Students at Ohio State University protest the university's preemptive dissolution of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion before right-wing state legislation mandated it.
“We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘Critical Race Theory.’
-Reactionary Propagandist Christopher Ruffo, 2021
Since the first day of Donald Trump’s second presidency, a new obsession has dominated his rhetoric and policy. He’s added a new fixation to the far-right pantheon of scapegoats and roots of evil that over the years have included Jews, communists, gays, and cultural degeneracy — now DEI is all the rage. DEI, which stands for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is a catch-all term referring to the broader set of policies around affirmative action and inclusiveness across identity in American workplaces or schools. In a slew of executive orders, Trump has attempted to wipe away every last vestige of “DEI.”
What are the Republicans attempting to uproot? Over the last 2 decades, an increasing number of institutions — from colleges to large corporations — have founded DEI departments in their bureaucracies or otherwise included elements of DEI into their HR departments or workplace trainings. These practices have arisen upon the framework of affirmative action which has attempted to address the profound racial inequality in higher education and the corporate world through entrance quotas and additional supports for students and workers of marginalized identities since the 1970s.
Affirmative action was a core part of a reorientation on the part of large sections of the U.S. ruling class in the 1970s. The mass civil rights movement of the 60s spurred on the landmark 1965 Civil Rights Act, ended legalized Jim Crow segregation in the South, and gained concessions for various social welfare and affirmative action policies which became core to the U.S. governments’ new posture on oppression. Rid of their Southern segregationist wing, the Democratic Party claimed to offer a vision for a new America — where the promises of the American Dream would be opened up to all of those who had been forcibly excluded from it.
Despite a large-scale backlash to the progressive momentum of the 1960s in the following years, the rhetoric of social progress and some of the affirmative action policies inaugurated in the previous period have continued through to our day. Many different programs and policies came and went, such as bussing to desegregate schools and quotas for oppressed people in college admissions. The new legal reality after the successes of the Civil Rights movement and the continuing anti-racist movements have made some strides in addressing racial and gender gaps in schools and workplaces despite continuing de-facto segregation and disparities along a variety of metrics for black, brown, and indigenous people.
However, these same strides have been the focal point for reactionary movements. A segment of the white population, agitated by the far-right and the Republican Party, violently resisted “forced bussing” and the integration of schools in the 1970s and ended up quite successful in stopping progress on that front. The meteoric rise of private and charter schools as an alternative to the public schools which must respect civil rights is one of the ways that backlash continues. Today’s war on DEI is the culmination of a long tendency in U.S. politics.
There’s nothing new about the current war on “DEI” by the Trump administration and the Republican Party. This is just the latest iteration of the tried-and-true ruling class strategy of divide-and-rule and scapegoating.
The reactionary propagandist, Christopher Ruffo, summed up the logic of the DEI panic aptly in his description for his reason for producing the previous reactionary panic around critical race theory:
“We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘Critical Race Theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”
Similarly to “CRT,” “DEI” has become a scary 3-letter acronym which does not represent only the discrete set of ideas or programs the term itself refers to, but the entirety of social progress over the last decades.
The DEI hysteria, just like the Critical Race Theory hysteria of the past years, sticks because it plays on the prejudices and nightmares of an important segment to the American populace. The increasing space for marginalized people in society, despite the continuing deep inequalities, presents an existential threat for White America, at least emotionally. When one is invested in an unequal society, any sign of equality is seen as an existential threat.
For the Republicans, this type of chauvinist demagoguery is absolutely core to their popular appeal as a party. While the core of Republican policy centers around economy — deregulation, privatization, short-term super-profits for capital, etc. — these policies are quite stale considered by themselves. They are dreams for the capitalist class, but abstractions for the middle and lower classes — besides for their terrible impacts. Consequently, to secure allegiance, the Republicans infuse their core economic doctrine with the worst type of reactionary ideology — from sexism, to racism, transphobia, xenophobia, and everything in-between.
These appeals strike the middle classes, and especially the white middle classes, deeply since they pinpoint a problem (blacks, immigrants, trans women) and offer a solution (social violence.)
