Some DEI programs aren’t worth defending

Donald Trump did not campaign on a promise to end the Pentagon’s celebration of Black History Month. Nor did the Republican air advertisements pledging to remove displays honoring nonwhite and female scientists from the National Science Foundation. And no Trump 2024 bumper sticker featured the tagline: He’ll curb the military’s recruitment of Black engineers! Yet the administration has focused inordinate time and energy on such odd endeavors. While doing little to address persistent inflation (beyond seeking to exacerbate it through tariffs), Trump has waged total war on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) — an umbrella term for workplace policies that seek to advance the fair treatment and full economic participation of people from historically marginalized groups. In recent weeks, Democrats have debated how they should respond. Some argue that the party should expend little political capital on defending DEI — and that Trump’s war on diversity initiatives may even have some upside. This contingent insists that the most effective way to redress identity-based inequalities is through class-based activism and redistribution. They contend (with good reason) that unions are more effective than corporate diversity initiatives at closing wage gaps between white and nonwhite workers. And they note that universal redistributive programs do more to mitigate racial disadvantage than the economic policies associated with DEI (Social Security reduces the poverty rate among Black senior citizens by nearly 30 percentage points each year, whereas prioritizing nonwhite or minority-owned businesses in government contracting benefits only a tiny fraction of nonwhite people.) Some “class-first” progressives see DEI policies — and the identity-centric politics associated with them — as not merely inadequate but counterproductive. In an interview with the New York Times, president of The Nation magazine Bhaskar Sunkara argued that corporate diversity initiatives have “pushed workers to dwell on their differences” while identity politics “trained politicians to court racial and ethnic groups rather than appealing to interests that were more universal.” Sunkara and like-minded progressives therefore reason that Trump’s rollback of DEI initiatives might actually be politically beneficial, helping them recenter the Democratic Party on class politics. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie deems that last argument dangerously naive. Bouie grants some of Sunkara’s premises: He concedes that DEI programs often serve little purpose beyond corporate PR. But he contends that the Trump administration’s war on DEI is not narrowly targeted at frivolous multicultural messaging or diversity workshops. Rather, the administration is rolling back civil rights enforcement, denigrating nonwhite and female federal workers, and restricting the recruitment of Black professionals. All this is more likely to yield something approaching “segregation” than a renewal of class solidarity, in Bouie’s estimation. “To concede that this administration has a point about DEI,” he writes, “is not to concede that they have a point about corporate personnel management but to concede that they have a point about rolling back the latter half of the 20th century and extirpating 60 years of civil rights law.” I think there is some merit to both these perspectives. I share Bouie’s sense that the Trump’s DEI crackdown is fundamentally aimed at defending white privilege, and that little good can come from such endeavor. That said, to my mind, there is little question that Democrats would be well-advised to focus their messaging and agenda on furthering the common economic aspirations of working people of all stripes. But today, I’d like to focus on a narrower point: I think it would be a mistake for Democrats to deny the validity of the right’s complaints about DEI. in all cases. The unfortunate reality is that some of the conservative movement’s complaints with DEI programs — that they waste time, undermine meritocracy, and inhibit organizational success — are plausibly true in some discrete instances. Recognizing how DEI initiatives can go wrong — and working to avoid such errors — is likely a precondition for minimizing the political appeal of Trump’s racist project. Diversity trainings can be ineffective (and sometimes, kinda racist) The Trump administration has argued that DEI programs are “wasteful” and “radical.” I don’t think this is true of such initiatives in general. But it is doubtlessly true that some diversity efforts consume more time and money than they’re worth. And in some cases, those programs also advance ideas that are both controversial and harmful. For example, there is little evidence that diversity trainings — in which DEI specialists seek to counter the latent biases of managers and employees through workshops — have any discernible impact on prejudice in the workplace. In 2016, the Harvard Business Review published an analysis of three decades of data on the efficacy of diversity trainings. It found that such programs succeed primarily at teaching people how to correctly answer a questionnaire on bias — but that these “positive effects” rarely “last beyond a day or two.” Meanwhile, multiple