Many of the most draconian measures implemented in the first couple weeks of the new Trump Administration have been justified as emergency actions to root out D.E.I.—diversity, equity, and inclusion—including the freeze (currently rescinded) of trillions of dollars in federal grants. The tragic plane crash in Washington, the President baselessly suggested, might also be the result of D.E.I. Typically, D.E.I. describes policies at large companies or institutions to encourage more diverse workplaces. In the Administration’s rhetoric, D.E.I. is discrimination pure and simple, and the root of much of what ails the nation. “D.E.I. is the boogeyman for anything,” Jelani Cobb tells David Remnick. Cobb is a longtime staff writer, and the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. “If there’s a terrible tragedy . . . if there is something going wrong in any part of your life, if there are fires happening in California, then you can bet that, somehow, another D.E.I. is there.” Although affirmative-action policies in university admissions were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, D.E.I. describes a broad array of actions without a specific definition. “It’s that malleability,” Cobb reflects, that makes D.E.I. a useful target, “one source that you can use to blame every single failing or shortcoming or difficulty in life on.”
Chapter 1: What does D.E.I. mean and why is it controversial?
Last week, we woke up to Elon Musk bragging that he was feeding a congressionally authorized agency with a 40 plus billion dollar budget into, and I quote, a wood chipper. Breaking things at warp speed is very much the point now. Many of the most draconian measures have been justified as emergency actions to root out DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
These are typically programs put in place by large companies or institutions or government agencies to encourage more diverse workplaces. But the administration characterizes DEI as discrimination and broadly as the root of so much of what ails this nation. The temporary freeze of trillions of dollars in federal grants since rescinded was described as an anti-DEI measure.
And the tragic plane crash in Washington, the president also suggested, might well be the result of, yes, DEI. To understand what's happening here and why, I sat down the other day with Jelani Cobb. Jelani Cobb is a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, and he's a historian and the dean of Columbia University's journalism school.
Jelani, barely two or three weeks in office, Donald Trump has gone after academia, journalism, and diversity. So you're a dean, you're a journalist, and guess what? So how are you holding up?
You know, it's kind of like a barrage from all directions. And the one thing that those disparate communities all seem to have in common is a sense of despair about, you know, what happens next and how do we navigate the trials of this moment.
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Chapter 2: How is D.E.I. being used as a political weapon?
Let's break this down then. What are the fears that you're sensing, for example, in academia where you're spending most of your days? You're at Columbia University.
In academia, the fears range. So there are people who worry that their work, if it touches upon any sensitive subject matter, anything that the Trump administration looks unfavorably upon, that they won't be able to get funding. And in some instances, these are projects that people have worked on for years. And so that's a huge fear for people. And then there's the kind of political pressure
I've talked to untenured junior faculty who worry that if they research a subject related to race or related to gender, related to sexuality or gender identity, that that may make it more difficult for them to get tenure. or more difficult for them to get grants and that kind of thing. So very much connected to career concerns.
Are those reasonable concerns, Jelani, since the people that are making the tenure decisions are senior faculty and deans?
Well, I think that there's a question of... whether or not university administrators will stand up for faculty who research topics that are unpopular. There's the maybe not so unreasonable fear that you could become a target of a news story that paints you to be, you know, a kind of caricature of what you actually are interested in researching.
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Chapter 3: What fears are present in academia related to D.E.I.?
One of the things that's really notable is the extent to which people have begun kind of pulling the historical literature on universities during the McCarthy period that talk about how we navigated that particular crisis.
What executive orders that have been issued so far related to DEI concern you most?
In the conversations I've had with people, some of whom are fairly knowledgeable on this, they've been of the more than one way to skin a cat persuasion. So if they're not able to freeze federal funds around DEI or related subject matter, there may be other ways of kind of arm-twisting people into compliance.
There's fear about endowment taxes being levied against large universities, particularly wealthy ones. There are fears about whether or not students from abroad will be able to get visas. with the same sort of ease that they once did. And that will, of course, have a financial implication.
And then there's the kind of other power of the purse string, which is the ability, coming out of the civil rights movement, the ability to withhold federal funding for institutions that discriminate on the basis of race. The conversation around DEI has overwhelmingly pointed to DEI as a kind of anti-white discrimination.
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Chapter 4: Are the concerns about D.E.I. in academia justified?
Well, Jelani, what is DEI at its best, in your view? And are there abuses of it, and how would you describe them?
So at its best, DEI represents an effort from companies... institutions, various kind of walks of American life to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to participate in the actions or the work of those institutions. And recognizing the kind of disparities that are baked into American life it is an attempt to undo them.
So for instance, for African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans collectively represent almost 40% of the population in this country, but only about 16 to 17% of the journalists in this country belong to one of those groups. And often those disparities reflect age-old prohibitions and barriers to entry for different groups.
And sometimes they just represent a kind of inertia of networks, that people hire people who they know, people who they know tend to have similar backgrounds and that kind of thing. And diversity is meant to be a kind of
self-aware approach to saying, hey, as opposed to just operating in the way that we always had, let's try to make sure that we reach out to people who might not have been considered previously.
And what's so terrible about that?
Well, here's the thing. Prior to the last few years, certainly prior to the rise of Donald Trump as a political force, most of the criticism you saw of DEI was from the left. You know, people felt that it was toothless. It was kind of checking boxes.
