It’s a strange declaration to appear in an institution that trains teachers of the children of conservative parents who know at this point in time what that formulation really signifies. True, not so long ago that DEI commitment might have appeared a more or less business-as-usual assertion. By 2018, we could say, the triad “diversity-equity-inclusion” had become so customary in higher education, government, and the business world that one barely paused to notice it.
There are many more examples throughout the red states, and they aren’t innocent, apolitical dedications. They’re code for a leftward future. “Social change” never means a return to traditional norms of sexuality. “Diversity” never calls for more evangelical Christians in the room. “Equity” means equal outcomes, by state imposition if necessary. There’s nothing conservative in these claims. They violate old ideas of liberal individualism, too. They’re anti-conservative and anti-individual.
Leftists and liberals protest such moves, of course, calling them censorship and tyranny. But in doing so, they forget the lessons of their own theorists and intellectuals. Left-wing thinkers from Marx to Marcuse and Foucault took as a principle that any idea that circulates in the world has embedded political content. If the idea seems neutral or bipartisan, as “diversity” does in its common expression, that’s only because its political meaning has been disguised, either intentionally by clever rhetoricians or by simple repetition to the point that it appears routine and natural.
Once that happens, those ideas become more dangerous, because their political force proceeds without people noticing. It’s a mistake, then, Foucault and others argued, to understand these words in their ideal meaning, that is, how the dictionary defines them. We must track their power, the effects they cause.
As I said, the mask has come off DEI. The moral cachet it enjoyed five years ago is gone. A growing number of Americans don’t accept it as a fitting program of fairness. DEI personnel have shown themselves to be bullies and control freaks, identity politicians eager to expel wrong-thinkers. The more the public sees DEI at work, in actual practice and not in rosy generalizations, the less popular it becomes. Republican leaders have no reason to believe that anti-DEI positions are political losers.
When I first heard the word “woke,” in 2018, it was uttered as an edgy claim of cool. To be woke was to be hip, enlightened, with-it, and savvy—and moral, too, committed to racial justice. Now, the word has all the edginess of an aging hippie in 1978.
The task now isn’t to discredit DEI, but to eliminate it. DEI advocates never wanted to debate the practice, anyway. They relied on guilt trips to gain power, and once they got it, why jeopardize their position by exposing themselves to the other side? It’s time to take that power away, which Gov. Stitt, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and others have proven can be done with no loss of support.
Republicans have been playing catch-up in the education sphere for a long time, but more of them recognize that much of the politics we see in the public sphere in 2024 has its genesis in the classroom years earlier. It can’t be ignored any longer.
