By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Contributing Columnist
“DEI means DIE!”
This wasn’t the first time that the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, lambasted diversity, equity and inclusion in an X post. His Jan. 20, 2025, post in this instance blamed the Los Angeles wildfire destruction on DEI programs and initiatives supposedly mandated for fire departments.
This is the first of a two-part series on the war on diversity, equity and inclusion. It’s an excerpt from Hutchinson’s latest book “DEI or DIE” (Middle Passage Press).
Musk claimed that opened the door for supposedly incompetent, unqualified, ill-prepared minorities, women, and LGBTQ persons to oust supposedly qualified and trained professional white males from the departments.
That was pure Musk. However, there was nothing hokum about the farcical blame of the fires on DEI policies when then 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump put his political muscle to the all-out assault on diversity, equity and inclusion. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly vowed to do it.
“I will direct the Department of Justice to pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination.” He was not talking about a full-blown legal assault using the massive power of the Department of Justice, Education Department and other federal agencies with their civil right divisions to combat racial discrimination and inequities. In decades past, the victims of the discrimination fight were exclusively African Americans, Hispanics, Asian and Native Americans.
The victims Trump had in mind were whites. In speech after speech before, during and after the campaign he made it crystal clear that he would scrap every vestige of diversity, equity and inclusion mandates from government agencies and by extension colleges, universities, corporations and businesses.
Trump would wield the one club that he had to end alleged racial targeting of whites. That was the use of federal dollars. Since 2021, the calculation was that the feds had spent more than $1 billion on DEI initiatives.
Trump vowed not to authorize a penny in federal spending to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. That was the new buzzword, watchword, and inflammatory red flag acronym that the GOP, ultra-rightists and Trump made their favorite whipping boy.
His predecessor in the Oval Office, Joe Biden made boosting DEI programs and initiatives a signature goal of his administration. Now Trump could radically and abruptly turn the tables.
The day after he sat down in the Oval Office, Jan. 21, Trump made good his vow. He signed a slew of executive orders that wiped out DEI language from government agency websites. He put on paid leave effective immediately all DEI program employees in federal agencies.
He ordered federal employees to blow the whistle on any government agency that tried to sneak through the back door a DEI initiative. For good measure, he reached back decades and scrapped an executive order signed in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson that bolstered affirmative action in federal contracting.
Trump promised there would be more hard action to come to totally expunge DEI from the landscape.
If anything, Trump was a Johnny-come-lately to the issue. The seeds of the conflict can be traced as far back to the moment the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed. The landmark bill outlawed all discrimination in public and private hiring, contracting, and accommodations.
But there was a hidden kicker in the passage of the act that would inflame and hyper charge the issue of discrimination. The issue was affirmative action.
Put simply, federal government policy would push, prod and edge colleges, universities, corporations and government agencies to implement special programs and initiatives that would boost the hiring and promotion of African Americans and other minorities.
Over time, this was expanded to include to women and LGBTQ people. Each time, the alarm bells among the ultraright rang louder. The new buzz word now was that affirmative action was “reverse discrimination.” And the alleged primary victims of the discrimination were white males.
The courts were flooded with lawsuits against affirmative action programs at colleges and universities, and at major corporations.
The red herring argument was that the government was demanding that all institutions set quotas that gave preferential treatment in hiring to minorities. That was a false charge that bore no basis in fact. However, the GOP and ultra conservative advocacy groups sold this bogus notion to much of the media and the public.
By the start of the 2024 presidential campaign, the anti DEI assault had gathered a full head of steam. A growing number of major corporations that included Walmart, Starbucks, Ford and Toyota that had implemented DEI initiatives following the police slaying of George Floyd in 2020 were under fire.
The critics pounded them for supposedly caving in to civil rights, women’s, and LGBTQ advocacy organizations. They furiously tossed the standard charge that the corporations were imposing hiring quotas, and preferences, all at the expense of whites, especially white males.
Trump’s winning the Oval Office was the breaking point. The speedy back pedal from nearly every one of the major corporations that had implemented DEI programs and initiatives was stunning. Musk’s perverse cry that DEI was DIE now sadly was closer to reality than ever.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is “President Trump’s America” (Middle Passage Press). He is the host of the weekly The Hutchinson Report Facebook Livesteamed.