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CORPORATE DEI WAS A TOOL OF THE ELITE. IRONICALLY, SO IS THIS
BACKLASH.  
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
March 10, 2025
Slate
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_ The battle over diversity and inclusion has always been about
labor. But Trump was able to frame it as something else. _

“Fight or Be Slaves”; Members of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters, the first successful African American Labor Union, at a 1955
ceremony., Bettmann via Getty Images

 

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Corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion rhetoric has never counted
as a meaningful step toward justice. “Identity politics” can be
wielded in counterproductive ways. And some performatively “woke”
people would do well to take an occasional nap. But whatever criticism
“DEI” deserves, it’s got nothing to do with the crackdown coming
out of the White House.

Since the inauguration, President Donald Trump has—in the name of
banning “DEI”—forced federal agencies to gut labor and
antidiscrimination protections across the entire government. He has
directed agencies to ban books and cultural heritage months, reject
grant applications, scrub thousands of government webpages of
innocuous words like “equity” and “gender,” and remove visible
honors or recognition for women and people of color in federal
buildings. He has also directed the attorney general to threaten
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companies that have DEI initiatives, creating a panic even outside of
organizations that get federal funding.

At the same time, his administration has elevated candidates
with scant qualifications
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positions of power across the federal bureaucracy. (Many of them have
very active _disqualifications
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And Trump has fired women and Black officers
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senior positions, including in the military, where he fired the Black
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to replace him with a white
retired general, who is both significantly less qualified 
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the job by military standards and ineligible for the role by
those same military standards
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That this is all being done in the name of “merit-based opportunity
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as Trump’s executive order put it, is patently absurd. But it’s
also a very clever political trick.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are, at their simplest,
practices that aim to make fairness and meritocracy possible in
systems that have never attempted either. (In the U.S., before these
practices existed, merit was one of the _least_ important
qualifications for societal advancement.) For much of the
20th century, diversity and inclusion efforts were the work of
patient incrementalists who simply sought to standardize education
opportunities and hiring practices.

But after 2020, DEI terminology took on a new valence. As a result of
George Floyd’s murder, people around the world rose up against the
police terror and violence to which they had been subjected for
hundreds of years. The response from those in power was immediate. The
World Bank established a “task force on racism.” Corporations
rushed to hire DEI consultants who could help them pivot or diversify.
Government agencies also worked to meet the moment; the CIA produced a
dozen bizarre recruitment videos
[[link removed]] reaching
out to multiple identity groups, including queer and Indigenous
people.

Some of this work was well-intentioned. Some of it resulted in
meaningful change. But there is no denying that it was also shot
through with empty lip service—that on many levels, elite
institutions and powerful organizations were performing symbolic
identity politics to bolster their reputations without enacting
meaningful material reforms. Many efforts were made to rebrand, but
not replace, existing institutions. The new initiatives wrapped
corporate entities in a shawl of faux progressivism, donned to placate
societal demands for civil rights, even while these same entities
continued to oppose unionization
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other efforts to meaningfully empower the workers whose diversity they
were so eager to acknowledge.

But the tides have shifted. In 2020, after police violently put down a
protest in downtown Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser renamed that
block “Black Lives Matter Plaza” and had those words painted on
the pavement—a show of defiance to Trump during his first term. Now
in 2025, Bowser has backtracked
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announcing that Black Lives Matter Plaza will be no more. Corporations
across the country began reversing course
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their DEI-specific programming and commitments even before Trump took
office again. In the wake of these hastily applied—and quickly
abandoned—initiatives, all that was left, for so many, was the
hollow perception that “DEI” itself was bullshit. And that
concessions to “identity” were nothing but self-satisfied branding
exercises and gatekeeping tools of the elite.

Though the higher education system in the United States is older than
the country itself—Harvard first opened its doors
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century before the 1776 American Revolution—women were still not
able to earn bachelor’s degrees for the better part of the century
that followed the founding. The admission criteria built up over the
20th century responded, on the whole, less to the question of how to
maximize the merit of the admitted class of students than to the
problem of, say, limiting the number of Jewish students
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each class.

Ruby Bridges
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her peers required extraordinary interventions, including armed
federal agent escorts through violent mobs, just to succeed in
attending newly racially integrated grade schools in the Jim Crow
South. Meanwhile, John F. Kennedy, known for mediocre grades, famously
penned a single paragraph
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find himself at Harvard. (“I have always wanted to go there, as I
have felt that it is not just another college, but is a university
with something definite to offer,” he wrote. “Then too, I would
like to go to the same college as my father.”)

