DEI Departments Don’t Always Work. That Doesn’t Mean We Should Get Rid of Them.
Published February 21st, 2025
By Daniel Jenkins, Director of Outreach
The phrase “DEI”, which stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, has gotten much attention lately, with Republican politicians around the country labelling them as discriminatory and vowing to get rid of them. But what does DEI actually mean? Generally, DEI refers to departments, policies, and training that increase diversity and acceptance in a workplace. Oftentimes, this includes efforts to create a diverse hiring pool as well. While the concept of these programs are essential, there is little evidence to clearly suggest that they usually end up creating a more diverse or accepting workplace, especially with hiring initiatives. Despite this, it is essential that we maintain these programs in the workplace.
The biggest reason for the failure of DEI is a bandaid for the bullet wound of systemic racism in America. Elevating marginalized groups to have the same opportunities as white people will take more than setting quotas in hiring pools and fighting against stereotypes. Broad societal change is necessary to produce a society equitable enough to overtake the barriers that America’s racist past has created. Fighting diversity not only achieves none of these goals, but also fails to actually improve our workplaces in any way. More significantly, the attacks on these programs only intensify an increasingly hostile attitude towards minorities in our society and workplaces. The fight for equality’s target should be on elevating marginalized groups and ending American poverty– creating a living minimum wage, investing in our cities and public transportation, ending the conservative NIMBY movement, establishing a right for healthcare and housing for all, giving families affordable housing opportunities, abolishing medical and student debt, and much, much more are required for this.
The war being waged on DEI doesn’t come from a place of equality. The conservative movement of America’s past has found a new fire after the 2024 election. With Republicans coming away as the night’s big winners, they’ve taken their “mandate” and have begun burning their political capital on pushing their agenda. They’ve drawn on their missions of the past, from the Reagan administration’s push for a colorblind society without accomodating reform to the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to strike down affirmative action, which was a decades long idea and legal battle. First on this reborn movement’s list has been the elimination of DEI, and anything else standing in their way. In their rampage, they are taking many other necessary and beneficial ideas with them.
What is the GOP defining as DEI? Indiana’s new governor, Mike Braun, issued an executive order eliminating DEI in state government, forbidding allocating resources to procedures or programs that grant or endorse “preferential treatment” to someone on the basis of race or ethnicity. The Indiana Senate has passed Senate Bill 289, making DEI illegal in government and state universities, defined as any effort to influence the composition of employees with reference to race, sex, color, or ethnicity, or any effort to give differential treatments or benefits on the same grounds.
But what else have these laws done? Braun’s executive order also forbids mandating the disclosure of one’s pronouns in state government. Senate Bill 289 requires primary school teachers to upload course materials to the school corporation’s website that address the following topics: nondiscrimination, diversity, equity, inclusion, race, ethnicity, sex, or bias. While war is waged on DEI programs, we lose other rights and protections along with them. Republicans are using their war on DEI as a method to pass the rest of their dangerous agenda in the name of “ending discrimination”, their frequent justification for attacks on DEI.
It’s essential, now more than ever, that we protect our vulnerable communities. Conservatives are not going after only DEI programs but also immigrants, academics, and more. But DEI departments are not our enemies, nor are these other groups. This worrying trend opens the door to larger, dangerous ideas, far beyond worsening our economic inequality. The continued, targeted degradation of our broad societal institutions and protections is not only unprecedented, it’s dangerous.
DEI departments do not and will never always achieve their goals. But having a wing within an organization to ensure that an effort is being made towards progress is not a bad thing, and it’s certainly not discriminatory. The fact that these programs exist at all shows our society’s commitment to progressing itself, even though many of them appear or prove performative. The broad implementation of diversity initiatives around the country was one of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement’s only tangible policy achievements. The existence of them, even when not effective, is much preferable to the attacks that come without them. Much like the implementation of Jim Crow laws in the South, the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, white backlash is threatening the achievements of a broader civil rights movement. It would be naive to let it win again.
