The Truth about DEI and Affirmative Action
Why we need them both and why they are still so misunderstood
Conservatives are doing their best to give DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) a bad name. They’ve already convinced SCOTUS to reverse a prior ruling in support of affirmative action in colleges and universities — an attempt to blow up a pipeline to success that wealthy white people have traditionally had easy access to. But they won’t stop there. Now they want to destroy all attempts to promote equity within spaces where POC (and LGBTQ+) already exist.
We have all heard the saying, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.” I beg to differ. When it comes to assumptions based on ignorance, the damage can be both extreme and long-lasting.
To understand the importance of DEI programs as well as affirmative action and how conservatives consistently manipulate facts to deny the need for such programs, we need a little history lesson on why affirmative action was created in the first place and how it has since morphed into the need for additional programs (DEI) to address our ever-changing human landscape.
The beginnings of affirmative action
The first attempt at including POC in the workforce was by President Franklin Roosevelt who created affirmative action by Executive Order. This was followed by subsequent Executive Orders to clarify the process and to specify who must comply.
But it was a Republican, President Richard M. Nixon, who started the quota system. There was a period during the Nixon administration when his Philadelphia Plan required government contractors to hire minorities. This was done to reverse the rampant race-based discrimination that pervaded our government institutions at the time. Before then, only white people were awarded government contracts.
But entitled white men tend to make noise when they lose their entitlements. It turns out their idea of fairness is to keep their entitlements, even at the expense of someone else.
So, in 1978, with the Bakke decision, SCOTUS decided that while affirmative action was legal, quotas were unconstitutional. Therefore, quotas have not been part of affirmative action since 1978. (Put a pin in that, as Rachel Maddow would say.)
How post-1978 affirmative action worked
Many years ago I worked for a property management company that submitted a proposal to redevelop the Presidio in San Francisco.
The Presidio was an old Army base and the project was being financed by the government. The redevelopment proposal guidelines required each submission to include how affirmative action would be incorporated into the execution of the development process. Up to that point, whenever I mentioned affirmative action I’d get an earful about quotas from angry conservatives who resented what they saw as “government overreach.”
So, when I did my homework I was surprised to learn that quotas were not part of the affirmative action requirements.
What I learned was that affirmative action was designed to help businesses match the demographics of the locale in which the business would operate. Back then, that meant using community outreach to find qualified applicants. In other words, posting job ads on bulletin boards in local establishments (yes, this was the Dark Ages).
The idea was to mitigate the practice of white people only hiring other white people even when qualified POC lived within the vicinity of the business. The goal was to expand the playing field so those who would otherwise be shut out could participate. It didn’t guarantee they would win — only that they could play.
The only other requirement of affirmative action was to document hiring practices so compliance could be verified. However, if 50 Black women applied for a job and none of them had the qualifications listed in the job posting, affirmative action would not require a company to hire them. Likewise, if the demographics of the business did not ultimately match the demographics of the locale, there was no penalty.
Nothing in the affirmative action guidelines called for hiring POC (or women) if they did not meet all the requirements of the job. And yet, somehow, affirmative action and “quotas” were (and still are) synonymous in the eyes of conservatives, who use their ignorance as a weapon in their battle against affirmative action and DEI programs.
(Well-known conservative writer Andrew Sullivan cited quotas in a rant against DEI just last Friday night on Real Time with Bill Maher. A perfect example of willful misinterpretation. He conflated the version of affirmative action that existed before 1978 with DEI and then used that as justification for trashing current DEI programs.)
What quotas are and what they are not
Quotas are not laws requiring unqualified people to be hired based on their race. Rather, they are designed to seek out qualified people with diverse backgrounds and intentionally include them in institutions that have a history of excluding them.
That was the point of the affirmative action programs in colleges and universities. And the benefits of those programs are undeniable. Still, in 2023, thanks to the same Trump appointees who gave the government the right to control the bodies of every woman of childbearing age in America, SCOTUS overturned the ruling allowing affirmative action in colleges and universities.
Interestingly, it did not occur to SCOTUS to address the obscene system that allows wealthy people to pay tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to send their children to elite private high schools and pay for personal coaches to all but guarantee them admittance to an Ivy League school— a ticket to the good life most of us cannot afford.
If the goal in reversing affirmative action was fairness, the goal was not met.
Ironically, one of the Supreme Court’s strongest voices in opposition to affirmative action was Justice Clarence Thomas, who insists that SCOTUS must be “color blind” to promote a so-called “meritocracy,” yet he has expressed no concerns about the unfair advantages given to rich kids and legacy admissions (Daddy went to Yale so you can too) when applying to colleges and universities.
(As an aside, Clarence Thomas was sent to Yale as a direct result of their affirmative action program. You’d think he’d be a champion of the program. Instead, his journey resulted in a bitterness toward the program that has left him feeling victimized and angry to this day — shamed by the skepticism of white students who maintained the misguided belief that he was unqualified to be there and had gained admission solely to satisfy a quota. It’s even been reported that Thomas blamed affirmative action for his failure to secure a desired job in a high-paying law firm after graduation. Perhaps that’s why he feels justified in taking millions of dollars worth of gifts from billionaires who stand to benefit from the decisions Thomas makes on the court — a kind of perverse payback for all his suffering. For more on this, check out the Frontline documentary on Clarence and Ginni Thomas.)
The idea behind affirmative action in higher education was to undo the race-based handicap POC experience when looking for work. If a person can’t gain admission to a top university despite excelling in academics, their lifetime earning potential is curtailed. So a system that requires admissions officers to step outside their comfort zone and admit POC with the qualifications to succeed (based on their merit as proven by test scores, essay submissions, prior grades, etc.) can do much to approach a more fair and equitable result. But that’s not what white people want. White people define “fairness” as the ability to maintain their elite status — anything that challenges that will be defended, vehemently.
