What is This Attack on “DEI” All About?
Two stories, really: first, how to find an audience wherever it might be; second, one "editorial" that did find its audience, however small it proved to be.
What follows is very much a local story, but it may reflect vibrations across the country. South Bend, Indiana (Ezra Klein, at the New York Times, has called it, “a small but noble town”) is a blue dot, shifting to purple, in an increasingly red state. While South Bend’s municipal government remains in Democratic hands, the county in which it sits, St. Joseph, has swung rightward over the years.
As of now, the three member County Commission, the county’s executive, is controlled by Republicans, 2 to 1. St. Joseph County also has a legislative body, the County Council. In recent elections the Council has moved from safely Democratic, to, in the last two elections, a 5 - 4 Republican majority with four pretty strong MAGA types.
Recently, one of the Republicans as a matter of “new business,” chose to raise as an issue, “DEI.” He described it as, among other things, “reverse discrimination.” He asked constituents to report any “DEI” policy any County employee may have pursued, presumably so it could be pulled out, root and branch.
South Bend does have a daily newspaper, Gannett-owned, and it will publish local contributions to its once a week editorial pages. But recently it has required laymen’s submissions to concern purely local issues. As a result, discussions of national concern, like whether “DEI” is good or bad, must find audiences wherever and whenever they might. The local paper, it now appears, is off-limits.
In this case the available audience turned out to be the nine members of the County Council. Here is the “editorial,” not to be seen in our local paper but hand-delivered to each of the Council members (and staff) at the end of the Council’s meeting that followed the previous session’s “root out DEI” episode. So, again,
What is This Attack on “DEI” All About?
At the February 11, 2025 meeting of this body one of its members spoke of “DEI” and how pursuing such policies might lead to “reverse discrimination” (against whom he did not say). At 48:15-40 of the meeting’s tape, he asked the public to report to him or other members, “any concerns with DEI within the county government. . . .”
Let’s consider what the letters “DEI” mean. Two of them, “D” and “I,” stand for “diversity” and “inclusion.” What is now called the United States has had diversity and inclusion for a very long time.
When our white Anglo-Saxon forefathers arrived at Plymouth in 1620, native-Americans in North America numbered in the millions having arrived here at least 20,000 years before the Christian Pilgrims did.1
Meanwhile, in 1619 our Virginia “Cavalier” forefathers had started their centuries-long program of exploiting Africans as slaves (those, at least, who survived the voyage in chains).2 By 1860, the Confederate States had a white population of about 5.5 million with some 3.5 million African-American unpaid laborers.3
Meanwhile, in 1836 Sam Houston and others separated themselves from Mexico, in part, to keep slaves, since Mexico had prohibited the institution in 1829.4 After Texas joined the U.S. in 1845, the 1850 census showed that the new state’s population included more than 14,000 residents of Mexican origin.5 Then we had the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). At war’s end, nearly 80,000 Mexicans suddenly became U.S. citizens, residents of the future states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona Colorado and New Mexico.6
From 1840 through 1860 another large group, this time white skinned -- though of the wrong religion -- joined the American population. This was the Irish, millions of them. According to the Library of Congress, in the 1840s, they comprised nearly half of all immigrants to the United States.7 They were met with outright hostility; cartoons depicted them as apes.8 The anti-Irish, anti-immigrant reaction of “real Americans” led to formation in the 1850’s of the American Party, the infamous Know-Nothings. “Know-Nothings believed that Protestantism defined American society. From this flowed their fundamental belief that Catholicism was incompatible with basic American values,” Jay P. Dolan, The Irish Americans: A History.
By 1882 another group, the Chinese had become part of the American fabric, having done much menial work to develop the mines and railroads of California and the Northwest. They faced hatred across the West. Their continued arrival here was stopped by the Chinese Exclusion Act of that year.9 Harsh limits on Chinese immigration continued up to World War II. Things finally began to change only when Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang became our ally during the “good war,” when we “real” Americans forced innocent Japanese-American families into concentration camps while their sons won Congressional Medals of Honor fighting for all of us in Italy.10
So there is a long history of this nation’s diversity and inclusion. As this recital also shows, of course, we Americans are burdened with an equally long history of victimizing people some of us dislike, fear or, either by wealth or political power, use as beasts of burden.
What is the function of this attack on “DEI”? Its essential purpose is to divide us; to engender fear and hostility toward selected “others.” In many cases it is nothing more than arrant racism or misogyny (an example: the suggestion, without a scrap of evidence, that an aircraft collision was caused by “a DEI hire”). It also reflects the fear that, on an even playing field, one or more of those “others” may be more competent, smarter or harder working than we white males.
This attack on “DEI” is even more pernicious than its reflection of racism or economic insecurity. It strikes at the heart of what it takes to have a democracy. Our democracy started in 1776 with 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 . . . .” Jesus is recorded in the King James Version of the New Testament as saying, “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them . . .” Matthew 7:12. Equality -- equity, the “E” in “DEI” -- is the essence of democracy. Contrary to what the pink pigs famously proclaimed in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, some animals are not more equal than others.
To treat fellow citizens, especially miniscule groups without power, as inferior, or as “the enemy within,” is the antithesis of democracy. It is, in fact, the first necessary step to fascism. No doubt the oligarchs -- Musk, Bezos and the other billionaires -- like what they see us “lesser beings” doing to ourselves.
Notes:
1. University of Oxford, “The Earliest Americans arrived in the New World 30,000 years ago” https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-07-22-earliest-americans-arrived-new-world-30000-years-ago
2. Encyclopedia Virginia, “Slave Ships.” (“Between 1500 and 1866, 12.5 million enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas, about 1.8 million of whom died on the Middle Passage of the transatlantic slave trade.”) https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/slave-ships-and-the-middle-passage/
3. Britannica, “The Confederacy at War” https://www.britannica.com/topic/ Confederate-States-of-America/The-Confederacy-at-war.
4. Wikipedia, “Texas Revolution,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_ revolution - CITEREFTorget2015
5. Texas State Historical Assn. “Mexican Americans” https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/mexican-americans
6. Wikipedia, “History of Mexican Americans” https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/History-of-Mexican-Americans.
7. Library of Congress, “Irish-Catholic Immigration to America” https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/irish/irish-catholic-immigration-to-america/
8. Sociological Images, “Irish Apes: Tactics of De-Humanization” https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/01/28/irish-apes-tactics-of-de-humanization/
9. Britannica, “The Chinese Exclusion Act” https://www.britannica.com/ topic/Chinese-Exclusion-Act
10. National WW II Museum, “Going for Broke: The 442 Regimental Combat Team.” https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/442nd-regimental-combat-team
That’s the end of the “editorial.” One can hope that at least some people in that tiny audience read it -- for the Republicans, unfiltered by Fox News or the local Sinclair TV station.
P.S.: For what it’s worth I’m half Irish; the “C” in John C. Hamilton is 100% Irish.