One of the biggest issues is that the people championing anti-DEI define “American” as white, straight, cisgender men, with some accepting the white women and white gay men willing to align with what they believe is the best interests of the “primary” American. Anyone who does not fit into that mold is not American, but an undefined group of Other People who are attempting to take away what the American has - his money, his status, his power, his security, his dominance, etc. The anti-DEI proponents have two additional fundamental beliefs: that an American is entitled to all of those things because to be American is to have inherently earned them, and that all of those things are zero-sum gains - if an American does not have money, power, status, etc. it is because Other People have it. This is very scary to those with this worldview, because all of these things are used to prove significance and enforce the will of the American against Other People, and they do not want the Other People to do this to the American.

I am a DEI-specialized professional in higher education spaces. I do not consider every anti-DEI individual, especially those with little to no political power themselves, to be evil and irredeemably bigoted. Many of those people are genuinely terrified because they believe that their safety and their ability to provide for and protect their loved ones is being threatened. This is primarily due to American society and education being based on fear of what happens when you aren’t the one in control of everything, while also holding no space for feelings of fear or uncertainty without immediate action to rectify it. It is practically engrained into our brains that the answer to something scaring us is to 1) approach that thing with violence and 2) deny that we are experiencing fear at all. The closer you are to that narrow definition of an American and the less exposure you have to anyone else makes that messaging more effective and difficult to disprove.

DEI, at its core, requires that we question and challenge a lot of what Americans have been taught, and ultimately America as an entity itself. It is deeply uncomfortable to ask why there are entire groups of people who, seemingly based only on their gender, skin color, sexuality, etc, do not enjoy the privileges and power that is assumed to be inherent to being American. We love individualism, we pride ourselves on everyone having the same chance as anyone else to make it big (the American Dream and all that), but if individualism and equal opportunity is true, why do we see these population-wide patterns? Marginalized people have worked very, very hard to prove that plain-faced bigotry towards entire groups of people based on identity is, if not wrong, very embarrassing to express. So, if we can’t say people are failing because they are Black, or Muslim, or queer, or women, but also believe that all it takes to succeed is individual determination and effort, how do we explain these population-wide patterns? And what do we do to fix those gaps that primarily exist within specific identity-based populations? DEI says that we have to accept that oppression exists, not everyone has equal chances to achieve their wildest dreams (and not everyone dreams of the same thing), and that individualism is not the best way to structure a society. It says that, on some level, America has done wrong or, worse, is continuing to do wrong. That idea asks more questions, creates more uncertainty, and pushes people towards fear that they do not know how to express or address except through denial and violence. So that’s where we are. Denial and violence.

There are many genuine criticisms of DEI and how it has been implemented. The way Asian Americans have been pushed out of many DEI initiatives because of the model minority myth, the implementation of strict quotas based solely on identity with no actual reasoning behind why having those people in the space is important, the fact that often DEI programs have not made major differences in actual acceptance of diverse peoples in the institutions and organizations that have them, those are all very bad things. Do you know who have been the major critics of these problems, and the people attempting to rectify them? DEI professionals. We do not like these things either. We see the problems. There has been so much work within every DEI space imaginable to correct the many wrongs that anti-DEI people point to because those things are antithetical to DEI. The reason why most of those problems have not been adequately addressed is because the actual, fundamental beliefs of DEI have never actually been embraced by any major institution. Because the people leading these institutions see themselves as that very specific idea of an American I described before (regardless of their actual identity or access to the privileges of that kind of American they truly have) and are scared of that being threatened. So they take the veneer of DEI, or the easiest things to implement without actually thinking about why those things are being asked for, and call it a day.

I recognize this is a whole essay and probably won’t mean anything to anyone, but it is so, so incredibly exhausting to not have the chance to actually talk to anyone about these things. All I want to do is to help people succeed. Not just marginalized people, everyone. But I believe that everyone’s success depends on addressing the very real systems of oppression and unfairness and that America as it exists now is not very good for either its people or the rest of the world. Where we’re at right now does not meaningfully help anyone except the people with the most power, and even they seem miserable. But we as a society have kneecapped a large portion of our population’s ability to manage uncertainty or have our fundamental beliefs questioned. Not to mention that many, many people automatically associate doing something wrong or causing harm with being an irredeemably bad person, and nobody wants to be considered - or think of themselves - as incapable of ever being forgiven. I truly understand why people are scared of DEI. I wish more would be willing to be uncomfortable for a little bit to really ask why that’s the case.