How is a system run by wealthy people who make admissions decisions based on financial resources and family connections a merit-based system?
The myth of American meritocracy
Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, coined the term meritocracy trap — a system that rewards an ever-growing share of society’s riches to an ever-shrinking pool of winners.
“Today’s meritocrats still claim to get ahead through talent and effort, using means open to anyone. . . In practice, however, meritocracy now excludes everyone outside of a narrow elite.”
This is a system that screws the poor, hollows out the middle class, and turns rich kids into exhausted, anxious, and maximally stressed-out adolescents who believe their future depends on getting into one of a very small group of colleges that routinely reject upwards of 90 percent of their applicants. — Caitlin Fligan, Private Schools have become Truly Obscene, The Atlantic, April 2021 Issue
It should also be mentioned that over half of the applicants to Harvard with unusually high SAT scores are Asian, yet they comprise only 20 percent of students admitted. In addition, Asians are the fastest-growing racial group in the United States, yet the percentage of Asians admitted to Harvard has not grown in decades.
If schools were color-blind, and the current system was a meritocracy, half of the current students at Harvard would be Asian.
Without admissions quotas to ensure qualified candidates from diverse backgrounds are included, top-tier schools shut them out. This is an undeniable fact.
The results of gutting affirmative action are well-known
SCOTUS would have us believe that affirmative action used to be necessary, but that time has passed. The evidence proves them wrong.
California banned race-based admissions for qualified students in 1998. As a result, the population of Black and Latino students dropped by 40% — in the first year.
The ban has in fact acted as a deterrent to prospective Black and Latino students . . . high-performing minority students were subsequently discouraged from applying to schools where minority students were underrepresented.
It’s taken 25 years of experimentation through race-neutral policies, but UC schools have begun to catch up to the racial diversity numbers lost in the wake of the affirmative action ban, says UCLA vice chancellor Chang.— NPR
For the last 25 years, the failure to maintain affirmative action programs has handicapped the ability of the UC system to reach its diversity goals — goals based on mirroring the demographics of the high-school population within the state.
The effects of this have been marked.
“Black and Hispanic students saw substantially poorer long-run labor market prospects as a result of losing access to these very selective universities,” Bleemer told NPR. “But there was no commensurate gain in long-run outcomes for the white and Asian students who took their place.”
While an intentional move toward developing a more diverse student body may be seen as a quota system by some, we cannot forget that quotas do not mean admitting unqualified applicants solely based on race. Race is merely one factor.
And if you think race doesn’t matter, consider the opinion of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the newest member of SCOTUS, who dissented from the recent decision to overturn affirmative action.
“The best that can be said of the majority’s perspective is that it proceeds (ostrich-like) from the hope that preventing consideration of race will end racism. But if that is its motivation, the majority proceeds in vain,” Jackson wrote.
We must continue to look beyond the incendiary language of those who insist on mischaracterizing the goal of diversity as a system that promotes less qualified applicants of color over more qualified white applicants. We owe it to ourselves and the next generation to understand how bans on affirmative action have affected the efforts of those in higher education to provide a more equitable experience for everyone.
Peter Salovey, the president of Yale, wrote in a statement that he was “deeply troubled” by the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action.
“Beyond Yale, and as evidenced by the broad range of voices that joined Yale in submitting amicus briefs in the case, as a nation and global society, we are strengthened by a higher education system that admits and graduates into the workforce diverse and excellent cohorts of students,” he wrote. “To the extent today’s decisions impede progress in this regard, I believe they have done the nation a disservice.” — Business Insider
Banning affirmative action in higher education has and will continue to have a detrimental effect on the ability of colleges and universities to meet the level of diversity that exists in the real world. If the role of higher education is to prepare students for the realities they will face after graduation, we can expect the banning of affirmative action to set us back decades in our ability to welcome new graduates into the workforce whose scholastic experience is adequate to the challenges they will face.
However, there is one bright spot on the horizon: the growing prevalence of DEI programs at work.
DEI in the workforce
When it comes to business, there is no substitute for diversity. Whether we’re talking about putting women on the boards of directors or hiring POC, or LGBTQ+, the more versatile the group the better.
It’s common sense. A homogenous group tends to come up with similar ideas. If you want to increase your range of options when brainstorming or problem-solving, include people with completely different life experiences and you’ll get a broader range of choices. In a competitive business setting, this is a game-changer.
Studies show that diversity improves company performance
DEI programs have been in place long enough for data to show their effect, and it’s impressive. In addition to increasing the overall sense of well-being that employees in diverse work environments have expressed, the bottom-line benefits are undeniable.
A Gartner study found that gender-diverse and inclusive teams outperformed their less inclusive counterparts by 50%.
Weber Shandwick, in partnership with United Minds and KRC Research, released a 2019 study in which 66% of executives at companies that aligned their business goals with diversity and inclusion goals agree that diversity is an important driver of company financial performance.
Companies with more diverse leadership teams report higher innovation revenue — 45% of total revenue versus just 26%, according to a 2018 BCG report. — Perdue Global
The facts speak for themselves. This issue is no longer up for debate. DEI is not just about making people feel better — it’s about helping companies perform better.
Given what we know now, it’s disappointing that the majority of justices on the Supreme Court refuse to acknowledge the benefits of continuing affirmative action in higher education in support of diversity.
It’s time we woke up to the fact that the conservative leadership in this country isn’t concerned about fairness for everyone — only for people like them. It’s not “all for one and one for all” any more. It’s none for you and two for me. And that is just how they like it.