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**APRIL 5, 2024**

On the Prospect website

Biden Nominee Asked About Discrepancies in Testimony

Sparkle Sooknanan said she wasn't lead counsel representing
vulture funds with Puerto Rican debt. Legal records and her own law firm
say otherwise. BY DAVID DAYEN

Autoworkers at Alabama's Mercedes-Benz Plant File for a Union Election

The announcement is the second UAW election planned in the South
this year. BY LUIS FELIZ LEON

Congress Poised to Prevent One Form of Student Debt Relief

The FAA reauthorization bans debt cancellation for flight education
loans. BY DAVID DAYEN

Antitax Nation

Michael Graetz's new book explains how clever marketing duped
America into shoveling more tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations.
BY DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

Kuttner on TAP

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**** DEI and Multiracial Coalition

Does redoubled commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion among the
already liberal address the deeper problem of systemic racism? Does it
backfire politically?

Our friend and

**Prospect** Board member Randall Kennedy is a distinquished law
professor at Harvard. Kennedy once clerked for Thurgood Marshall. He is
author of many books, including one titled

**For Discrimination**, a comprehensive defense of racial preference as
the necessary remedy for the long legacy of slavery, Jim Crow,
segregation, racial redlining, and other elements of state-sponsored
racism.

But Kennedy sees the DEI movement as increasingly counterproductive. In
a piece written April 2 for

**The Harvard Crimson**
,
Kennedy quotes an emblematic diversity statement proposed by Harvard's
Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. He writes:

For the purpose of showcasing attentiveness to DEI, the Center suggests
answering questions such as: "How does your research engage with and
advance the well-being of socially marginalized communities?"; "Do you
know how the following operate in the academy: implicit bias, different
forms of privilege, (settler-)colonialism, systemic and interpersonal
racism, homophobia, heteropatriarchy, and ableism?"; "How do you account
for the power dynamics in the classroom, including your own
positionality and authority?"; "How do you design course assessments
with EDIB [equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging] in mind?"; and
"How have you engaged in or led EDIB campus initiatives or programming?"

Kennedy sees such statements as "a troubling invitation to ritualized
dissembling. A cottage industry of diversity statement 'counseling'
has already emerged to offer candidates prefabricated, boilerplate
rhetoric."

Does Kennedy have a fair point, or has he gone neocon on us?

Let's recall the distinct origins of affirmative action and DEI.
Affirmative action was invented during the Johnson administration, as
civil rights advocates appreciated that it wasn't enough to simply
prohibit discrimination in employment, as the 1964 Civil Rights Act did.
Deep-seated racist pattens of recruitment required deliberate
countermeasures. So in 1965, LBJ issued Executive Order 11246

requiring federal contractors to "take affirmative action" to reach
minorities in recruitment, advertising, apprenticeship and training, as
well as employment. That was literally the first use of the term.

[link removed]

Affirmative action was embraced by corporate America, and quickly spread
to higher education. It was right-wing courts, not public opinion, that
challenged affirmative action, beginning with the

**Bakke** case of 1978.

In

**Bakke**, the Supreme Court deadlocked over whether an affirmative
action program at the University of California was illegal
discrimination against white people. In that case, Justice Lewis Powell
broke the tie by inventing, out of whole cloth, an entirely new
rationale for affirmative recruitment and acceptance of minorities:
diversity. It was pedagogically good

**for white students**to experience a diverse classroom.

With the Black Lives Matter movement, a more militant version of
diversity took hold
. In Ibram X.
Kendi's formulation, white liberals might think they were "allies" of
racial justice, but they needed to work harder at it. Meanwhile, the
high court, after chipping away at affirmative action in several cases
since

**Bakke**, finally killed it last year in Students for Fair Admissions
v. Harvard
.

So we now have two conceptions of racial remediation going in opposite
directions and talking past each other. Affirmative action, explicitly
aimed at the descendants of slaves, is in ruins. The more diffuse
concept of diversity, requiring ever more exquisite sensitivity, is
targeted at well-meaning white liberals. Meanwhile, in Trump country,
DEI doesn't make a dent in patterns of racism and stimulates ridicule
and backlash.

Kennedy writes, "Universities are under a legal, moral, and pedagogical
duty to take action against wrongful discriminatory conduct. But demands
for mandatory DEI statements venture far beyond that obligation into
territory that is full of booby-traps inimical to an intellectually
healthy university environment."

But the wider consequences may be even more serious. If we are ever to
return to the days when courts and broad public opinion were accepting
of affirmative action, that will take more robust multiracial governing
coalitions, who in turn will elect presidents who appoint progressive
judges and pursue progressive economic policies that bridge racial
divides.

The right question to be asked of DEI initiatives is not whether they
increase sensitivity among the already sensitive but whether they help
us get back to a multiracial governing coalition.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

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