In the minds of white racists, America has been taken over. They rely on Trump and the Republicans to “Make America Great Again” by bringing back their imagined utopia of 1950s American life, when the American dream seemed to be a reality — at least for white men — with access to jobs and homeownership and when women, queers, and blacks were “put in their place.” They attribute the decay of U.S. capitalism in the past decade, with its declining living standards, as a product of the “degeneracy” of accepting oppressed groups into polite society.
They see DEI and affirmative action as a serious injustice against themselves. In their thinking, the groups which have benefited from affirmative action are inherently undeserving. By opening up academic and job opportunities for the undeserving, the “rightful” hegemony of the privileged is infringed upon. The systematic exclusion for centuries of oppressed groups from any positions of power or privilege is seen as the natural order of things: “it’s common sense!”.
These fears of loss of dominance pairs, especially for the middle classes, with economic fears. Unemployment, stagnant wages, the increasing unattainability of home-ownership, credit and medical debt, and the other basic realities of the current neoliberal order create a fear which is whipped up and redirected with this chauvinistic scapegoating directed from the top. The deep-seated prejudice of a layer of the white masses is expertly exploited using the DEI and CRT panic and the racism that undergirds both.
This type of reactionary ideology and scapegoating is a key ingredient in establishing what Theodore Allen terms an “intermediate social control stratum” in his vital work The Invention of the White Race. Allen argues that the ruling class in any given society cannot rule alone. In class societies, the ruling class always constitutes an insignificant minority of the population, yet seizes and hoards the wealth, knowledge, and power in society through the exploitation and oppression of the mass of laborers. This type of violence and inequality can only continue as long as there are layers of society far wider than the ruling class itself who have an investment in the existing system and the social relations it depends upon. A minority cannot govern such a system through force alone — ideas that can be believed in are required.
Despite also suffering due to the inequalities and injustices of the present American system, the U.S. middle classes are brought behind it with ploys like the current DEI hysteria. The ruling class maintains hegemony by weaponizing chauvinistic systems and ideas which can secure the allegiance of a large social base within the middle classes. This systematic subjugation of large parts of the population has various economic and social benefits for those who rule, but just as importantly, it gives this intermediate strata a visceral sense that they do have more to lose than their chains.
There indeed is a problem with DEI however, and it isn’t its radicalism. On the contrary, policies associated with DEI don’t go nearly far enough. These policies are band-aids on the bullet wounds riddling American society. These kinds of wounds can’t just be patched up with changes in hiring policies and diversity trainings for predominately white, white-collar workers. They cut deep, all the way to the bones of U.S. capitalism.
In the final analysis, DEI policies are minuscule concessions to movements for justice which aim to contain radical energies with the promise of integration into education and the corporate world for an infinitesimally small fraction of marginalized people. The liberal-wing of the ruling class seeks to win the fealty of the most privileged elements of oppressed groups to give the illusion of freedom and equality to the oppressed masses at large, deflecting responsibility for the continuing crises facing millions of oppressed workers away from the capitalist system.
But to join in on the attacks against DEI would be a total betrayal to the struggle against oppression. In reality, Trump and his cronies' war on DEI is not seriously concerned with anti-racism trainings for corporate boards or inclusive bureaucracies. DEI is just the latest dog-whistle used to rebrand plain old prejudice. The far-right wants to wipe away all the social, political, and economic gains made by blacks, latinos, arabs, women, and transfolk to secure a rabid mass-base among the white middle classes and gain all the advantages accrued from super-exploiting significant sections of the working classes.
So what should our posture be towards DEI and what must our organizing seek to accomplish? Given the fury with which the Republicans have attacked the Democratic Party for its unflagging commitment to the “woke Marxist destruction of the white race,” it would be easy to assume the Democrats are our saviors from the ravages of a reactionary party. The Democrats, portrayed by their rivals as radical advocates for social equality and communism, are in fact no friends of progress either.