studies indicated that such trainings sometimes make participants more biased than they had been previously. And yet, as of 2016, nearly all Fortune 500 companies invested time and money into such programming. What’s worse, certain diversity trainings promote ideas that are at once arguably racist and organizationally unhealthy. For instance, one of the most influential equity gurus, Tema Okun, argues in her trainings that “objectivity,” “a sense of urgency,” and thinking in binaries such as “good or bad” and “right or wrong” are defining characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” She therefore advises organizations to be on guard against these exclusionary tendencies. The idea that there is something inherently racist about believing in a binary between “right and wrong” reads like a parody of liberal thought. And encouraging organizations to stigmatize a “sense of urgency” or “objectivity” sounds like a recipe for institutional self-sabotage. Meanwhile, Okun’s implication that standards of timeliness and impartiality are exclusionary for nonwhite people would be problematic, even if she weren’t herself a white woman. And yet, her work has been used in trainings for school administrators in New York City, and recommended by the National Education Association, the Minnesota Public Health Association, the Los Angeles chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, and the Society of Conservation Biologists, among other progressive institutions. Conservatives who deemed all this absurd would, unfortunately, have a point. At least one federal DEI initiative may have put diversity above meritocracy and the public interest Trump and his allies have suggested that DEI programs privilege diversity over “merit,” and thereby undermine the efficacy of organizations that implement them. There’s reason to doubt this as a general proposition: Diverse hiring practices correlate with higher profitability in the corporate sector, according to a 2019 report from Mckinsey. But the administration has recently latched onto one instance in which a federal agency pursued diversity goals in a manner that arguably may have come at cost to fairness and the government’s broader objectives. In the wake of the tragic collision between a military helicopter and passenger jet over Washington, DC, last month, Trump baselessly claimed that the Federal Aviation Administration’s DEI policies had caused the crash. This was pure demagoguery: Trump’s remarks reflected no actual evidence, but merely his interest in leveraging a tragedy to advance his ideological goals. Yet Vice President JD Vance was able to put a patina of substance on Trump’s ravings by invoking a decade-old FAA diversity initiative, which had attracted reasonable bipartisan criticism — and an ongoing class action lawsuit against the government. “We want the best people at air traffic control and we want to make sure we have enough people at air traffic control who are actually competent to do the job,” Vance said. “You have many hundreds of people suing the government because they would like to be air traffic controllers but they were turned away because of the color of their skin.” Vance’s insinuation that the FAA had been hiring incompetent air traffic controllers was unfounded. The agency requires all controllers to undergo arduous training and demonstrate competence before assuming their roles. And America’s air safety record in recent years has been fairly strong; last month’s disaster was the first fatal commercial airline crash in the US since 2009. This said, it is true that the FAA pursued a diversity initiative under Barack Obama that may have undermined the agency’s hiring pipeline while disqualifying worthy air traffic control applicants on an arbitrary basis. In 2014, the FAA abruptly changed its hiring practices for air traffic control (ATC), in a bid to diversify its workforce. The agency’s concern with its demographic homogeneity was well-founded. As of 2016, nearly 60 percent of FAA employees were white men. And the agency’s traditional approach to hiring air traffic controllers reinforced its diversity problem. Historically, the FAA had given preferred status to applicants who were military veterans or graduates of Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative (CTI) programs. The case for such preferences for CTI graduates was intuitive: Beginning in the 1990s, the FAA had partnered with colleges to establish CTI programs so that the agency would have a pool of already (partially) trained recruits to draw from. And students who entered these programs needed to invest considerable time and money into their air traffic control educations. If making this investment didn’t give them a leg up for jobs at the FAA, then young people would have had less incentive to pursue such a narrowly applicable degree. Yet relying heavily on veterans and CTI graduates for recruits was unfavorable for diversity. Women are underrepresented in both the military and CTI schools, and Black Americans are also underrepresented in the latter. In light of these facts, the FAA made two major changes to its hiring practices, hoping to eliminate barriers to nonwhite and female participation at air traffic control. First, it ended preferences for applicants