Most Americans believe that our nation today lives up to its founding principle that all men are created equal. The letter of the law seems to provide for colorblind equality, according to which individuals are judged on their talents and virtues, rather than on their ancestry, religion, or place of origin.
The old rationale was that achieving equal rights for the previously disenfranchised required a short period of favoritism on their behalf, which would wither away. But the withering never happened. Instead, our institutions intensified their commitment to racial favoritism, right up to the present day, and most recently under the mandate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.
One prominent proponent of that policy is Vice President Kamala Harris, who rose to power on the coattails of racial politics and, as vice president, has worked to entrench DEI into every aspect of the federal government.
This agenda was made explicit by her running mate. During the Democratic primary campaign in 2020, then-candidate Joe Biden committed to choosing a woman as vice president and to appointing an administration that “will look like the country,” a polite way of saying that he would consider identity first and merit second. The following month, he noted that among his list of potential VPs were “four black women,” and amid a pressure campaign to select one, eventually chose Harris, then senator from California.
Since then, both Biden and Harris have reinforced their commitment to racial preferences. “To me, the values of diversity, equality, inclusion are literally—and this is not kidding—the core strengths of America,” the president said earlier this year. The vice president, for her part, has denounced those who “say that it is a bad term to talk about DEI.”
Those commitments have since become federal policy. On his first day in the Oval Office, President Biden rescinded former president Donald Trump’s order to “combat offensive and anti-American race and sex stereotyping and scapegoating,” and replaced it with a new executive order on “racial equity,” which “charged the Federal Government with . . . addressing systemic racism in our Nation’s policies and programs” via “an ambitious, whole-of-government approach.”
A few months later, the president issued another executive order, directing the head of each agency to “establish a position of chief diversity officer,” to “take steps to implement or increase the availability and use of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility training programs,” and to issue annual DEI plans and reports to the president—all in the interest of advancing the administration’s “racial equity agenda.”
Over the course of this month, we will publish a series of stories investigating these policies and their impact on science, foreign policy, finance, and government contracting. Together, they will underscore the need to dismantle DEI and to pursue the only real solution to America’s racial woes: the principle of colorblind equality.
Obey
Article URL : https://www.city-journal.org/article/unmasking-the-whole-of-government-dei-agenda?skip=1