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What is DEI, and why is it dividing America?

President Donald Trump speaks Monday as he issues executive orders and pardons from the Oval Office of the White House. Carlos Barria/Reuters

President Donald Trump speaks Monday as he issues executive orders and pardons from the Oval Office of the White House. Carlos Barria/Reuters

CNN — Diversity, equity and inclusion programs have come under attack in American boardrooms, state legislatures and college campuses – and now broadly across the federal government.

President Donald Trump hours after swearing in this week began making good on promises to wage a war against such policies, inking an executive order banning efforts such as “environmental justice programs,” “equity initiatives” and DEI considerations in federal hiring.

The fledgling Republican White House also ordered employees of federal diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility offices to be put on paid administrative leave. And DEI is in the crosshairs of Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire Elon Musk, who last year called DEI “just another word for racism.”

The changes come as wealthy corporate leaders, including billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and conservative activist Robby Starbuck, have decried diversity programs on social media. In step, some US companies – including the nation’s largest employer, Walmart – have backpedaled on some DEI initiatives, including racial equity training programs for staff and evaluations designed to boost supplier diversity.

DEI has also been used to criticize and discredit high-ranking lawmakers and local officials. Most recently, in the wake of the deadly Los Angeles County wildfires, Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley came under attack for her focus on DEI efforts in the department including recruiting a more diverse force.

“DEI means people die,” Musk said in an X post, resharing a local news story about Crowley being the department’s first female chief.

Scott Jennings, a CNN political commentator, also condemned Crowley.

“We have DEI, we have budget cuts and yet I’m wondering now, if your house was burning down, how much do you care what color the firefighters are?” Jennings said on CNN’s “News Night with Abby Phillips.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris also became a target for conservatives.

Last July, Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett suggested President Joe Biden selected Harris as his running mate because she was Black. “One hundred percent she is a DEI hire,” Burchett said. “Her record is abysmal at best.”

Amid the rising right-wing pressure, US workers in November viewed DEI more negatively than they did the prior year: While 52% said focusing on increasing DEI was mainly a good thing, 21% said it was a bad thing – a 5 percentage point increase from 2023 – a Pew Research Center survey found.

Still, 52% of employed US adults said in 2023 they had DEI trainings or meetings at work, and 33% said they had a designated staff member who promotes DEI, a Pew survey that year found. 

Critics say DEI programs are discriminatory and attempt to solve racial discrimination by disadvantaging other groups, particularly White Americans. But supporters and industry experts insist the decades-old practice has been politicized and is widely misunderstood.

What is DEI?

Among seven DEI experts and industry leaders CNN has interviewed, most had a shared vision for what constitutes the concept:

  • Diversity is embracing the differences everyone brings to the table, whether those are someone’s race, age, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability or other aspects of social identity.
  • Equity is treating everyone fairly and providing equal opportunities.
  • Inclusion is respecting everyone’s voice and creating a culture in which people from all backgrounds feel encouraged to express their ideas and perspectives.

DEI was created because marginalized communities have not always had equal opportunities for jobs or felt a sense of belonging in majority-White corporate settings, said Daniel Oppong, founder of The Courage Collective, a consultancy that advises companies on DEI.

“That is the genesis of why some of these programs exist,” he said. “It was an attempt to try to create workplaces where more or all people can thrive.”

When did workplaces start embracing DEI?

The backlash against DEI may feel like a pendulum swing from 2020, when the nation faced a racial reckoning after Black father George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis by a White police officer.

But the DEI practice has been around for decades.

The origins of DEI programs date to the Civil Rights Movement, which played a pivotal role in accelerating efforts to create more diverse and inclusive workplaces, said Dominique Hollins, founder of the DEI consulting firm WĒ360.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed employment discrimination based on race, religion, sex, color and national origin. It also banned segregation in public places, like public schools and libraries. And Title VII of the Civil Rights Act established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, which works to eliminate employment discrimination.

 

President Lyndon Johnson hands a pen to the Rev. Martin Luther King (second from right) after signing the Civil Rights Act in 1964 in the East Room of the White House.
President Lyndon Johnson hands a pen to the Rev. Martin Luther King (second from right) after signing the Civil Rights Act in 1964 in the East Room of the White House.  AFP/Getty Images
 

In the 1960s and ’70s, employees began filing discrimination lawsuits with the EEOC, and many companies started incorporating diversity into their business strategies by providing diversity training, according to a 2008 report published in the Academy of Management Learning & Education.

These diversity training efforts emerged around the time affirmative action began by executive order from President John F. Kennedy, a Democrat. Although the concepts may seem similar, affirmative action is different from DEI as it required federal contractors by executive order to treat applicants and employees equally based on race, color, religion and sex.

