With the stroke of a pen, President Trump wiped out a massive government bureaucracy that promoted diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Even more important, he rescinded President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 executive order establishing affirmative action programs for hiring and promotion.
This changes our approach to minority relations: not just DEI but a half-century of affirmative action. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination by race, religion, sex or national origin. President Johnson’s executive order the following year went beyond removing barriers: It called for taking affirmative action to hire and promote minorities and women.
I spent most of my career in AT&T’s affirmative action program, one of the first in industry. It worked fairly well. The company promoted minorities and women aggressively, but that did not keep me from getting promoted. You can quibble about whether a specific person is the best qualified for a particular job, but I never saw the company promote a person who was unqualified.
Being the largest company in the world made AT&T’s affirmative action relatively painless. If you were passed over for a promotion you had a shot at the next one. The company also had lots of women who supervised operators and service reps and were more than ready to move up.
Over the years affirmative action became less affirmative and more regimented. Colleges began setting racial and ethnic quotas for admission. While I always had a chance to be promoted at AT&T, race-based hiring and promotion foreclosed that opportunity in many institutions. A college-professor friend was told that when he retired his successor would NOT be a white man.
DEI used race as a determining factor for practically everything. The Black Lives Matter riots in 2020 spread DEI throughout the economy and culture. The Biden administration created a massive bureaucracy and a government-wide obsession with race, ethnicity and gender.
The idea of using discrimination to correct past discrimination failed. In 2023 the Supreme Court struck down racial preferences in college admissions. Mandatory DEI training sessions exacerbated workplace conflict, Bud Light learned that diversity doesn’t sell beer and Americans refused to vote for candidates who called them racists.
DEI did not improve race relations: The percentage of Americans who say relations between black and white people are good declined sharply from 72% of whites and 66% of blacks in 2013 to 43%/33% in 2021.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 still is the law of the land (and the reason why the discriminatory aspects of DEI were struck down). Unlike 1964, when President Johnson relied on Republican votes to pass the law, a couple of generations of Americans have grown up in a society guided by affirmative action.
Today there is nothing unusual about women and minority group members in positions of power. Workplace inequality between women and men has narrowed. It’s hard to believe Archie Bunker was considered radical in 1970. There’s widespread acceptance for gay, lesbian and disability rights. Interracial marriage has become normalized and the number of mixed-race people is growing. My kids went to integrated schools. Despite disagreements about race relations, there’s a broad consensus that discrimination is wrong: a consensus that did not exist 60 years ago.
We still need a civil rights movement, however. Progress for women and minorities is not a done deal and the Civil Rights Act needs continued enforcement. We’re still sorting out how to accommodate trans people without hurting women. Antisemitism is a growing problem. Racial disparities haven’t gone away.
Much of the black-oriented civil rights movement forfeited moral advantage when it was co-opted by the Democratic Party and race hustlers. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was purchased by the teacher’s union to oppose black parents who want school choice. The Southern Poverty Law Center has become its own hate group. The American Civil Liberties Union advocates for illegal immigrants and opposes anti-crime legislation. Black Lives Matter took everybody to the cleaners and nobody listens to Al Sharpton.
Civil rights organizations for women, LBGTQ, the disabled, etc., have important work to do but must decide whether they are advocacy groups or partisan operatives.
I’d like to see civil rights become a bipartisan issue as it was in 1964. The shift in the political parties, with the Republican party becoming working-class and multiracial, gives Republicans a vested interest in helping their voters in inner-city neighborhoods. Perhaps Democrats, having lost credibility as the champions of civil rights, will figure out that calling their opponents racist and sexist is not a winning strategy.
A bipartisan commitment to enforce the Civil Rights Act could focus on systemic racism in Democrat cities as well as in Republican election laws. Cities that provide less police protection for minority neighborhoods and lock minority children into failing schools merit scrutiny from federal civil rights lawyers. So do universities that condone antisemitism. I’d like to see civil rights demonstrations outside both Democratic and Republican institutions.
Eliminating DEI can clear the way for a renewed focus on civil rights. Call it civil rights 2.0.