The War on DEI Is About Hierarchy

Critics of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, or DEI, often say they’re the real anti-racists. The programs are discriminatory, they argue, even authoritarian, as they amount to a forced redesign of society by woke elites. Indeed, the right attacked Claudine Gay’s alleged “DEI empire” before she resigned as Harvard’s president. Merit and viewpoint diversity are all that should matter, especially among college faculty, they insist. Although that explanation fooled some liberals, it never survived close scrutiny for long. A new investigation undermines it still further.

Emails and drafts obtained by The New York Times show that there is little daylight — if any — between the intellectual right and the fringe. “America is under attack by a leftist revolution disguised as a plea for justice” like “Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution,” wrote Ryan Williams, president of the Claremont Institute, in a draft grant proposal. “In support of ridding schools of C.R.T., the Right argues that we want nonpolitical education,” wrote Republican donor Thomas Klingenstein in one email. “No we don’t. We want our politics. All education is political.” Dr. Scott Yenor, a conservative academic affiliated with Claremont, responded, “An alternative vision of education must replace the current vision of education.”

The emails are rife with racism, homophobia, and misogyny. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute wrote that gay men are “‘are much more prone’ to extramarital affairs ‘on the empirical basis of testosterone unchecked by female modesty.’” In another email, Mac Donald attacked women who employ domestic workers from “the low IQ 3rd world,” calling it “another curse of feminism.” Yenor accused his employer, Boise State University, of “being ruled by women” and shared a photo of a female computer-science student with a short haircut. “Gynocracy update!” he wrote. “Androgynocracy update,” replied Dr. David Azerrad, a professor at Hillsdale College. The intellectual right and the fringe may disagree on public tactics, but in private they share objectives. The right’s war on DEI is not so secretly a war on minority groups.

That’s visible in the right’s committed belief in a natural social hierarchy. They are so convinced of it that they assume everyone else believes the same thing, that the left merely wants to rearrange who stands where on the ladder. Last May, as Mac Donald and Yenor speculated upon the prospect of same-sex marriage in India; they wondered how liberals would react if the country’s highest court legalized the practice but Indians themselves did not comply. “How will western elites explain the benightedness of yet another group of POCs?” Mac Donald asked. Yenor replied that “not tons of asian countries have SSM” but instead “‘more wholesome policies like prison’ for gays,” the Times reported. “Heather, that’s an easy one. Indians are Asians who are white-adjacent so at the bottom of the totem poll. Gays are second after blacks,” Azerrad responded.

To these conservatives, LGBTQ+ people, women, and minority racial groups lack innate dignity and worth. Equality is impossible, and no one’s fighting for it anyway. They oppose so-called “wokery” because they believe it threatens their position at the top of the ladder. That anyone might wish to do away with that ladder altogether either doesn’t occur to them or is too naïve to contemplate. What they fear more than anything is the loss of status and with it, power. Their crusade against DEI and CRT was never anything more than an assault on the notion of multiracial democracy itself.

The right has allies in that fight. Liberals too often buy their public explanations while conservatives think of ways to string them along. In a series of 2023 emails, Yenor and Azerrad planned a defense of Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has said that the U.S. would be “better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration.” In an email to Azerrad, Yenor urged him to “appeal to lefties” by stressing free-speech concerns. Target them, he added, “both on free speech grounds and on grounds that implicate their fears.” Azerrad, he said, should “defend Dr. Wax on the grounds that if she were fired, it would only embolden red-state lawmakers to fire controversial left-wing professors,” as the Times put it. Their real motivations were malicious. “But don’t we want this to happen?” Azerrad asked. “Yes,” Yenor said, “But your audience doesn’t want it to happen.”

DEI isn’t perfect. In the workplace, it cannot replace collective organizing, which subverts corporate power in ways that traditional DEI initiatives do not. As David Zirin recently wrote for The Nation, “defending these liberal DEI programs from statehouse goons should never be the same as endorsing them as a method to fight racism.” On Palestine in particular, DEI programs can also be easily weaponized to silence anti-Zionist critique in schools, and elsewhere too. “DEI also fails this moment because its emphasis on the personal steers people away from the political discussions that schools need to be having,” Zirin added. We need a more robust anti-racism. As the right attacks DEI, though, we must also be clear about who they are, and what they want. Beneath the intellectual veneer, the right’s academics and experts sound a lot like the average Proud Boy. They know, too, that they can only maintain their power through the marginalization of other groups. We can’t afford to ignore their brutality.