Colleges and universities also used affirmative action to boost enrollment of students of color at majority-White schools. But the US Supreme Court in 2023 gutted affirmative action, ruling race-conscious college admissions were unconstitutional.

Some diversity efforts lost momentum after GOP President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s backed corporate deregulation policies asserting companies should address discrimination internally, Hollins said. In the coming decades, many companies kept pushing for DEI-focused jobs and training in a “piecemeal” fashion, rather than by creating ongoing programs and dedicated teams, she said.

Other companies didn’t have the staffing or resources to sustain DEI efforts, Hollins said.

Then, Floyd’s murder renewed the push for DEI leadership roles and initiatives at major corporations. Between 2019 and 2022, chief diversity and inclusion officer roles grew by 168.9%, a LinkedIn analysis found.

Now, though, some of those efforts have been rolled back and DEI roles abandoned because leaders didn’t feel fully supported, Hollins said: Companies “were giving the appearance of commitment without actually doing the right work for that commitment to be sustainable.”

What does DEI look like at work?

DEI in the workplace can be a mix of employee training, resource networks and recruitingpractices, said Kelly Baker, executive vice president and chief human resources officer at Thrivent, an organization that provides financial advice.

In 2023, 61% of US adults said their workplace had policies focusing on fairness in hiring, promotions or pay, a Pew study that year found.

Thrivent, for example, has resource groups for women in leadership, young professionals, Black employees, Hispanic employees and military veterans, among others, Baker said.

Its DEI trainings teach employees how to understand and bridge cultural differences in the workplace, she said, adding Thrivent also seeks job candidates with diversity in their race, geography, gender and industry background.

Many corporations tie DEI to their business strategies, experts told CNN.

Diversity “is related to our business growth strategy,” Baker said. “It’s pragmatic and essential and critical for us to ensure that our client base reflects the world that we are in and the world that we are going to be in.”

What are critics saying?

In recent years, DEI has become a social and political lightning rod for lawmakers, corporate leaders and conservative activists who have sought to cast such initiatives as unfair and even racist, with some emboldened by the Supreme Court’s gutting of affirmative action.

“These are not neutral programs to increase demographic diversity; they are political programs that use taxpayer resources to advance a specific partisan orthodoxy,” outspoken DEI critic Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, wrote in a 2023 New York Times op-ed.

Indeed, the ideology behind DEI is “fundamentally anti-American,” said Ryan P. Williams, president of The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank.

“The words that the acronym ‘DEI’ represent sound nice, but it is nothing more than affirmative action and racial preferences by a different name, a system that features racial headcounts and arbitrarily assigned roles of ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’ groups in America,” Williams said in an emailed statement. “If we continue to do democracy this way, it will only end in acrimony, strife, resentment, and American collapse.”

Ackman, the billionaire investor, last year posted a 4,000-word opus on X criticizing DEI as “inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the so-called oppressed.” Musk, the Trump confidant and billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO, later reposted it on X, which he owns.

 

Elon Musk listens in November as then-President-elect Donald Trump addresses a House Republicans Conference meeting at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill on November 13, 2024 in Washington, DC.
Elon Musk listens in November as then-President-elect Donald Trump addresses a House Republicans Conference meeting at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill on November 13, 2024 in Washington, DC. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
 

“DEI is just another word for racism. Shame on anyone who uses it,” Musk wrote, later doubling down: “DEI, because it discriminates on the basis of race, gender and many other factors, is not merely immoral, it is also illegal.”

Tesla since then omitted all language regarding minority workers and outreach to minority communities in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Who’s defending DEI practices?

Not every business leader agrees: Mark Cuban, billionaire and minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks, pushed back on Musk’s posts in a thread defending DEI.

“The loss of DEI-Phobic companies is my gain,” Cuban wrote. “Having a workforce that is diverse and representative of your stakeholders is good for business.”

Companies turning their backs on strategies to promote diversity will limit equal opportunities for people who face disadvantages because of their skin color, the neighborhood they grew up in, the quality of schools they attended and other forces beyond their control, two Black pioneering business leaders – former Merck CEO Ken Frazier and former American Express CEO Ken Chenault – told CNN.

“At its best, DEI is about developing talent, measuring it in a fair way and finding hidden talent and disadvantaged talent in a world where not everybody has an equal chance to exhibit their abilities,” Frazier said.

CNN’s Michelle Krupa, Donald Judd, Katelyn Polantz, Dakin Andone and Nathaniel Meyersohn contributed to this report.

Author: Nicquel Terry Ellis, CNN

Source: CNN:::

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