from CTI schools. Second, it established a “biographical assessment” as the first phase of its selection process. This assessment included some questions that appeared totally arbitrary. For example, the test asked applicants which high school subject they had received their lowest grades in. The “correct” answer — or at least, the one that garnered applicants the most points — was “science.” Applicants who failed to provide enough of the preferred answers to these arbitrary queries were eliminated from consideration. Since the FAA adopted the biographical assessment after committing to diversify its workforce, some suspected that the test’s odder questions were designed to disfavor white applicants. Ultimately, of the roughly 28,000 people who applied to become air traffic controllers in 2014, only 2,400 passed the biographical assessment. All this raised legitimate questions about the wisdom and fairness of the FAA’s policy. CTI school administrators were dismayed by the changes, which seemed to nullify the appeal of their programs. At a Senate hearing in 2014, Democratic Sen. Patty Murray echoed the schools’ concerns, citing the example of “one CTI graduate from Washington State” who had “graduated with high honors, passed an FAA test for initial qualification, has almost five years of service in the air force, and a commercial pilot certificate” but was disqualified from consideration by the biographical assessment. Eventually, around 900 graduates joined a class action lawsuit against the federal government, arguing that the biographical assessment’s arbitrary questions were designed to screen out non-Black applicants on the basis of their race. The FAA, for its part, acknowledges that the biographical assessment was designed to have a lower “disparate impact” on minority applicants than the cognitive test that it had replaced. But the government denies that the assessment discriminated against white applicants, and notes that the plaintiffs have produced no statistical analysis demonstrating that such discrimination occurred. (You can read the government’s full, initial response to the lawsuit here.) The case is still pending, although the Trump administration’s avowed sympathy for the defendants makes a settlement seem likely. In any case, it is conceivable that the FAA’s hiring changes contributed, in some small way, to the present shortage of air traffic controllers. Following those changes, enrollment at CTI schools dropped, thereby damaging the pipeline for new controllers. The impact of this on ATC staffing should not be exaggerated. The fundamental constraint on hiring in the 2010s was not DEI but fiscal austerity, which left the FAA without the funds necessary to hire enough controllers to keep pace with retirements. And Congress banned the agency’s dubious biographical assessment in 2016, then restored hiring preferences for CTI graduates in 2020. Nevertheless, there’s a reasonable argument that the FAA did, at one point, implement a DEI initiative that undermined its broader objectives, if only by weakening college training programs that the agency itself had co-created. And that initiative’s flaws have put wind in the sails of the right’s anti-diversity crusade: Ever since the centrist Substack commentator Jack Despain Zhou published a report on the lawsuit against the FAA last year, the case has been a cause celebre on the right, one that evidently attracted Vance’s interest. None of this means that the FAA was wrong to try to diversify its workforce. But seeking to recruit more women and minority students to CTI schools may have been a more fruitful path for reform. Flawed DEI programs don’t justify Trump’s war on racial justice, but they might abet it The fact that some DEI programs are genuinely wasteful and misguided does not justify Trump’s attacks on virtually all efforts to advance racial and gender equality. The White House portrays its recent crackdown on DEI as a defense of color-blind meritocracy. Yet it’s plain that this administration does not venerate merit-based hiring (it put an alcoholic Fox News host in charge of the Pentagon) or color-blindness (even as it suspended the admission of refugees, it enhanced resettlement opportunities for white South Africans). The administration has also appointed a State Department official who declared in October that “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.” As Bouie writes, it is reasonable to suspect that this is the anti-DEI push’s animating sentiment. And it’s hard to see how such a hateful endeavor could have positive political implications. Nevertheless, the right’s complaints about DEI are not wholly unreasonable in every instance. And I think it’s politically unproductive to pretend otherwise. Many diversity initiatives are worth defending. Obstacles to the full participation of nonwhite, LGBT, female, and disabled people are real. Vigorous enforcement of civil rights laws — and some corporate recruitment and mentoring programs — can help to erode such obstacles. But ill-conceived diversity programming jeopardizes public support for such worthwhile endeavors. Democrats should therefore resist the temptation to defend every program that claims to advance inclusion, or dismiss every conservative complaint about specific DEI policies.