Give Trump credit for this: he’s pretty much slaughtered the term DEI and, with it, the practice of companies big and small to have divisions within them that focus on the recruitment and hiring of BIPOC employees.
A few years ago—say, from 2018 until a year ago—most big corporations felt the necessity of having DEI efforts. The drift of American politics had been decisively in favor of increasing the number of Black, Latino, gay and female employees. American voters seemed sympathetic to this goal: no company wanted to be smeared with the reputation of being discriminatory. DEI was ascendant and seemed likely to remain so.
Then came 2024 and Donald Trump. Now, corporations have been dismantling their DEI departments rapidly. Among the bigger ones are Boeing, Google, Walmart, Meta, Amazon, Ford, and Wall Street banks, including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. There are, to be sure, companies that maintain DEI departments, such as Apple, Cisco, Delta and Costco. However, they are in the minority. DEI seems likely to become one of those cultural anachronisms that had its 15 minutes, then disappeared into the darkened tomb of history.
META is a prime example. The company disbanded all DEI programs last year, just days before Trump took the oath of office for the second time. In announcing the move, their HR department cited a “changing…legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States.” With the U.S. Supreme Court chipping away at affirmative action and DEI programs, and Trump overtly threatening companies that continued diversity efforts, it no longer made sense for a company to tread those shark-infested waters. Just months after starting his second term, Trump issued an executive order, “Addressing Discrimination By Federal Contractors,” which ordered all companies doing business with the U.S. government to “not engage in any racially discriminatory DEI activities” or else have those contracts “canceled, terminated, or suspended in whole or in part, and the contractor or subcontractor may be declared ineligible for further Government contracts.” For most corporations, this was the equivalent of the death penalty; imagine Boeing stripped of all U.S. government contracts!
What does Trump’s order mean for Oakland? Plenty. He can cancel federal funds to the city providing for affordable housing and homeless shelters. Oakland’s infrastructure of progressive nonprofits and diversity consultants is also a target; without those millions in subsidies, lots of nonprofits will cease to exist. Trump’s order has already resulted in over a thousand federal research grants being canceled at the University of California (headquartered in Oakland) for having terms like “diversity” and “gender” in their keywords. Needless to say, our progressive leaders—Barbara Lee, Lateefah Simon—are refusing to comply. Simon in particular, as Ranking [Democratic] Member of the House Oversight Committee, is the top Democrat in Congress fighting efforts to outlaw diversity initiatives, such as the administration’s attempts to cancel Veterans Affairs infrastructure projects in the District. But it’s not clear that anything she can do will have any impact. The administration’s cancellation of Simon’s beloved Alameda Point Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic, based on soaring costs, environmental pollution at the site, and its “inaccessibility” to veterans given the lack of public transit to Alameda, represents a serious, perhaps fatal setback, and Simon and her Democratic colleagues in the House are engaged in a mighty legislative battle to preserve the program. But fighting the administration of any President is an uphill battle, and it’s not clear Simon can win this fight, without a change in the leadership of both the House and the Senate.
Oakland departments despite the pressure continue to maintain diversity divisions, especially the city’s Department of Race and Equity (DRE). The city’s Department of Transportation also has its Race and Equity Team Charter. Rather than letting every branch operate entirely on its own, the central DRE agency is legally mandated by Oakland's municipal code to oversee, train, and structurally audit all city departments. This results in a mandate to develop programs consistent with the mission and theory of change to advance equity in all that the City does, which is central to every program Oakland runs.
Inherent to this vision of equity is the related notion of equality of outcomes. For Oakland politicians, it’s not enough that all citizens have equal access to Oakland’s resources, which despite our budgetary woes remain considerable. There’s a lot of money at stake here, and if a city department or program wants access to it, they must demonstrate not only that everybody is able to get the money, but that everybody benefits equally from it. This means that any deviation from the norm—say, BIPOC students don’t do as well in school, or BIPOC residents don’t have the same rate of home ownership as Whites and Asians—is interpreted as prima facie evidence of racism. As any teacher, employer or athletic coach will tell you, differences in performance outcomes are inevitable among humans. There’s no conceivable way to make, say, the average Asian teenager as adept at basketball as his Black counterpart. We ought to celebrate this diversity, but equity freaks hate it. And so Oakland keeps on going along the same path to nowhere because it’s central governing ideology is based on a falsehood.
In all likelihood Oakland will be plagued with this sickness for many more years. The people who run this town are told what to do by their BIPOC masters at the employee unions, and their indentured servants—the City Council—find it functionally impossible to ignore orders. It would be wonderful if SEIU and the other unions decided to tell the truth and admit that human nature cannot be changed so that incompetent people have the same opportunities as competent ones. But this can’t happen under our current structure. When and if Oakland decides to terminate its obsession with racial equity, we can begin to dig ourselves out of this hole. But if you want to do that, you’re going to have to fire most of the current city leaders, especially the mayor. We cannot have a city that values only some of its residents.
So back to the central question, Whatever happened to DEI? It died, or was killed by Trump and MAGA. I personally do not mourn the demise of this historically bad trend. The thing to understand, though, is that, as far as the left is concerned, DEI is not dead. It can never die. Like Dracula, it sleeps from time to time, then arises again to haunt us., under another name. We must be very careful to avoid all aspects of racism in Oakland. It will require a huge shakeup. We’ll have to get rid of everything that reeks of “social equity,” including the city’s expensive, useless violence-prevention programs. Whenever new politicians come along, we have to parse their words carefully. The mere mention of “equity” should disqualify them from holding office. Had we taken this approach earlier, we wouldn’t currently be suffering through Lateefah Simon and Barbara Lee. Better late than never!
Steve Heimoff