When I write about race and justice in the United States, my thinking is guided by a few simple principles. First, that between 1776 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the United States maintained a system of legalized bigotry defended by state violence, and second, that our nation bears an enduring moral responsibility for addressing the consequences of its own oppression.
At the same time, we can and should correct the consequences of both historical and contemporary injustice without engaging in additional racial discrimination. We can and should educate the American people about the requirements of federal law and the historical facts of American injustice without suppressing free speech or engaging in tendentious and destructive ideological indoctrination.
Harmonizing these principles is the moral and legal responsibility of every presidential administration, and Donald Trump is already failing. His executive orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the federal government do far more than simply ban illegal or irrational D.E.I. excesses.
Instead, they block the government from lawfully and fairly seeking to increase the representation of historically marginalized people in the federal government and — critically — threaten to undermine compliance with the federal civil rights laws they purport to uphold.
Let’s take, for example, Trump’s order dated Jan. 21, 2025, titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” Some of it is benign and even quite welcome. By its terms, it bars race-based preferences in federal hiring, retention and promotion — conduct that was already almost certainly illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent.
After the Supreme Court held that the use of race in college admissions decisions violated the Constitution, any government entity that uses race at all — either as a positive or a negative — in a personnel decision can potentially face extraordinary judicial scrutiny.
Trump’s order also has the effect of blocking most forms of diversity training. That’s hardly a loss. Study after study has shown that diversity training is often an expensive, divisive waste of time. As Jesse Singal wrote in a Times Opinion guest essay in 2023, diversity training tends to have “little or no positive long-term effects.”
There’s also strong evidence that it can do more harm than good, especially when it engages in racial stereotyping, such as when, as Singal pointed out, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture posted an infographic that described individualism, the nuclear family, “objective, rational linear thinking” and a “bland” definition of attractiveness as “aspects and assumptions of whiteness and white culture.” (The Smithsonian later apologized for this presentation.)
So does this mean that D.E.I. deserves a swift and permanent political death? Not so fast. Race-based preferences are unlawful. Diversity training can be divisive, but neither affirmative action nor diversity training is the sum total of D.E.I.
There are many ways to support historically marginalized populations without engaging in race-based preferences. In the higher education context alone, one can pursue policies like the Texas “top 10 percent plan,” which grants every student who finishes in the top 10 percent of a public high school automatic admission to a Texas public university.
States can also provide admission preferences on the basis of income, create targeted tutoring programs on the same basis, and ban legacy admissions, which often grant additional advantages to some of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the United States.
In other words, there is a host of race-neutral policies that an intelligent government can implement that have positive, race-disproportionate effects. Class-based interventions promote racial inclusion precisely because historical racism has contributed to systemic economic disadvantages.
But Trump’s orders counter the most extreme forms of D.E.I. with an extremism all their own. Trump bans the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs within the Department of Labor from merely “promoting ‘diversity.’ ”
He mandates the closure of D.E.I. offices and the termination of “all ‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ ‘equitable decision-making,’ ‘equitable deployment of financial and technical assistance,’ ‘advancing equity’ and like mandates, requirements, programs or activities, as appropriate.”
His order banning D.E.I. in the military contains its own propaganda requirement, directing military academic institutions “to teach that America and its founding documents remain the most powerful force for good in human history.”
While I take a back seat to no one in my respect for the Constitution and appreciation for the founding of the United States, that statement is nonsense. I don’t think the Declaration of Independence can compare with the Sermon on the Mount. Words like “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” not only have application across millenniums, they also indict the cruelty and vengeance of our own nation’s leaders.
We don’t have to inflate America’s virtue to inspire soldiers to come to its defense.
Even worse, the language of the executive orders is so broad and sweeping, I’m concerned that they could undermine enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, the most powerful diversity measures in the federal legal arsenal.
The Civil Rights Act may require colorblind hiring decisions, but they are assuredly not colorblind statutes. Their prohibition against discrimination and harassment requires examining the racial motivations of hiring decisions and workplace mistreatment. Legal doctrines (the disparate impact doctrine, to give one example) require federal employers to examine whether policies have an unintentional discriminatory effect.
