Words & Phrases We Could Do Without

The anti-DEI crusade is about cementing white male dominance

As with “CRT,” the MAGA censors, thought police (aimed at rooting out “improper ideology”), Great Replacement paranoids, and outright bigots cannot tell us precisely what “DEI” is—they merely know they are dead set against it. Teaching children to hate America. Making whites feel guilty. Quotas. None of that resembles the “DEI” practices utilized by universities, employers, researchers, and government entities—but that’s irrelevant to them.

Nuanced concepts (e.g., outreach to recruit Americans of all backgrounds, medical trials to ensure women’s physiology is taken into account) do not appeal to people who think Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick epitomize “merit.”

Increasingly “DEI” in the MAGA dictionary has come to mean “Blacks” or “women” or “a convenient scapegoat who represents the ‘other.’” A plane goes down? DEI. A museum pays tribute to the greatness of Jackie Robinson? DEI.

Increasingly, the anti-DEI mission has become an explicit attempt to blame or erase non-whites, females, and other disenfranchised groups. Remember when they used to oppose “canceling” people and policing speech? MAGA ideologues no longer hide their core belief: that white men are inherently qualified, the “true” history of America has been made by white males, and non-white men are to blame for all calamities.

But the MAGA obsession with eradicating “DEI” is downright ludicrous. In their zeal to Make America White Again, the Trump word police went after the Smithsonian and the National Zoo. “The zoo boasts prominently on its website that it has ‘more than 2,200 animals representing almost 400 different species,’” Dana Milbank pointed out. “Could there be a more brazen embrace of DEI?”

It is impossible to disguise the anti-intellectual, anti-truth, and anti-American bent of the anti-DEI fanatics. The National Park Service webpage no longer features Harriet Tubman nor extols the Underground Railroad, “the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, through the end of the Civil War.” The website has scrubbed any reference “to the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage.” Instead, we get a celebration of “American ideals of liberty and freedom,” CNN reports, without any explicit mention of slavery. American history without slavery—how convenient!

The ham-handed effort to bolster white advantage cannot conceal its real intent: To resegregate government and elite institutions. To take us back in time. Donald Trump’s repeal of LBJ’s Executive Order 11375 gave away the game.

“LBJ’s order gave the Secretary of Labor the authority to ensure equal opportunity for people of color and women in federal contractors’ recruitment, hiring, training and other employment practices,” Axios explained. “It required federal contractors to refrain from employment discrimination and take affirmative action to ensure equal opportunity ‘based on race, color, religion, and national origin.’”

Can’t have that!

At times, the anti-DEI crusade seems aimed to repeal the fundamental statutory and constitutional protections that prohibit discrimination and give meaning to “All men are created equal.” After all, if the MAGA crowd really wanted to root out unfairness and promote merit they would insist we reject unqualified white appointees and dump legacy admissions at colleges and universities schools. Instead, the anti-DEI crusade aims to bolster white entitlement and eradicate any sense of obligation to right society’s wrongs.

In barring the collection of data that would reveal racial, ethnic, religious, and/or gender discrimination, the MAGA forces implicitly allow it to go undetected. “Systemic inequalities plague the health care landscape across race, gender, geography, socioeconomic status, and education levels,” the American Journal of Managed Care explained. “These issues are systemic and largely result from policies like redlining in mortgage lending, transportation and housing policies, and criminal sentencing.” In other words, “Implementing DEI policies and training in health care has allowed providers to become more aware of the need to develop their cultural competency skills to adequately serve growing patient populations and health disparities among various populations.”

If we cease to collect maternal and infant mortality data by race, the disproportionate deaths of Black women and infants will go undetected, and the causes of the disparities unaddressed.

For the MAGA gang, the problem seems to be the attempt to uncover, quantify, and remedy discrimination, not the discrimination itself. We cannot measure or correct what we do not know. By banning language and data collection (including medical trials, crime statistics, educational outcomes, etc.), that reference to prejudice based on race and/or gender goes unchecked.

Let’s get real. The entire “DEI” search and destroy mission is a canard. “DEI” has lost all meaning. The MAGA gang is not seeking to undo unfair practices—but to give license to discrimination, elevate white victimhood, erase non-whites’ place and invaluable role in American history, and cement disadvantages we have never truly removed. If they actually explained why they opposed diversity, equity, and inclusion, few Americans would tolerate their effort to arrest social, political, and economic progress. When they oppose DEI, they are telling us they support homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion (as former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg pointed out).

Since DEI’s meaning has been so obscured, the rest of us should, under this sham administration, stop using “DEI” to describe what is simply adherence to anti-discrimination regulations, laws, and constitutional provisions—which require we measure, understand, and address discrimination. And let’s call the anti-DEI fetish what it is: A blatant attempt to whitewash American history and solidify historical disadvantages that white supremacists resent giving up.