DEI’s Year in Retreat

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, December 21, 2023

 

At the outset of 2023, the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda showed no signs of slowing its march through American institutions.

 

The DEI outlook, which seeks to draft all public and private enterprises into an effort to level the cosmic scales by correcting for real and perceived historical injustices through the elevation of individuals possessed of certain accidents of birth, was popular. According to invested parties with an interest in anathematizing anti-DEI campaigns waged by Republicans such as Ron DeSantis, Americans saw it as a necessary corrective mechanism. The DEI extortion racket — in which private actors are threatened with social and commercial consequences if they do not reward anti-racism activists with high-status, well-compensated positions — rolled along into the spring. The rigid tenets of this new ideology captured colleges, high schools, and even elementary education. It tainted scientific study and found its way into the practice of medicine. It became a central feature of American politics at all levels of government. And there seemed to be no stopping it.

 

Indeed, why would there be? Compliance with the new regime was a lower-risk proposition than going against the grain. Those who objected to DEI’s assault on the social compact were easy to ignore. There were no consequences for frustrating DEI’s critics. But spring 2023 would see the DEI agenda reach the apex of its power. It was then that the counterattack began.

 

The Supreme Court fired the first major salvo. In June, the Court found that the president and fellows of Harvard University had effectively engaged in racial discrimination in the name of diversity, a decision that functionally invalidated racially conscious college admissions. In her dissent against the majority, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson reaffirmed DEI’s fatal conceit. The majority had only revealed its “obliviousness” by insisting upon “colorblindness for all.” Simply “deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,” she wrote. Jackson deserves credit for her ill-advised candor. The alternative to colorblindness in law is a form of positive racial discrimination from which Americans tend to recoil. When it is not camouflaged with ornate, superficially authoritative jargon, DEI is exposed for what it is: bigotry.

 

Even before the Supreme Court’s ruling, colleges across the country had begun to pare back the bloat associated with the expansion of DEI-related managerial tasks and the non-faculty administrators who oversaw them. Republican lawmakers in states such as Florida, Texas, North and South Carolina, and Ohio secured legal prescriptions against discriminatory practices in hiring and blocked in-state schools from imposing DEI-related ideological litmus tests on students. But after the Court’s ruling, schools weren’t the only private institutions that found themselves in the crosshairs of DEI’s critics.

 

Chief Justice John Roberts’s determination that racial admissions policies rest on the discriminatory assumption that, for example, “A black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer,” opened the floodgates to litigation targeting biased hiring practices, too. Suddenly, the private enterprises that once regarded DEI initiatives as a necessary concession to this menacing movement began to regard their investments in DEI as an unaffordable luxury. Accordingly, “corporate DEI world” began to shrink.

 

The new threat posed by running afoul of jurisprudential anti-discrimination precedent in combination with the belt-tightening demanded by an economic environment distorted by inflation saw the mass sloughing off of DEI professionals. “Since last July, Indeed [the job posting index] has seen DEI job postings drop by 38%,” NPR reported in August. The outlet followed the journey of one recently let-go equity administrator “trying to find another DEI job after her layoff in April.” It was a “disheartening” experience. “Positions she applied for were eliminated midway through the interview process,” the report observed.

 

That hardship became an increasingly common one by the fall. “2023 has undeniably shifted the DEI landscape for years to come,” read the memo from the DEI consultant Paradigm as reported by Axios. A wave of precedent-setting lawsuits, widely circulated open letters from advocacy groups, and threatening memos produced by Republican state attorneys general soon had their intended effect — companies began scaling back their DEI programs.

 

Then came the October 7 massacre.

 

Within weeks of the unprecedented slaughter of Israeli Jews, the contours of the debate over just how much those Israeli Jews deserved their kidnapping, rape, dismemberment, and murder began to take on a shape familiar to DEI’s opponents. Advocates of a paradigm that rendered the attack a highly abstract expression of anticolonial grievances gave cover for — or, in some cases, encouraged — hostility toward Jews in general. An unsettling spike in antisemitic activity on college campuses exposed the institutions most predisposed toward DEI as incubators of hatred. With that, anti-DEI activism transformed from the fringe preoccupation of the American Right into a source of mainstream trepidation.

 

“Those critiquing DEI aren’t just the extreme, right wing anti-progress activists, like the group who challenged affirmative action,” Paradigm’s Joelle Emerson mourned in a December interview with Axios. “They’re also liberal leaning people who are likely values-aligned with DEI in principle, but confused and misguided about what the work looks like in practice.” Hardly.

 

No one is confused. There’s nothing particularly complicated about the atavistic pursuit of advantages for one’s tribe at the expense of the outgroup. It’s the social configuration to which most vertebrates are instinctually predisposed. DEI initiatives have long conflicted with America’s egalitarian ideal. It’s only that you couldn’t say as much in polite company without risking exposure to professional consequences. What the Supreme Court and the October 7 massacre did was only to provide anxious observers with a permission structure to call this fashionable form of prejudice by its name.

 

The battle against DEI has not been won but has been joined. For the first time in a long time, DEI advocates are on the back foot. There will be a counteroffensive — there always is. But for now, DEI is in retreat, and its opponents are poised to maintain their tempo of operations into 2024.