Bigots and racists have always been wrong. Love has always been right.

ICYMI: "Make America Segregated Again" ain't it. It's our turn to fight for love.

Feb 14, 2025

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Several weeks ago, the Hegseth hearings for Secretary of Defense were used by Republicans to bemoan feminism and “woke” policies as the real danger to this country because they lowered standards for “equity” hires.

Hegseth and company averred that women—and people who are gay or trans, or people of color—have overtaken men’s spaces, including the military, and somehow that’s made things worse.

Since then, that narrative has gone from bad to worse. From attempts to erase Civil Rights, to attacks on trans Americans and children, to ICE raids, the last few weeks have been, well, what one reporter called an “unprecedented barrage of barbaric policy moves and casual executive depravity.” Which sums it up pretty well.

This has all been deeply upsetting, even if all of it has not been totally surprising. I have to say though, that I was taken aback when the president claimed that the tragic plane crash over the Potomac was caused by…DEI.

And that was the signal that this wasn’t going to be a soft launch to assert that certain people need to be “put back in their place,” but an attempt at a full throttle attack.

Minorities and women are now responsible for making planes fall out of the sky? (I mean, if only we had that kind of power!)

After the election, I tried to arm myself with the foreknowledge that the DUMBEST possible stuff would now be unleashed. I would not be surprised by it. I would still care about the harm that it does, but I would not be exhausted by outrage over it. No, not this time, not me.

As I said then:

And yet. I mean. I have to admit I didn’t think we would be having conversations about whether measures to [checks notes] **seek the fair treatment and full participation of all people** causes plane crashes. You really got me there, guys!

Every time a person of color, woman, or queer person gets a promotion, a puppy dies. That’s what this administration is going with?

The problem with this discourse isn’t just that it’s stupid and low and mean, which it is. It’s that journalists and Dem leaders alike get dragged into conversations debating these claims and in the process, normalizing them.

Anand Giridharadas

of The Ink put it here: “Even well-meaning and thoughtful reality-based people were essentially having…a conversation about whether the miscegenation of the races is causing airplanes to drop out of the sky.

We don’t have to get dragged into engaging conversations of irrational bigotry.

The broligarch administration seems to be throwing every version of that at us, and probably will continue to do so. Aeronautical tragedy? DEI. World on fire? DEI. Stress nightmares about fascism that are like episodes of Severance, but Milchick has the dead blue eyes of JD Vance?? DEI!

As we head into this dizzying era of, well, bigoted nonsense, let’s pause for a another reality check. Have policies to promote diversity and equality “lowered” the standards in our country, have they somehow left us worse off?

Well, first let’s recall that policies that promote equality date back to the Civil Rights movement, founded in a radical notion that people should be treated equally under the law regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, or sexual orientation. These have generally been celebrated not only as just, but as some of the best things to happen in this country.

The best moments in American history, the ones that we sing about, and put in the history books, and refer back to in speeches have been the ones where we open our arms, show more love, and make more room for everyone.

Here are just a few such policies that have been considered “DEI” over the years:

-School desegregation (1954)

-The ability for Black men to vote (15th Amendment in 1870)

-The ability for women to vote (19th amendment in 1920—just 100 years ago, kinda wild!)

-Fair housing laws that make it illegal to discriminate when renting, selling, or financing property. (1968)

We can also thank diversity and equity policies for:

-Making it legal for women to have their own credit cards without a man’s signature (1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act) 1974!!

-Allowing women to have their own bank account (again, 1974!!)

-Admitting women to Ivy League Colleges (Princeton and Yale began admitting women in 1969). (Columbia, my alma mater, held out until 1983! Michael Jackson was singing “Thriller” and girls could not go to Columbia, y’all!)

-Admitting Black men and Jews to Ivy League schools (Yale held out an informal policy restricting Jews to 10 percent; Yale College admitted its first significant group of Black men in the fall of 1964)

-Decriminalizing homosexuality (starting in Illinois in 1962).

-Removing homosexuality from APA’s list of “mental illnesses” (1973!)

-The Americans with Disabilities Act prohibiting discrimination against people with disabilities in employment, transportation, and provides public accommodations. (1990)

-Sexual harassment is deemed illegal in the workplace (1980)

This is, of course, just scratching the surface, it’s not meant to be a comprehensive list. If you’ve benefitted from elevators in public spaces for wheelchairs and strollers, been able to breast pump at work, not been fired because you’re pregnant or gay or not white, been able to own property or your own money while not male or white, or been able to call HR when someone grabs ass in the break room, you’ve benefitted from diversity and equity policies!

Note that many of these policies merely expand spaces, opportunities, and safety that had historically been afforded to wealthy white men. Of course an admin of sexual harassers and power-hungry broligarchs would love to attack DEI to take back even more power and more money.

Is that good for everyone else? Um, no.

Despite billionaires’ whining that workplaces have become “neutered,” and “feminized”, according to a McKinsey study, US companies with diverse executive boards had a 95% higher return on equity than those that lacked diversity.

The same report finds that DEI initiatives help organizations eliminate or reduce policies and behaviors that are biased, making them less susceptible to toxic behaviors. Unconscious bias costs US businesses $550 billion annually, a point that is rarely mentioned in the debate over the effectiveness of DEI initiatives.

It’s also nice to live in a country that feels more just and less toxic, ya know? The psychic weight of it all.

It’s worth pointing out from this timeline that our current president was nine years old approximately when schools were desegregated (legally at least, many schools are still plenty segregated), was in his twenties when women and Black men started attending Ivy League colleges in significant numbers, and was well into his thirties when workplace sexual harassment was made illegal (not that it stopped him!).

So when he says MAGA, it’s pretty clear what kind of “great past” he’s nostalgic for and is trying to recapture—a segregated past where women and people of color were kept out of the halls of power and public life.1

I also want to point out that this list of diversity and equity policies have contributed directly to the historic gains that sexists and racists would find most troubling, and are right now having fits over.

Consider: In 1964, women and people of color start attending Ivy League colleges in significant numbers, and 17 years later Sandra Day O’Conner is the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court, followed by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993.

Princeton admits women and people of color in significant numbers in the 1970’s, and in 1981 a young woman named Michelle Obama begins her freshman year.

In the 1980’s Columbia University admits women and people of color in large numbers, and in 1983 a young man named Barack H. Obama graduates from Columbia, bound for Harvard law school.

He will go on to become the first Black President of the United States.

(Which will then cause an upswell of backlash that we are now experiencing.)

The good news is, we’ve been here before and we have overcome. These policies may not be popular with billionaires and power-hungry autocrats, but over time they have become quite popular with American people who enjoy basic rights and living in a country that’s more just and less toxic.

(Unfortunately, many white Americans have been brought along to many of these policies kicking and screaming, see Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us: How Racism Costs all of Us).

But we don’t have to engage in debates over whether segregation is good, or bigotry should be normalized. We already know the racists and bigots have always been the bad guys. Right now I’m reminded of a quote that Barack Obama gave in a speech way back in 2008, that he borrowed from Alice Walker and poet June Jordan in her poem protesting apartheid. It feels very relevant now:

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."

I think part of the grief that we are feeling is that we thought all this stuff had been handily won. We thought we lived in a time and place where justice and humanity were more enshrined, and we could look forward to enjoying a more safe and peaceful present and future.

We are finding out that’s not the case—we are living through a historic time.

It’s our turn to fight for love.

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