Since the Civil Rights Act blocks discrimination and harassment, there’s a necessary educational component. Federal employees do not walk into the job as experts on civil rights law. They have to be trained to understand their obligations.
To be sure, Trump’s executive orders wax eloquent about the obligations of the federal government to comply with civil rights laws. His Jan. 21 order calls the Civil Rights Act “a bedrock supporting equality of opportunity for all Americans” and directs “all agencies to enforce our longstanding civil rights laws and to combat illegal private sector D.E.I. preferences, mandates, policies, programs and activities.”
But the orders contain mandatory language at odds with robust civil rights enforcement. The very same order that claims to uphold the Civil Rights Act repealed previous executive orders that banned discrimination. For example, Trump repealed Executive Order 11246, which prohibits federal contractors from discriminating “against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or national origin.”
In addition, by banning any efforts to achieve diversity at all, it could rip the heart out of the civil rights enforcement infrastructure. It will be far more difficult to comply with complex federal civil rights laws when the Trump administration orders the closure of diversity programs and activities unless the president deems them “appropriate.”
Finally, it’s foolish to ignore the cultural and political context of Trump’s orders. The MAGA right is in the grips of anti-D.E.I. hysteria. The confusion over whether Trump’s order banned an Air Force video about the Tuskegee Airmen — Black pilots who served courageously in World War II in a still-segregated military — is emblematic of the problems caused by the combination of broad language and intense fear.
How committed is the Trump administration to the meritocracy, really? No one should look at Pete Hegseth or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard or Kash Patel and think that Trump has scoured America to find the best and brightest to lead his new administration.
The contrast between Hegseth and Joe Biden’s outgoing defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, is profound. Austin, who is Black, served as a battalion commander, a brigade commander, a division commander and CENTCOM commander before he was selected to lead the Pentagon.
Of course, those qualifications are no guarantee that a person would be an effective secretary of defense, but Austin is vastly more qualified than Hegseth, who was barely confirmed after three Republican senators voted against his nomination. No one should denigrate Hegseth’s service. He served his country honorably in combat operations overseas. But so have hundreds of thousands of other Americans.
If we’re applying the colorblind analysis that Trump allegedly demands, he just downgraded our secretary of defense. He’s promoted an unqualified man to one of the most powerful and important jobs in the United States.
Trump’s cure for D.E.I. isn’t a true meritocracy, but rather affirmative action for the MAGA movement. Providing preferences for populists might be a natural consequence of Trump’s political victory, but it is not an improvement on the status quo.
Some other things I did
My Sunday column took a close look at the morality of the MAGA movement. Why are so many Trump supporters eager to embrace Trump’s cruelty? How did they move from supporting Trump in spite of his flaws to reveling in his aggression?
A good way to understand this terrible political morality is to read Carl Schmitt, a German political theorist who joined the Nazi Party after Hitler became chancellor. I want to be careful here — I am not arguing that millions of Americans are suddenly Schmittians, acolytes of one of the fascist regime’s favorite political theorists. The vast majority of Americans have no idea who he is. Nor would they accept all of his ideas.
One of his ideas, however, is almost perfectly salient to the moment: his description, in a 1932 book called “The Concept of the Political,” of the “friend-enemy distinction.” The political sphere, according to Schmitt, is distinct from the personal sphere, and it has its own distinct contrasts.
“Let us assume,” Schmitt wrote, “that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable.” Politics, however, has “its own ultimate distinctions.” In that realm, “the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”
The friend-enemy distinction helps explain both the culture of MAGA and Trump’s actions, now that he’s back in power:
The friend-enemy distinction explains why so many Republicans are particularly furious at anti-Trump dissenters — especially when those dissenters hold conservative values. In the friend-enemy distinction, ideology is secondary to loyalty.
You see this principle at work in Trump’s decision to pardon or commute the sentences of the Jan. 6 rioters and to revoke Secret Service protection from one of his former national security advisers, John Bolton, and from one of his former secretaries of state, Mike Pompeo. Friends can get away with violent crimes. Bolton and Pompeo publicly criticized Trump, and now they’re enemies who have to pay the price.
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