Three years ago, Republicans were reluctant to take direct aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion. It just sounded too nice to oppose. Better, political strategists thought, to go after the toxic concepts and practices by a different name: critical race theory.
This is why the budding effort to dismantle DEI bureaucracies in higher education should be accompanied by an effort to defund DEI consultants in K-12 education directly.
There are two key elements to an effective strategy for the latter. The first, which was unthinkable three years ago but is becoming more common in legislative language, is to name DEI directly to send an unambiguous signal to local school administrators. The second, which has not yet been attempted, is to task state superintendents with creating lists of vendors that are ineligible to receive state funding.
This second step is key. Simple statutory language is inadequate to defund the constant linguistic churn of CRT/DEI/”woke” consultants effectively; there must be an element of executive discretion. A state secretary of education should be charged with creating and annually updating a list of vendors that the state will not permit its money to flow to. “Courageous Conversations” obviously belongs on that list, as does “UnboundEd.” But so, too, would “Brave Talks” or “Boundless Ed,” if either of those two companies decide to form spinoffs to try to get around the law.
When even a liberal federal judge appointed by former President Barack Obama rules that diversity, equity, and inclusion practices can be illegal, it is time to recognize that most DEI regimes by design are invidiously discriminatory.
In a case that received too little attention, Judge Wendy Beetlestone of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled this month that former Pennsylvania State University professor Zack De Piero had reasonable grounds to keep alive a lawsuit against the school based on its DEI practices. De Piero said DEI policies at the college essentially forced his resignation, and Beetlestone agreed the professor “plausibly alleged that he was subjected to a race-based hostile work environment.”
literally being forced to feel pain because one is white isn’t racially discriminatory, nothing is. But that was only one example. In another instance, De Piero said the facilitator “condemn[ed] white people for no other reason than they spoke or were simply present while being white.” Meanwhile, he said, university officials specifically told him “to incorporate race into his grading” in a way that would “penalize [white] students academically on the basis of their race.” And it is incontrovertible that Penn State’s DEI director “sent an email to all employees ‘calling on white people’ to ‘feel terrible,’ about their ‘own internalized white supremacy.”
Enough is too much. Courts across the land should recognize that DEI is nothing more than illegally institutionalized racism — and, accordingly, kill it.
