When affirmative action, the predecessor of DEI, was first implemented in the early 1970s, the goal was to address cruel centuries of oppression of African Americans. It was widely supported by many white Americans, who saw it as a short-term palliative.
But in recent years, affirmative action has merged with a more radical academic dogma known as “critical race theory”. At its core, this belief system deplores America as a racist confection, a country that will never be able to address its evils without abandoning the merit system and the notion of fair play. Critical race theory (CRT) has grown into a lucrative industry, as schools, companies and governments raced to implement DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) policies and imposed Mao-like struggle sessions on employees to hold the party line.
Today, thankfully, CRT now faces a serious decline. Theoretician Ibrahim X Kendi recently closed his Boston University “anti-racist research” centre, moving it to Howard. President Trump seems determined to wipe out CRT and DEI among anyone in the federal orbit, which could include the very universities that nurtured it. The administration is perfectly aware that DEI and CRT policies are widely unpopular among most Americans.
One contributor to the backlash has been how CRT ideology has shifted activists towards ever more radical politics, particularly with regard to Israel and Jewish Americans. In California, an incoming new “ethnic studies” curriculum for schools has been accused of categorising all white people, no matter their origins, as enjoying “white privilege”. In this world-view, groups like Jews do not suffer discrimination, which might have come as a surprise to our immigrant forebears as well as to those who are still facing anti-Semitism today.
Throughout academia, DEI and other race-based programmes have emerged as fulcrums of anti-Israel, and often anti-Semitic action. Even on my normally sane campus, our DEI unit at Chapman awarded this year’s Dr Martin Luther King Jr Community Service Award to the university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).
Given numerous instances of harassment of Jewish students and the SJP’s celebration of the October 7 pogrom, this was clearly absurd. Our President, Daniele Struppa, effectively rescinded the order, apologising to Jewish students and faculty, to the horror of many at the school’s ultra-woke Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
In California, Jewish legislators are campaigning to keep CRT’s pernicious influence contained, and to mitigate the worst consequences of the new “ethnic studies” guidelines. But the CRT radicals remain deeply entrenched and well-placed within school bureaucracies and the teacher’s unions. Many blue states still embrace policies that discriminate on the basis of race and gender. The Biden administration to its shame promoted critical race theory. Much the same has occurred in the likes of Minnesota.
So even as Trump and his allies seek to counter DEI and CRT, it’s going to be a tough struggle at some elite universities. In some cases, anti-Jewish sentiment is widespread. Jewish students face professors hectoring against Israel and demonstrators who have blocked off access to school buildings for “Zionists”. Erwin Chemerinsky, Berkeley’s Law School dean and well-known progressive, wrote in the LA Times that “nothing has prepared me for the anti-Semitism” now clearly evident at Berkeley and other campuses.
Despite these outrages, it won’t be easy to remove these antics. Already some universities are rallying to keep discriminatory practices, even in red states. Their oligarchic funding is unlikely to run out in the near future. At least until Trump, Leftist activism was often subsidized by federal taxes, something the public had little notion about.
In the long term, however, the decline of CRT should mark a step towards a society closer to Dr King’s ethos, particularly critical for a country that may become predominantly non-white by mid-century. Crowing about the end of “the US white majority” might be popular in ethnic studies departments but has not translated into a better life for most minorities. America’s great strength is that it was not founded on the basis of any particular ethnicity and has successfully evolved to become more inclusive; a fundamentally racist society would not be such a lure for new Latin American, African or Asian immigrants.
Getting rid of DEI, CRT and their offsprings is one step towards this new post-racial future. It represents the rejection of the sectarianism preached by “racial justice” activists in the West, Hamas and other jihadis, and by far-Right sectarians across the West. America, indeed, all of Western society, needs not more separation but more unforced integration.
CRT needs to be returned to the obscurity of its origins in the university hothouse. What is needed instead is a commitment to help raise people from poor circumstances, whichever race they happen to be. True social justice cannot be accomplished by turning people against one another.
This piece first appeared at Telegraph.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: N. Papes, USA Today
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