DEI Is the New Black

The demonization of anyone who is not white, straight and male is a tradition as old as America.

David Wilson/Wikimedia Commons/ContrabandCamp

“Years ago, I did a terrible thing,” wrote activist writer, professor and feminist author Toni Cade Bambara.

In The Black Woman: An Anthology, Bambara describes reading a paper to one of her classes that referred to white people as “us” and Black people as “them.” After listening to phrases like “I don’t believe in the double standard, but…” or “They’re trying to take over,” the entire class concluded, “it was the usual racist shit.” But one particular pro-Black male student was “more vitriolic in his condemnation of the bigotry and hypocrisy than anyone else,” Bambara wrote. He agreed that allotting “two or three slots in the executive order” was an insufficient fix for this example of white supremacy.

Until Bambara revealed that he was the student who had written the paper …

“I edited a copy of [his] paper … so that all references to male and female were changed to ‘us’ and ‘them,’” Bambara wrote. “Of course, he went on a tirade about my ethics when I announced that the paper, his paper, originally was not about Black and White but about Men and Women … But at least the point had been made: racism and chauvinism are anti-people.” Bambara concluded her story by introducing a phrase to the cultural lexicon that would bedevil America for decades.

“A man cannot be politically correct and a chauvinist, too.”

According to the book Beyond PC, Towards a Politics of Understanding, this was the “earliest textual reference” of the term “politically correct.” To Bambara, an actual scholar of words, the two-word expression represented a world that was the opposite of sexism and racism. Among Black Power activists and radical thinkers of the 1970s, the phrase succinctly defined a mode of political thought and speech that showed compassion and humanity for everyone.

To America, this has always been a terrible thing.

Today, Bambara would likely be accused of teaching critical race theory. The Black Arts Movement that defined Bambara’s work would likely be called “woke” in 2025. The university where Bambara taught would probably be forced to fire her because, in the “great” version of America that Donald Trump is making, Bambara wouldn’t be considered one of the greatest writers and thinkers of our time.

She would be a “DEI hire.”

The demonization of anyone who is not white, straight and male is a tradition as old as when the legal definition of American was a “free white persons.” Under the Alien and Sedition Acts, immigrants could be legally deported and journalists could be fined for being “malicious” to white people. In the early 1800s, writing about the inhumanity of slavery was a federal crime. Newly emancipated freedmen who demanded equal treatment of the law were considered “Black radicals.” Whether you peacefully demanded your civil rights like John Lewis or demanded Black power like Malcolm X, to the FBI and white America, you were a Communist. According to white people, the founders of Black Lives Matter, Colin Kaepernick, Martin Luther King Jr. and even Barack Obama — the literal embodiment of a respectable politician — were all secretly trained by anti-American Marxists who hate America.

While these historical examples have nothing to do with actual diversity, equity or inclusion, they are connected to recent backlash against DEI. Just as white America turned a Black woman’s term for a more correct political philosophy into a slur by condensing it down to “PC,” the Joe Rogan-tested, Elon Musk-approved version of Caucasian American Vernacular English resurrected an evil negro monster by turning everything even tangentially connected to equality or addressing racial disparities into “DEI.” Because Omeretta the Great was not available to make a song about it, here’s a list of everything that is not DEI:

• Black History Month is not DEI

• Teaching the true history of America is not DEI

• Contracting with Black-owned businesses is not DEI

• Looking for employees at an HBCU is not DEI

• Giving scholarships to Black students is not DEI

• Addressing underfunded schools is not DEI

• School lunches are not DEI

• Treating LGBTQIA people as humans is not DEI

• Singing the Black national anthem is not DEI

• Stocking Black hair care products in your store is not DEI

• Hiring qualified Black people is not DEI

Black women were dark and lovely long before Target was kind enough to invite itself into a $9 billion industry to atone for the death of George Floyd and hopped on the Tabitha Brown bandwagon we built. But no one in Black America asked for Target to solve police brutality by stocking more Pink Oil Lotion and edge gel. There isn’t a single African-American federal employee who was longing to celebrate Black History Month with their white colleagues. Colin Kaepernick didn’t sacrifice his career because he wanted to hear dulcet notes of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” waft over the “End Racism” sign in the end zone. They were asking white people, white institutions and the country they lived in to fix the racial disparities created, ignored and perpetuated by whiteness. They wanted less inequality and more injustice. They didn’t ask for diversity, equity or inclusion; they asked white people to stop being racist.

The colleges that dismantled affirmative action admit more unqualified white students. In a world where Black college graduates are paid less, underemployed and underutilized compared to whites with the same level of experience and education, in 2019, 5% of Target’s executives, senior officials and managers were Black. But after making a commitment to Black-owned brands, the company’s “industry-leading beauty assortment” was worth more than $10 billion by the end of 2023.

There is no DEI backlash. Cancel culture does not exist. White third-graders are not learning CRT from teachers who are 80% white. Billion-dollar corporations and schools with billion-dollar endowments are not reversing their decisions to be more equitable because they fear Donald Trump. The cowards inside these companies, institutions and government agencies are reinstating a whiter supremacy.

If Target wanted diversity, they wouldn’t need to manufacture a policy. They could just hire the Black people they were rejecting before a cop murdered a man. If the federal government wanted equity, its contractors would reflect the demographics of the taxpayers whose money they spend. If a college wanted inclusion, they’d dismantle legacy admissions that perpetuate centuries of exclusion. If any of these organizations were actually dedicated to fairness, they’d be booting everyone connected to the systems that created the systemic racism that warranted these copy-and-paste DEI policies in the first place.

Instead, they are kicking Black people to the curb and hitting “undo” on their let’s-be-slightly-less-racist directives. They are dismantling the insufficient solutions that white people created to fix the shit that white people broke. They are rededicating themselves to the incorrect politics that made America great…

Again.

In the 1990s, the pariah of “PC Culture” became an untenable burden that represented everything white America hated. To Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, the phrase was synonymous with Black welfare recipients. ABC tapped self-important snark and self-described “house nigger” Bill Maher to host a late-night network TV show cleverly named Politically Incorrect. Even the president of the United States weighed in. After explicitly acknowledging that “the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism,” President George H.W. Bush explained that “the notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land.”

The backlash to treating people who are not straight, white, male and Christian was so furious, the New York Times put its senior white man on the case.

“As defined by its critics, political correctness is a widespread tendency to use censorship, intimidation and other weapons abhorrent to the American political process to support popular demands for measures to enforce sexual, racial and ethnic equality,” wrote Pulitzer Prize winner Robert D. McFadden. “[A]s increasing numbers of women and minority students and faculty members have greatly diversified the nation's once overwhelmingly white male campuses, the struggle between traditional academicians and those demanding preferential admissions and more multicultural curriculums has intensified.”

But the companies, agencies and institutions that are dismantling policies that were created to address well-documented social inequities are not dismantling DEI. They are undoing civil rights. They are reversing progress. They are rejecting fairness. They are undermining justice.

This is an attack on Black people.

In America, this is politically correct. There has never been an institution in this entire country that is focused on taking stuff from white people to give it to African-Americans. What they call “DEI” is just a meager attempt to fix a country that white people broke.

Because, when it comes to justice, civil rights, progress and especially Black people …

America did a terrible thing.

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