The Democratic leadership has maintained a deafening silence in the face of these broad attacks on DEI and oppressed people more broadly. So far, Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries haven’t even pretended to be in defense of the oppressed. At best they have established an ineffectual policy of pointing out Trump’s hypocrisies and excesses. But more often (and worse) the Democratic politicians have spent their energy whining about their constituents' anger at them! They respond to their naive supporters' calls for action and struggle with lectures on the culpability of the Republicans and their own powerlessness. The hundreds of millions of working-class Americans can make a claim to powerlessness today in this sham democracy, but such an assertion is unbecoming of one of the most powerful political parties in world history.
They have stopped pretending they’re fighters for progress — we need to stop pretending they are too. They started the unprecedented crackdown on democratic rights in an attempt to smash student activism and the Palestine solidarity movement after October 2023 which broke ground for Trump’s disgusting attacks on organizers like Mahmoud Khalil. The Democrats tried to push the most anti-immigrant legislation in decades last year and jeered at the Republicans for their moderation in hating immigrants. The Democrats have spent the period after the George Floyd rebellion of 2020 calling for more funding for police and crackdowns on anti-racist movements while they helped manufacture a phony crime panic which set the stage for even more Trumpist racism. These people have been telling us they are our enemies for years — it is time we listen to them. When they oppose Trump, it is about aesthetics, not politics. The only use for an opposition party like this is to prevent a real opposition party from ever spoiling the good thing the 2 parties have got going: pure unchallenged capitalist domination.
We can’t let the Democrats lead us in the fight against systematic attacks on DEI and oppressed people more broadly. Where they lead, they only mislead. But more often than not they don’t even want to lead. They make it clear, typically by their silence, that they don’t want to go through the effort of putting up any serious opposition to Trump’s reactionary program.
Instead, we must pick up and lead this fight ourselves — workers and oppressed peoples. By organizing the masses in defense from these attacks on DEI, we can start to build the type of movement we need to not only fight back against Trump’s regime, but win much more than “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” In our workplaces and schools, we need to take an active approach towards resisting the whole slate of reactionary policies being imposed from above. Unions, student groups, and community organizations can be built up as vehicles towards mass resistance.
The fight against oppression of marginalized groups must be at the core of our political activities. The best way to combat the prejudices that the ruling class tries to instill in the workers is by aiding oppressed peoples in their fights for their rights and working to unite people behind a liberatory politics of the working class. There are many, both on the left and right, who try to wave away these struggles as “woke”, “divisive” and “culture war nonsense,” advocating for a slavish fixation on “economic issues.” Rightists make this claim to obscure the way their politics are dependent on the reactionary “culture war nonsense” they claim to oppose. Some on the left, on the other hand, try to make out these struggles as distractions from the concerns of normal (white, male, cis, culturally conservative) workers.
This caricature of leftism totally reverses the duties of the movement. It is absolutely true the ruling class uses “culture war” issues to divide up the working class. The only effective response to these strategies of divide and rule, however, is building up a principled unity against oppression. The path to progress isn’t by asking oppressed people to drop their “particularist” issues in favor of “working class unity,” but by challenging the chauvinism and prejudice that the ruling class cultivates. We can’t lower ourselves down to the level of the most backward and ignorant workers, we must fight alongside the most conscious workers to raise the level of the whole working class.
Our tasks as class-conscious, working class militants today are massive. The Trump administration is attempting a campaign of Shock and Awe to crush all opposition before it can materialize, and the so-called progressives of the Democratic Party not only refuse to fight back, but even adapt to these reactionary politics. If the Republicans are allowed to implement their full program (reflected in “Project 2025”), a serious portion of the progress won through struggle by the exploited and oppressed over the last half-century could be wiped away in months.
It would be all too easy to wait for some savior on high to prevent this disaster, or to succumb to total demoralization in the face of this massive onslaught. But we ourselves can fight back and win. Only through mass organizing can we turn the tide of reaction and make serious inroads against this oppressive system. Through the defense of the admittedly circumscribed gains of social struggle that our enemies denounce as “DEI”, we can transform defeat into the fuel for a struggle for liberation that will go far further in uprooting oppression than the band-aids offered by those who seek to reform the system in order to preserve it. An end to racism, sexism, transphobia, xenophobia, and all forms of bigotry is possible, but we need to fight for it.