Anti-DEI Policies are Unconstitutional and That’s That

In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which President Lyndon B. Johnson signed on July 2nd of that year. The law forbade discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. 

And yet, the discrimination continued—quite blatantly—in some school spaces well into the 21st century. Articles by the New York Times and Daily Telegraph covered Wilcox County, Georgia’s first integrated prom in 2013. 

Meanwhile, in the workplace, the overrepresentation of dullard white men in positions of leadership became so obnoxious that the phrase “failing up” became a thing. Nepotism increasingly revealed that many “chips off the old block” were, in fact, chips off of blocks that had already been identified as useless pieces of wood long ago. 

Then came the election of President Barack Hussein Obama.

The Start of Petty Sabotage

There is no arguing the point that the country changed at that moment.

In short, white people lost their minds. The all white Senate Republicans had a secret meeting the very next weekend to plot how to sabotage his presidency before it even started. There was never the slightest intention to work with the Black man. Instead, he was to be undermined and insulted and kept in his place.

If he said yes, they would say no. This led to infamous instances of the Republican Senators voting against their own bills, like the gun background check expansion, simply because President Obama supported them. 

And so it came to pass that President Obama publicly said “kids, stay in school.” Which elicited a reaction so extreme that by 2012, law-school-educated Republican Rick Santorum was expressing offense at the very notion that the President of the United States was advocating for a highly educated populace. He and other college-educated Republicans scoffed at the very idea while regaling their mostly white audiences with the message that it was “elitist” for President Obama to expect their kids to go to college. After all, the world needed plumbers, too. 

The only problem was that those kids didn’t want to be plumbers. Nor work in the mines. The jobs of the future were coming, regardless of how 2012 Republicans felt about it. And even though they lost at the ballot box, their rhetoric began a trend which led to a bunch of undereducated white men trying to compete in a workforce of increasingly educated minorities. 

Which has now led to the obvious illegality of anti-DEI policies, because…Civil Rights Act. 

Anti-Equity Is Discrimination

Let us begin with equity. Merriam-Webster defines equity as “fairness or justice in the way people are treated.” That’s all it means. It simply means fairness. When it comes to the workplace, that applies to things like interviewing, hiring, and judging performance. 

Thus, to be anti-equity means to be anti-fairness. So if one argues that it’s legal to establish anti-fairness policies, that’s the same as arguing that it’s legal to discriminate. Like how Senate Bill 10 mandates the posting of the Ten Commandments in all public school classrooms while banning other “content.” The bill doesn’t even pretend to consider fairness in regards to religious expression. It specifically mandates Christianity. The Civil Rights Act specifically bans this. So, that means it must be illegal to ban fairness policies.  

Anti-Diversity Is Code for Racist

It is no secret that many on the right use the term DEI as a stand-in for “Black.” Black elected officials are routinely referred to as “DEI” by pundits on the right. And with the ability to use the code came increased anti-DEI rhetoric from the right, escalating to the point of Charlie Kirk calling Black pilots “DEI.” 

Let’s take a moment to explore just how ridiculous this claim is. When it comes to pilots, Black men have already proven to be some of the best ever. Anyone who has heard the story of the Tuskegee Airmen knows this. So, to see today’s pilot corps still retaining its 84.6% white membership has nothing to do with any DEI initiatives. In fact, it proclaims the opposite. The 2.2% of Black pilots Charlie sees represent those who excelled despite the barriers put in their paths. They walked in the door knowing that they would have to be “twice as good” to even get a shot. 

Meaning, anti-diversity is nothing more than racism. Seeing a nonwhite face and declaring it “lesser than” based on nothing more than color. That was banned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, too. 

Anti-Inclusion is “The Good Ol’ Boy Network” in Disguise

This last part is the most insidious and probably the least obvious in the bunch. This is the catch-all for women, the disabled, and the poorest…of all races. In short, it is the reason the Civil Rights Act of 1964 exists. So that “We The People” would not have to suffer the hubris of nepotism and exclusion based on random, yet purposeful, acts of discrimination. 

It is now apparent that the Black community will once again have no choice but to endure the misogynoir, racism, and sexism of this proud-to-be-cruel administration. There will be no scandal uncovered by any news organization with access to the White House. The good ol’ boys have closed ranks.

Which is how Jim Crow came about in the first place. And then it was deemed unconstitutional with the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Regardless of how Republicans try to redefine legal segregation. And until they have the cojones to repeal that 61-year-old law, all these state-based anti-DEI laws, like Texas’ Senate Bill 12, are just more displays of temporarily failing up.