President Donald Trump shows off another executive order he has signed in the Oval Office. Columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson says the president promotes myths while attacking diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Courtesy photo
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Contributing Columnist
President Donald Trump wasted absolutely no time the first day he took his seat in the Oval Office on Jan. 20. He kept his much-spoken vow to wipe out all federal backing of diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
In his inauguration acceptance speech, he again cited one of the most endlessly repeated anti-DEI myths The myth that DEI was an effort to “socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.”
This is the second of a two-part series on the war on diversity, equity and inclusion. It is an excerpt from Hutchinson’s latest book “DEI or DIE” (Middle Passage Press).
That was only one of the bottomless storehouses of myths that Trump and the legions of diversity, equity and inclusion opponents encoded as an article of faith in their crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion. They even reached back into time to dredge up one of their most favored knocks.
That was the ancient notion that diversity, equity and inclusion opened the floodgates to hire packs of unqualified, ill-prepared, incompetent Blacks, Hispanics and women, all of course at the expense of supposedly supremely qualified and competent white males. This dredged up the old straw man notion that diversity, equity and inclusion, as its predecessor affirmative action, was just a sneaky way of slapping quotas on companies to hire women, LGBTQ and nonwhites.
This, so the claim went, mocked the notion that merit, hard work, education and training and preparation must be the only criteria for advancement.
There was absolutely no evidence that companies ever deliberately went out of their way to pack their work force with nonwhites at the expense of qualified white males. If anything, it was the opposite.
Surveys found that Blacks and other minorities in skilled positions at major companies repeatedly complained that they must work even harder and have even greater top notch proven education and skills than their white counterparts. This was to dispel the deep-seated suspicion and often open charge that they were diversity, equity and inclusion hires and therefore suspect.
There’ was another double edge to the anti-diversity, equity and inclusion sword. That was that nepotism, or more commonly, the good ole boy’ network was still a dominant feature of corporate hiring and promotion. A 2023 Harvard Magazine survey confirmed that favoritism was rampant and that it benefited white males from well-connected, higher-income families.
Trump made the unsubstantiated claim that whites were getting the short end of the stick all due to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. In this case, Trump made the claim in an interview in May 2024 with Time Magazine.
He gave not one instance or example to back up the fallacious claim that whites were the principal victims of racial discrimination. But then that wasn’t important. The point was to reinforce the increasingly widespread belief that diversity, equity and inclusion not only victimized whites but made them the object of racial hatred, solely because they were white.
The words and terms that Trump and the growing hordes of anti-DEI opponents routinely tossed around was that DEI fueled the belief that whites were inherently racist, enjoyed boundless white privilege and that whiteness was the fount of all evil.
This latter point was especially galling because to hear Trump tell it, this encouraged schools to shame and indoctrinate into white students that American history was one long train of unspeakable horrors, brutality and abuses of Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans by malicious whites.
The other unstated brutal truth was that Blacks were the absolute last group to benefit from diversity, equity and inclusion programs. A 2011 study by the African American Policy Forum confirmed that.
It cited a U.S. Labor Department report that found that affirmative action programs gave the prime boost to white women in breaking the glass ceiling. Diversity, equity and inclusion, of course, in the decade since that study was conducted replaced affirmative action as the buzzword for supposed discrimination against white males. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 2023 ruling, had all but wrote the epitaph for affirmative action.
A 2021 McKinsey Study and various other studies found that most top echelon corporate positions were not women or minorities, but white men. Conversely, studies also found that Blacks and other non-whites remained just as firmly ensconced in the bottom rung positions in corporations and had scant success in breaking through in any significant numbers to the top management and middle management spots.
None of that mattered to Trump. He and the horde of diversity, equity and inclusion opponents continued to fan the same tired, shop-worn myths that diversity, equity and inclusion penalized white males.
Worse, that it made it made a joke of the cherished American principle of merit and achievement as the sole means of achieving. This was yet another of the many myths about diversity, equity and inclusion. Trump’s signing of the slew of executive orders knocking out federal funding of DEI across the board didn’t and wouldn’t stop the myth making.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is “President Trump’s America” (Middle Passage Press). He also is the host of the weekly The Hutchinson Report Facebook Livesteamed.