When you looked at between 2010 and 2020, the number of non-white lawyers in the United States, according to the American Bar Association, went from 11% to 14%. which means that the number of white lawyers in the United States went from 89% down to 86, that steep drop in that timeframe. That kind of progress was seen as really incremental. And in fact, the most cynical views of DEI
saw it as a kind of corporate insurance. If anyone said that this institution discriminates, they can say, look at our DEI policies.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of recent executive orders on D.E.I.?
beside the point at best and a racket at worst, you know, and didn't really have any positive impact on anybody's consciousness, much less hiring. So there can be an abuse of it, no?
So, I mean, I think that there's a kind of skeptical way of looking at this. And certainly, having sat through various trainings of various sorts, I didn't necessarily leave any of them feeling as if I was brimming with new knowledge. Right.
Yeah. That's put in a much more elegant way. I appreciate that. But what causes a president in the United States, on the eve of a horrible tragedy like a plane crash, with seeming sincerity and all the chutzpah in the world, to blame that horrible accident, the deaths of dozens of people, on DEI? And get away with it.
So I think that what's happened around Trump and, you know, we mentioned, you know, the McCarthy era before. And I think there's an important parallel between Trump and McCarthy. There are lots of important parallels. But in this one particular case, you know, everything that was associated with Joseph McCarthy happened. happened prior to Joseph McCarthy.
He didn't originate any of these things, but he did have the instinctive ability to see where the crowd was headed and run out to the front of it. And I think that Donald Trump did very much the same with the politics of racial resentment that have come to be a defining feature among other things of the Trump era.
He understood that there was a set of people, and this is kind of statistically borne out, who felt that white Americans were particularly disadvantaged. And what they were seeking was a kind of public redress, something that would say that the government was looking out for them, too. And so for all of the...
toothlessness of DEI in some circumstances, it still made a really potent target to say that you're uprooting it or that you're removing it. And then you've also heard that language bandied about from lots of people in Trump's circle, particularly Elon Musk.
to a point that it becomes kind of pretty close to the old race science, you know, the ideas of inherent intelligence and IQ measuring and those kinds of things. And so the belief is that everything that has gone wrong with America
is a product of not operating at a meritocracy, and that meritocracy would necessarily result in these institutions being more monochromatic than they have become over the years.
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Chapter 6: How has Trump influenced the conversation around D.E.I.?
So I think the thing that's interesting, but there are two things here. One is that that increase benefited from the absence of enthusiasm from other people in those communities who just opted for the couch over the ballot box in this most recent election.
The other, however, is that the thing that I think Trump has done more masterfully than probably any other modern American politician is the ability to own both sides of an issue and the ability to operate with particular kinds of wedges.
And so for African-American men whose voting behavior had been more predictable based upon their race, all of a sudden it became clear that there were gender ideas and the very masculinist dynamics of the Trump movement appealed to a certain portion of that population. I think people saw the same thing with Latino male voters too. And so it is a kind of
house of cards in terms of like the structure of all of it. Once you start pulling at how people understand their interests, this doesn't add up. But Trump is a master salesman. The idea is that you don't really think about what you've bought until you've left the store. And by that point, it's too late.
Trump also released an executive order saying he would divert federal funds from schools teaching what he calls discriminatory equity ideology. It also said the government would sanction any school that taught that people can be oppressed due to their race, which is kind of amazing. What does that mean in practice? And how can a teacher reasonably deal with this?
You know, if a president says something like that, people should reasonably take it seriously.
And even if this doesn't come from the federal level, in which we'd run into a lot of First Amendment complications at the very least, it sets a tone in which a person might well become the subject of digital harassment or in-person harassment, or they may find pressure placed upon their employers in various kinds of ways. And so we've seen this over the course of the years, if you remember,
The anti-CRT hysteria, critical race theory, which just a few years ago turned every school board meeting in the country into the Hunger Games, practically, or WWE, where people were concerned that their children were being indoctrinated with ideas that really were not being taught in elementary and junior high schools in this country.
I'm speaking with Jelani Cobb. He's the author of The Substance of Hope, Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, and many other books. We'll continue our conversation in a moment.
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Chapter 7: What are the potential consequences of D.E.I. policies?
And wound up killing 20, 30,000 people or so before it was over with.
The question we'll ask is, how did this happen?
Yeah, that's not the right question. The question is, why would they do such a stupid thing? Yeah, that is the question, isn't it? Yeah, that's the question.
Find out on How to Cure What Ails You from Radiolab. Listen where you get podcasts or on the WNYC app.
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I've been speaking today with Jelani Cobb, who's a historian and a staff writer at The New Yorker. We're talking about the Trump administration's wholesale assault on DEI, programs in the federal government and elsewhere that encourage diversity, equity, and inclusion. DEI is a singular obsession for Donald Trump and his allies.
So I'll return now to my conversation with journalist and historian Jelani Cobb. So in 2023, the Supreme Court issued its ruling that ended affirmative action as we knew it. Coupled with that, how are these executive orders going to affect the environment that you're in at Columbia and academia writ large?
Everyone is trying to figure that out. I'm at my own institution daily, and I'm in contact with scholars from around the country, and everyone is trying to figure this out. So affirmative action has been ended by the Supreme Court, and there's a significant Venn overlap between affirmative action and DEI, but they're not necessarily the same thing. Explain that.
So one of the parts of inclusion would be like, if we say that we don't have enough African-American or enough Latino engineers, well, we're going to create a pipeline program in high schools that... have significant numbers of Hispanic or African-American students and say, would you like to be an engineer? Well, this is a voluntary thing and it's giving people access to something.
It's not giving them any consideration they didn't already have. That would fall very much on the DEI, but it wouldn't fall necessarily under affirmative action. Is that permissible? people don't know. And what may be legally permissible may or may not be politically permissible or culturally permissible in this particular moment.
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