Kennedy’s essay was tacit acknowledgement of the fact that the
system of opportunity that preceded Civil Rights was not even facially
“meritocratic.” Elite institutions of higher education were
essentially finishing schools for the well-to-do and well-connected:
however neutral the letter of the admissions requirements, the
“competition” between the Kennedys and the Bridgeses of the world
had been won well in advance. Apartheid is not meritocracy.

Every single change to this non-meritocratic status quo—in education
and in the workforce—was won against the dogged resistance of the
very political legacies
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claimed by the president and the Republican Party that has
been reshaped
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his image. The first women to earn bachelor’s degrees in 1836 did so
at Oberlin College
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abolitionist institution that was also a stopover point on one of the
many networks of the Underground Railroad
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supported African Americans freeing themselves from slavery. That
network faced violent opposition from Southern bounty hunters and
Northern vigilantes alike, including “kidnapping clubs
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run by members of the New York Police Department with the support of
Wall Street financiers, judges, and politicians. The abolitionists
succeeded only because of equally comprehensive efforts led by
“Vigilance Committees
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to raise funds, collect intelligence, and harbor fugitives.

The same goes for the more recent history that explains the very laws
the Trump administration is undermining in its anti-DEI crusade. As
Adam Serwer chronicled at the Atlantic, Trump’s efforts to replace
high-level Black administrators echo the efforts
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the Woodrow Wilson administration to resegregate the government in the
1910s. It took the full might of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters
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against the political backdrop of a world war to force President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt to make the first executive orders
prohibiting racial discrimination by federal contractors in 1941. The
right wing of this country had to be dragged kicking and screaming
into the most basic commitments to even consider job applications and
admissions applications from people with the wrong race, religion, or
pronouns.

The values of diversity and inclusion descend from this fight, and
represent the closet thing we have to a political movement for
meritocracy. The opposition to “DEI” that occupies the White House
is a smokescreen for a step in exactly the opposite direction, plain
as day: make sure the rich get richer, and that no pesky standards of
fairness or rules get in the way.

The fact is, the battle over “DEI” has always been a fight about
labor, work, and who has access to the jobs and political institutions
that build and protect wealth. If we ever forgot that, we’re
learning it again now. We know that the administration’s problem
with our institutions is not their insufficient commitment to the
underlying values of the Civil Rights Movement. Trump and Elon Musk
are enraged at even the half-measures taken in the general direction
of fairness. (That those half-measures can be lumped together under a
bureaucratic-sounding acronym—DEI—probably makes Musk and his
cohort feel they have even greater license to paint them as tools of
the nanny state.)

Musk and the other tech CEOs who are bankrolling the right wing today
began a crusade against DEI because it represented a modicum of
control 
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didn’t have over their employees. And they are winning that control
back by a campaign for seizing total power: not just over their
workers, but over all of us. We are already seeing how a game that
only billionaires can afford to play will be rigged against the rest
of the population. Amazon’s Whole Foods, for example, is openly
declaring
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it will defy a labor election and labor law since the president
has illegally undermined
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National Labor Relations Board that enforces the law. And many of the
powerful who once embraced DEI are also now delighted to disavow it.
They are free of accountability. It no longer serves their hold on
power.

The trick of Trump’s rhetoric is to look back at the moves elites
made to cover their DEI bases, hail those moves as hollow, then
channel the resentment created by those moves to turn around and
solidify _actual _elite power, which lies in money—and
the political institutions
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control who has access to earning it.

If meritocracy is to be won in this country, we have to create the
possibility for lasting change first. Accomplishing this task is
directly at odds with “restoring” a mythic past. No matter how
many times the president or his party use the word “meritocracy,”
it is clear that the game rigged for the Kennedys and against the
Bridgeses of this country is the America they want to return to
“greatness.” And no matter how they phrase it, the case for that
is meritless.

_OLÚFẸ́MI O. TÁÍWÒ [[link removed]] is
Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He
received his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of California Los
Angeles. He has published in academic journals ranging from Public
Affairs Quarterly, One Earth, Philosophical Papers, and the American
Philosophical Association newsletter Philosophy and the Black
Experience. He is the author of ELITE CAPTURE
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REPARATIONS.
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_SLATE is a daily magazine on the web and podcast network. Founded in
1996, we are a general-interest publication offering analysis and
commentary about politics, news, business, technology, and culture.
Slate’s strong editorial voice and witty take on current events have
been recognized with numerous awards, including the National Magazine
Award for General Excellence Online._

* Donald Trump
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* Gender
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* Elon Musk
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* George Floyd
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