The End of DEI

Trump is ending racial preferences, and America will be better because of it.

Last February, my book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America was published. In it, I argued that color blindness—the principle that people should be treated without regard to their race—should guide American public policy. For this, I was called a “charlatan” by Sunny Hostin on The View.

I did not foresee that less than a year later Donald Trump would become president again, and that upon taking office, he would end decades of race-based presidential directives and with the stroke of his Sharpie adopt my call for racial color blindness. As Trump put it in his inauguration address: “We will forge a society that is color-blind and merit-based.”

Trump’s Executive Order 14171 is titled Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity. It describes how vast swaths of society, including the “Federal Government, major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, large commercial airlines, law enforcement agencies, and institutions of higher education have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI).”

In response, Trump has ordered the executive branch and its agencies “to terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements.”

That is a lot of preferences and mandates. Trump’s executive order accurately describes the enormousness of the DEI bureaucracy that has arisen in government and private industry to infuse race in hiring, promotion, and training. Take, for example, the virtue-signaling announcements made by big corporations in recent years—such as CBS’s promise that the writers of its television shows would meet a quota of being 40 percent non-white.

And so, we will now see what federal enforcement of a color-blind society looks like. We’ll certainly see how many federal employees were assigned to monitor and enforce DEI—Trump has just demanded they all be laid off.

The most controversial part of this executive order is that it repeals the storied, 60-year-old Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Johnson’s original order mandated that government contractors take “affirmative action” to ensure that employees are hired “without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin.”

The phrase affirmative action, however, has come to have a profoundly different meaning for us than it did during the 1960s civil rights era. Back then, it simply meant that companies had to make an active effort to stop discriminating against blacks, since antiblack discrimination was, in many places, the norm. Only later did the phrase come to be associated with the requirement to actively discriminate in favor of blacks and other minorities.

One of the great ironies of affirmative action is that it was not a Democrat but a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who did more than anyone to enshrine reverse racism at the federal level by establishing racial quotas. According to the Richard Nixon Foundation, “The Nixon administration ended discrimination in companies and labor unions that received federal contracts, and set guidelines and goals for affirmative action hiring for African Americans.” It was called the “Philadelphia Plan”—the city of its origin.

For the first time in American history, private companies had to meet strict numerical targets in order to do business with the federal government. Philadelphia iron trades had to be at least 22 percent non-white by 1973; plumbing trades had to be at least 20 percent non-white by the same year; electrical trades had to be 19 percent non-white, and so forth.

In the intervening decades, this racial spoils system has not only caused grief for countless members of the unfavored races—it has also created incentives for business owners to commit racial fraud, or else to legally restructure so as to be technically “minority-owned.” As far back as 1992, The New York Times reported that such fraud was “a problem everywhere”—for instance, with companies falsely claiming to be 51 percent minority-owned in order to secure government contracts. In a more recent case, a Seattle man sued both the state and federal government, claiming to run a minority-owned business on account of being 4 percent African.

For progressives, Trump’s repeal of LBJ’s 1965 executive order is being framed as a reversal of Civil Rights–era gains. In covering the repeal, Axios reminds readers that “Segregationists during Johnson’s time opposed the executive order.” This framing makes sense only if you omit the changed meaning of affirmative action over time. In context, the segregationists of the 1960s believed in a race-based society and wanted to exclude black people from opportunities, whereas today, Trump is opposing racial mandates. They were against color blindness; Trump is for it.

Trump’s executive order gets closer to the original intent of the civil rights movement than today’s DEI policies. During the Senate debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the bill’s lead sponsor, Senator Hubert Humphrey, famously promised that if anyone could find any language in the Civil Rights Act that required preferential hiring based on percentages or quotas, he would eat the entire bill page by page. In the twenty-first century, it’s today’s progressives who would be the ones chewing.

But Republicans have soul-searching of their own to do. Their presidents have been complaining about, and campaigning against, affirmative action since the Reagan era at least. But Trump is the first president to actually do anything about it. Affirmative action has long been unpopular with the public, which is why it lost two separate referendums in the solid-blue state of California. And it’s also why the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that struck down affirmative action in college admissions was met more with resignation than with protest on the left. Still, Republican presidents have been too risk-averse to take straightforward steps to roll it back.

In one sense, Trump is simply riding an anti-DEI wave that he cannot claim credit for. For instance, he could have done this in his first term, but like every Republican since Nixon, he chose not to.

Yet in another way, Trump is demonstrating one of his strengths as a leader: the ability to stop procrastinating and take calculated risks. We saw him exhibit this quality when he moved the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. And we see it today, with his long-overdue rollback of an unpopular DEI establishment.

While most states still have independent race-based policies that are not directly affected by Trump’s directive, this is an important moment in the history of American race relations, and a special moment in the career of this writer: Regardless of what happens, it is not every day that you get to see your ideals enshrined as the law of the land.