DEI: can't have it both ways

If individuals from the dominant majority are supposed discrimination victims, then the same would be true when the tables are turned.

Laws and leaders that ban diversity, equity, and Inclusion (DEI) practices of public institutions, and even try to extend the ban to the private sector, argue that DEI potentially discriminates against individuals who are not of a race, religion, ethnicity, gender orientation, or other group that DEI seeks to protect.

Individuals from the dominant groups in the nation or a state, they reason, deserve to be treated fairly, as individuals, in competition with minority individuals for college admission, employment, housing, and other sectors. No one should be favored because he or she belongs to a group that is supposedly discriminated against in our society and culture.

That argument has won the day for the past year in the federal government, and for longer than that in Iowa. Anti-DEI laws and executive orders are bringing major changes to public institutions like state universities, for example.

Best Colleges, a major national higher education analytics firm, finds Iowa to have the nation’s “most extreme anti-DEI law” affecting public colleges in the nation. Enacted in Iowa’s budget bill of May 2024, the legislation doesn’t just ban DEI offices at the state’s three Regents universities. It also limits the types of positions and viewpoints those institutions can promote in any way.

The new Center for Intellectual Freedom, which opened in December on the University of Iowa campus in Iowa City, puts an exclamation point to the situation. It remains to be seen if the new Center actually turns out to be neutral and open to free expression, or whether it devolves primarily into a conservative thought outlet.

And that’s exactly the point. Are anti-DEI efforts, here and throughout the nation, truly bent on eliminating favoritism for minority groups, or do they instead intend to maintain superior marketplace advantage for the majority “heritage” or “legacy” (translate “straight white European ethnic”) American group? Not as individuals, but for the group itself.

For more than 50 years Donald Trump has spoken out against minority groups who are not of the dominant collection. His many, many comments, and actions through executive orders, are way too numerous for a column like this one. Just go to the internet and call up “Racial views of Donald Trump.” The Wikipedia site goes on and on and on, for 19,000 words.

The crucial point is that the President’s comments don’t limit themselves to denigrating just certain individuals. He has no problem castigating entire ethnicities and nationalities.

If the supposed problem with DEI practices is that they favor entire minority groups over individuals in the dominant group, then the reverse should be equally abhorrent: the entire dominant group should not be favored over individuals in the minority groups. For example, when Trump complained that the U.S. has too many immigrants from “hellhole” countries (he earlier had reportedly used a more vulgar term), he added, “Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let’s have a few from Denmark.”

That kind of talk—and it’s very common throughout his public statements—violates the essential principle of anti-DEI philosophy. It turns the argument on its head: entire ethnic groups (in this case, Scandinavian) should be given a head start in access to the benefits of America, while individuals of other groups should be held back.

It can’t be both ways. If one group deserves benefits that those from another one can’t get, then the whole argument falls like a house of cards. It turns out to be just racial, or ethnic, or religious, or gender-based prejudice.

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