No Room at the Table? Democracy Will Take a Hit
Trump's attacks on DEI and migrants are less about improving our nation and more about consolidating power as the population gap between whites and non-whites shrinks, and diversity gains importance.
A place at the table: How important is that simple five-word sentence to our American democracy?
The goal of America’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs isn’t just to raise people up who haven’t had the same opportunities to gain as others. It’s also designed to broaden the talent pool in our businesses, schools and government to include differing viewpoints and skills based on different backgrounds.
The MAGA myth pushed by Donald Trump and his allies is that black and brown Americans, females, gay folks and those with disabilities are blocking more “qualified” straight white men who could do the jobs better, and that this is somehow weakening the country as a result.
The reality is that DEI programs work to uncover candidates that may be more qualified, suitable and able to deal with changing times. Non-hispanic whites fell to 57.8% of the population in the 2020 census from 63.7% a decade earlier. And you can pretty much bet that gap has continued to tighten since then, with the census finding that more than half of those under age 16 were identified as a racial or ethnic minority.
In fact, the 2010 to 2020 decade was the first since the initial census in 1790 in which the white population failed to grow. So, for the white supremacists in MAGA, the need to strike when the iron is hot was tantamount in their minds. Thus, the creation of Project 2025 and Trump’s push against DEI and the black and brown migrants coming into our country from the south.
These attacks were an effective campaign trapping in 2024, when eight of 10 Trump voters were lily white.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration placed federal employees working in D.E.I. offices on administrative leave starting at 5 p.m., the first step toward shutting down the offices and programs altogether. Yesterday, federal employees were threatened with “adverse consequences” if they didn’t snitch on colleagues who defy orders to purge DEI efforts from their agencies.
If you don’t like your boss or the guy who sits on your left, I guess this would be a handy way to get rid of them. It’s a return to the Joseph McCarthy “red scare” of the 1950s, but this time it’s the “black or brown scare.”
Strangely, it’s a thrust led by a man whose career was initially funded by millions of dollars from his father, a successful real estate developer in New York City. At one point, daddy bailed Trump’s casino business out by buying approximately $3.5 million in chips when it was on the edge of ruin. Now Trump doesn’t want anybody getting a job who doesn’t have a great start in life, and he’s stuffed his administration with billionaires who think similarly.
It’s just one of the myriad inconsistencies in the MAGA book.
So let’s take a moment to look at how DEI programs work. To find qualified individuals, they post job openings on diversity-focused job boards, partner with historically Black colleges and universities, tribal colleges, or Hispanic-serving institutions and collaborate with disability and veteran advocacy organizations.
These programs work differently among different platforms. But they’re not scooping people up off the street, as the MAGA folks would like you to believe. They’re just pushing the door ajar a bit to find people who may not otherwise seen a particular job.
At the same time, they seek to ensure that job descriptions avoid biased or exclusionary language, and they tend to emphasize team-oriented qualities. As a whole, they tend to remove names, schools or other identifying information from resumes to focus solely on “qualifications” and “skill.” And they require a standardized interview process with interviewers from diverse backgrounds.
The goal: Reduce the unconscious, and sometimes not so unconscious, bias tied to the wink and a nudge acceptance that goes along with phrases like “hey man, you went to the same school as I did” or “yeah, that happened to me too” and “don’t you know my dad, or my cousin Jimmy …”
By focusing on “equity” rather than “equality” these programs will sometimes consider nontraditional career paths or transferable skills that offer new perspective to the jobs they seek to fill while offering apprenticeships or internships for individuals who may not have traditional qualifications.
And if you’re going to do all that, it’s important to monitor progress, sharing the results with employees, stakeholders, or the public to demonstrate commitment to DEI goals.
It’s important to note that no where in what I researched and just wrote mentioned the word “quota” or suggested hiring at the expense of merit. Instead, DEI programs aim to level the playing field, remove systemic barriers, and ensure all qualified candidates, regardless of background, have equal opportunities.
We live in a time when a straight white man from a predominantly white middle-America community watching TV in the evening, might notice that many, if not most, commercials rolling out in a row include a non-white person, and where the husband is almost always characterized as the idiot in a marriage. And most national news stations have diverse hosts.
Women make up almost 60% of college undergraduates, and the gap between men and women is the widest it's ever been. And these graduates are quickly moving into management jobs over, you got it, white guys.
All of this has created an atmosphere where white men in these Middle-America communities increasingly fear for their future, a fear Trump — the ultimate political con man — expertly exploited in a campaign that cast him against a highly-qualified Black woman.
Many white men without college degrees have faced economic hardships, including job losses and wage stagnation, particularly in manufacturing sectors, and they feel that the traditional political “elites” have ignored them. Many perceive the advancement of minority groups as threats to their traditional status.
Meanwhile, Trump's combative demeanor and emphasis on traditional masculinity attracted men who felt alienated by evolving gender roles and discussions around masculinity in modern society.
In Trump, the far-right folks in the Republican party saw a last-chance opportunity to gain and hold on to political power, well aware that evolving population changes — which helped elect the first black president in Barack Obama — might decrease their chance to hold power into the future. What do you think?