponents have argued the term “color-blind” can perpetuate racism.
As a result of DEI, beginning in kindergarten and extending to university classrooms and company boardrooms, alternative narratives proclaim that America is founded on racism and white supremacy. DEI divides all Americans into two groups — oppressors, who are racists and colonizers, and those they oppress, whom they call victims.
DEI teaches that because of America’s original sin of slavery, we are all doomed to live in a country where those who are oppressed cannot succeed, no matter how hard they try, because racists have stacked the deck against them.
Now higher education officers and other DEI officials are suing Trump because he took immediate and comprehensive steps to end DEI.
It is hard to understand why Trump’s and Abbott’s actions to end DEI are even controversial. Over the last 20 years, DEI has not increased the numbers of minority students on campuses, and a Texas study conducted last year showed DEI programs also didn’t improve educational outcomes, including graduation rates or better job opportunities, for minority students.
DEI is a multibillion-dollar industry that has infiltrated our schools, businesses and government. But instead of making our communities more diverse and inclusive, it has divided us by race, gender, sexual orientation and ancestry. That’s why Trump’s edict to end DEI is both broad and deep. It needs to be.
