Gus John | DEI must not die!

Among the tornado of executive orders that Donald Trump has unleashed since his inauguration on January 20 is one which effectively shuts down funding for, and the operation of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programmes across government, corporate and public institutions in America. This has led to corporate Britain feeling emboldened enough to call for the same here.

In the preamble to his executive order, Trump stated that “the Biden administration forced illegal and immoral discrimination programmes, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI), into virtually all aspects of the federal government, in areas ranging from airline safety to the military.

TAXPAYER RESOURCES

Asserting that “Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect, and to expending precious taxpayer resources only on making America great”, Trump mandated ‘the termination of all discriminatory programmes, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) mandates, policies, programmes, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear”.

Trump’s billionaire advisers heading up the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, like Trump himself, appear to treat with utter disdain those ‘underserved groups’ Biden saw as the beneficiaries of those DEIA policies and programmes. On January 3, Musk tweeted: “DEI is just another word for racism. Shame on anyone who uses it.”

LEGACY AND HISTORY

Last November, Ramaswamy said on X: “The latest HHS (Health and Human Services) budget request mentions ‘equity’ 829 times, with requests seeking to address ‘racial equity and environmental justice’ at the forefront. An efficient government has no place for DEI bloat. Time to DOGE it”.

Trump took office 60 years and six months after President Lyndon B Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, and national origin. The act addressed voting rights, employment, public accommodations, education, and more. A series of laws in the 1960s and 1970s clarified and expanded the discrimination ban to include age and disability discrimination as well as housing and voting rights.

But the act and the laws that flowed from it didn’t come from nowhere, nor were they magnanimous political gestures on the part of Johnson, and John F. Kennedy before him.

Musk was born seven years after the Civil Rights Act was written into law; Ramaswamy, 21 years after.

Those who gave their lives, or suffered loss of limbs, or served long prison sentences for resisting Jim Crow racism and holding America to its founding principles left a legacy and a history which those two men either know and choose to dismiss, or see as being of no contemporary relevance. It is a history that clearly has no place in the MAGA play list.

Preamble to the Declaration of Independence

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

It will soon be five years since George Floyd was murdered by a white policeman in Minneapolis, a murder that sent shock waves through the USA. But it should not have taken that sadistic murder to awaken that nation either to the extent of day-to-day, systemic, institutional and cultural racism in the society, or to the persistence of the ideology of white supremacy that underpins that racism.

George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020. One year and one day earlier, April 24, 2019, John King (23) was executed in Texas, having been found guilty of murdering James Byrd Jr.

King, Shawn Berry, also age 23 and Lawrence Brewer, 31, had all been found guilty of having given Byrd a severe beating, chaining him by his ankles to the back of their pickup truck and dragging him for three miles, then dumping his dismembered body at the entrance of an African American cemetery. Brewer was executed in September 2011 and Berry was sentenced to life in prison.

This piece of history, very much in the lifetime of both Musk and Ramaswamy, is important because it is certainly not fanciful to suggest that the white supremacist project of Donald Trump and MAGA has the potential to incubate more Kings, Berrys and Brewers.

For, what are we to make of the fact that Trump, who outlaws DEI policies and programmes as discriminatory and illegal, is committing the USA to expelling two million Palestinians and appropriating their land, to turn it from the rubble and the expansive graveyard that their bombs have created into a playground for the rich and a colonial trophy for Israel?

DEBUNK FALSE DICHOTOMY

And in the same week that Trump told the world of his intention to violate international law and forcibly displace Palestinians from Gaza in an act of ethnic cleansing, with Benjamin Netanyahu pledging to help the US get it done, he is declaring financial war on the government and the black majority population of the Republic of South Africa.

Having suspended the US Refugee Admissions Program on his first day in office, a programme which, according to the State Department, has allowed entry mostly to people from war-torn countries, or from ethnic, religious and political repression in Africa and Asia seeking asylum, Trump ordered that priority be given to the refugee resettlement of South Africans of European descent.

His executive order charged the South African government with “unjust racial discrimination” against Afrikaners, on account of its land distribution programme that seeks to redistribute the vast quantities of land still owned by a white minority of the population, i.e., the Afrikaners who colonised the country and kept the majority black population in apartheid bondage until the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 after 27 years in prison.

Trump is seeking to dictate to South Africa how it should manage its affairs as a sovereign state. His executive order puts an end to aid and other forms of assistance to South Africa while it pursues its land reform agenda. He is also punishing South Africa for having taken up “aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies”, because of the case it brought before the International Court of Justice alleging that Israel was engaged in acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

UNCONSCIOUS BIAS

So, what should Britain’s position be on Trump and DEI?

Over the years, we have become used to a familiar pattern. The US sneezes today and Britain catches a cold tomorrow. But whatever reset of DEI might be needed in Britain – and there is much that needs fixing, not least ditching the expanding ‘unconscious bias’ industry–Britain will gallop back to the 1950s if it follows Trump and cancels DEI.

Those of us who struggled to gather the evidence that led Parliament to pass the 1968 Race Relations Act, the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 constantly need to remind young and old alike what it was like before such target groups had the protection of anti-discrimination legislation. Despite that legislation and the current Equality Act, systemic discrimination is still rife, and far too little attention is paid to the intersection of race and class.

We need to be clearer about whether our focus is on equality or equity, what we mean by diversity, and what inclusion looks like. Above all, we need to debunk this false dichotomy that would have you believe that merit and equal opportunity are polar opposites, and that you could choose people on merit if your systems automatically exclude them from the opportunity to come in front of you in the first place.

Professor Augustine John is a human-rights campaigner and honorary fellow at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London.