Trumpism’s anti-DEI agenda has nothing to do with legitimate criticisms of DEI

Jamelle Bouie (gift link) is very cogent on this:

To a certain set of well-meaning cultural liberals, D.E.I. refers mainly to H.R. mandates and ineffectual diversity training. If those people work in progressive nonprofits or any other space that attracts young, left-leaning people, D.E.I. might also mean the aggravating use of clumsy acronyms like “BIPOC” or linguistic inventions like “Latinx.”

For people of a more moderate or conservative persuasion, D.E.I. might mean affirmative action and the elevation of unqualified people to sensitive and high-status positions. (Although how one knows they are unqualified is often left unsaid.) It might also mean public adherence to liberal shibboleths about diversity — “virtue signaling” by “woke elites” in academia and the corporate world.

There is also a related (and not altogether incorrect) view from the political left that D.E.I. is just a smoke screen for capital and its servants — a multicultural gloss on the neoliberal agendas of the managerial classes, whether corporate bean counters or university administrators.

From a perspective inside academia, I would put more weight on the legitimacy of the last criticism, as in characterizing it as largely though not wholly correct.

But that’s a quibble. Bouie’s central point is that right wing criticisms of DEI have nothing to do with any of that.

You’ll find the surest evidence of the real meaning of the president’s anti-D.E.I. order in the fact that he also dismantled a decades-old requirement, originally promulgated by President Lyndon Johnson, that federal contractors try to employ more women, Black Americans and, in the years since, other people of color. One imagines that Johnson’s opponents, like the segregationist senators James Eastland and Strom Thurmond, would have been pleased to see his handiwork — and that of a generation of civil rights lawyers — tossed aside with the stroke of a pen.

The segregationist intent of the president’s policy is even more apparent when you turn your attention to some of the people he has chosen to place in his administration. For example, not long after Trump pledged to root out every federal worker involved in diversity efforts, he appointed Darren Beattie to serve as acting under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs at the State Department. Beattie was previously known for being fired from his job as a Trump speechwriter in 2018 for appearing at a conference attended by white nationalists in 2016.

His views haven’t changed. “Competent white men,” Beattie wrote last October, “must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”

“Competent white men must be in charge” is as close to a rallying cry as I can imagine for the Trump administration, although, of course, it strains credulity to say that either Trump or his subordinates count as competent.

But here is where even as trenchant a critic as Bouie doesn’t quite dive all the way down to the very bottom of this ideological cesspool:

[Trump’s] attack on D.E.I. isn’t about increasing merit or fighting wrongful discrimination; it is about reimposing hierarchies of race and gender (among other categories) onto American society. And following the goals of its intellectual architects — one of whom is infamous for his supremacist views — Trump’s war on D.E.I. is a war on the civil rights era itself, an attempt to turn back the clock on equal rights. Working under the guise of fairness and meritocracy, Trump and his allies want to restore a world where the first and most important qualification for any job of note was whether you were white and male, where merit is a product of your identity and not of your ability. As is true in so many other areas, the right’s accusation that diversity means unfair preferences masks a confession of its own intentions.

This understates the extent to which Trumpism is a political movement based at its core on patriarchal white supremacy. To Trump in particular and MAGA in general, having white men in charge of everything, as they used to be until quite recently, IS PRECISELY THE SAME THING AS “increasing merit and fighting wrongful discrimination.” That the superior race and the superior gender should be running everything is to these people a simple tautology, although 97% of them, including Trump himself, have no idea what that word means.

Saying that one of the nation’s two major political parties is wholly committed in theory and practice to patriarchal white supremacy sounds like something a hysterical feminist would say if she were playing the race card, so obviously that can’t be true.

Obviously.