Diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI), and its enemies

On Thursday, January 30, 2025, there was a horrific midair collision near Washington’s Ronald Reagan Airport. The collision was between a military Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines jet coming in from Wichita, Kansas. Sixty-seven people died. Many of the passengers in the aircraft were young men and women returning from a national figure-skating camp.

Americans, and the world at large, were aghast at the tragedy.

 “Even in Nigeria, quotas and preferences in school enrolment and employment continue to cause bad blood.”

President Donald Trump, only a few days into his second Presidency, was expected to be the soul of empathy as he held a press conference.

In the event, what was unleashed was a potpourri of accusation and innuendo in a most undignified exercise of blame-setting. It left watchers speechless. Former Presidents Obama and Biden created the circumstances for the crash, Trump averred. It ‘could have been caused’ by the DEI policies instituted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and across the nation. His implication was that incompetent air traffic controllers, employed through preferential hiring of ethnic minorities and disabled persons, were responsible for the air crash. ‘Very powerful tests’ for competence in air traffic control were ‘terminated’ by his predecessor, President Biden. Pressed by journalists to explain how he could so quickly decide, the President replied, ‘Because I have common sense, OK, and unfortunately a lot of people don’t… The FAA’s diversity push includes hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities… Brilliant people have to be put in those positions…’

It was a most extraordinary scenario.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is a term that has been frequently heard in employment and educational circles in the USA and Europe over the past few decades. It arose from ‘Affirmative Action’ – a label first used in an Executive Order signed by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. This required government contractors to take ‘Affirmative Action’ to ensure that all employees were treated fairly during employment, without regard to race, creed, or colour. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination based on race or other considerations. President Lyndon Johnson followed in 1965 with another Executive Order along the same lines.

None of the legal stipulations up till that point required preferential treatment for any race or group. Over time, however, implementation of affirmative action began to involve goals and quotas for certain groups who were seen to be under-represented or ‘disadvantaged’.

Inevitably controversy grew around the well-meant initiative.

Read also: Nigeria’s diversity is a source of strength, innovation – Odjenima

The Supreme Court in 1978 started the journey of splitting hairs between the concepts of ‘equality’ and ‘equity.’ It ruled that quotas were illegal, but that it was allowable to consider ‘race’ as a ‘plus’ factor for the disadvantaged when trying to foster ‘diversity’ in educational institutions.

This ‘Wisdom of Solomon’ judgement, unfortunately, only made the controversy and polarisation more intense. White male Americans, the previously ‘advantaged’ group, complained they were now the victims of discrimination.

Diversity became more and more politically divisive, even as the setting up of structures for the implementation of Diversity programmes became a big industry in government and corporate organisations.

From the turn of the century, support for, and opposition against, ‘Diversity’ became more intense.

Barack Obama signed an Executive Order pushing the boundary in 2011.

Within Industry and Academia, spending on DEI programmes snowballed.

By the time of the first Trump Presidency and following the advent of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, DEI hirings for minorities and people with targeted disabilities were widespread across corporations and government agencies, including the FAA.

In 2023, in a ‘Students for Fair Admissions vs Harvard’ lawsuit filed by a group of white students, the Supreme Court rejected race-based affirmative action in college admission.

By 2024, as momentum built up towards the second Trump presidency, American companies such as Walmart and Amazon began to scale back, or end, their DEI programmes.

All of this provides the context for Donald Trump’s speech following the Washington plane crash.

It must not be assumed that DEI has been an unmitigated blessing to blacks and other minorities in the USA. It is said, for example, that the greatest beneficiaries are ‘white women’, a few of whom were ‘promoted’ to the Board Rooms of Fortune-500 companies. Some talented, highly accomplished black people have felt diminished by being labelled as ‘Diversity’ employees, even when they are outliers in their fields. An uneducated man like Trump was able to query the Harvard credentials of a Barack Obama by querying, falsely, whether he was a ‘Diversity’ intake.

Even in Nigeria, quotas and preferences in school enrolment and employment continue to cause bad blood. For the student from Zamfara State who gains admission to a Federal University with much lower JAMB scores than a student from Imo State, it is an advantage to be ‘disadvantaged.’ It is especially troubling where there is no corollary commitment on the part of the government of Nigeria or Zamfara to eliminate the factors causing the ‘disadvantage’ in the near future.

America is a diverse society riven with inequities and exclusion. Schools, workplaces and even Hollywood, do not reflect a faithful picture of outside society.

Unfortunately, despite the best efforts to split hairs between ‘equality’ – lacking because many black people come from deprived backgrounds, and ‘equity’ – which is desirable for a harmonious society, the issues have been horribly polarised and politicised – by the often racist Right-wing, and the Woke Left-wing made up of young firebrands, including university students.

The focus has been lost, sometimes intentionally. For instance, originally, ‘Diversity’ in employment or school enrolment required that ‘all necessary qualifications for the job are met.’ If this stipulation is not guaranteed, it would put the system, and society itself, at risk of decline or disaster.

This is precisely the claim that President Donald Trump is making, without any shred of evidence, demonstrating an obvious ideological intention on the part of his government to abolish equity, not fine-tune its implementation.

It is a fine mess, and the arguments will continue, louder, in the next four years.