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Why DEI Was Doomed to Fail
DEI’s fundamental contradiction was this: It argued that race is a social invention—a system created to control people by reducing complexity—yet it never suggested replacing it with a more holistic vision of justice.
Mar 09, 2025
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI, is collapsing—not just as a corporate initiative, but as an ideological framework.
In what seemed like a flash, it became a dominant force in American institutional life, embedded in HR departments, university policies, and media discourse. And now, just as quickly, it finds itself in retreat, with entire DEI offices being gutted across corporate and academic America.
President Donald Trump’s administration has aggressively targeted DEI, issuing executive orders to dismantle these programs across federal agencies. This federal rollback has emboldened Republican-led states to eliminate DEI efforts within public institutions. Meanwhile, MSNBC’s recent firing of Joy Reid, a vocal defender of DEI who embodied many of its most aggressive tendencies, signals a broader cultural shift.
If we want to build a politics that actually addresses racial injustice, we need an approach that is dynamic rather than static—one that acknowledges history without being trapped by it.
The right celebrates this as a victory over “woke ideology.” The left frames it as yet another example of backlash and white fragility. But these explanations fail to account for why DEI has unraveled so quickly.
The reality is that DEI was doomed to fail—not because the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion are unworthy, but because the framework built around them was structurally flawed.
DEI’s fundamental contradiction was this: It argued that race is a social invention—a system created to control people by reducing complexity—yet it never suggested replacing it.
Instead, it doubled down on racial categorization, reinforcing the very thing it claimed to challenge. This reification of race, rather than dismantling structures of oppression, helped sustain them, making DEI brittle and politically untenable.
For the left, the lesson here is crucial. If we don’t break out of the rigid, black-and-white thinking that DEI promoted, we will continue ceding ground to the right. The need to discuss race and identity remains vital, but it must be done in a way that opens space for complexity rather than reinforcing the very constructs that uphold division.
DEI’s fatal flaw is that it traps itself in a closed loop. It rightly argues that race is a historical construct—a tool of power designed to enforce hierarchy. Yet instead of pushing beyond this construct, it reinforces race as fixed and immutable. The result is an ideological contradiction: Race is framed as an arbitrary invention, yet treated as an unchanging, permanent reality.
James Baldwin exposed the hollowness of racial constructs decades ago. In “On Being ‘White’… and Other Lies,” he wrote: “The crisis of leadership in the white community is remarkable—and terrifying—because there is, in fact, no white community.”
Baldwin understood that whiteness, like all racial identities, was not a biological or cultural fact but a political invention—a shifting construct designed to serve power. Yet DEI never seriously engaged with this idea. It simply replaced one rigid racial hierarchy with another, treating whiteness as an unchanging position of privilege while treating other racial identities as fixed sites of oppression.
This rigidity meant that DEI operated as a closed system, reasserting racial categories rather than interrogating them. It failed to engage with race as a lived, historically contingent process—one shaped by history, class, and material conditions.
By doing this, DEI alienated people across the political spectrum. Many white people, even those who consider themselves progressive, felt that DEI erased any meaningful discussion of economic struggle or historical complexity within whiteness.
Meanwhile, many people of color found DEI’s racial framework superficial—offering corporate-friendly language about inclusion while doing little to address material inequalities. The framework functioned as a kind of racial accounting system, but it lacked a clear political vision for building solidarity.
Sheena Mason, a scholar of racial theory, has articulated the deeper flaw in this approach: “To undo racism, we have to undo our belief in race.”
This insight is crucial. If race itself is a construct designed to justify social stratification, then maintaining race as a primary framework for addressing inequality only reinforces the divisions we claim to want to overcome. Yet DEI never suggested dismantling the concept of race—it only sought to redistribute power within its existing framework.
This was a fatal mistake. Modern genetic science has definitively debunked the biological basis of race. There is more genetic diversity within so-called racial groups than between them. The racial categories that shape our politics and institutions are historical inventions, not natural facts.
Yet DEI, instead of leveraging this knowledge to transcend racial essentialism, entrenches race as the defining lens for justice. This approach not only deepens social division but also makes the left vulnerable to the right’s attacks.
By insisting on the permanence of racial categories, DEI created an ideological framework that could be easily caricatured as divisive and exclusionary—giving conservatives an easy target while failing to deliver meaningful change.
Racial discourse often eclipses broader discussions of material conditions, making it harder to address economic inequality in a meaningful way.
Patricia Hill Collins, a foundational thinker in intersectional theory, has observed that, “Race operates as such an overriding feature of African-American experience in the United States that it not only overshadows economic class relations for Blacks but obscures the significance of economic class within the United States in general.”
DEI’s fixation on race, detached from material conditions, contributed to this very problem. By prioritizing racial categorization over economic struggle, it often obscured the broader systems of inequality that shape American life.
This not only made class politics more difficult to articulate but also allowed racial identity to become a stand-in for structural critique—reinforcing an identity-based framework that often benefited elites more than the working class.
With DEI collapsing, the question becomes: What comes next? The right hopes this marks the end of racial discourse altogether. That cannot happen. Structural racism, economic exclusion, and historical injustice are still deeply embedded in American life. Ignoring the function of racism and racial categories plays into the hands of those who want to maintain both racial and economic inequality.
But we cannot simply replace DEI with another rigid, prepackaged framework that reproduces the same mistakes. If we want to build a politics that actually addresses racial injustice, we need an approach that is dynamic rather than static—one that acknowledges history without being trapped by it.
This means recognizing that racial categories are not timeless truths but historical constructions that have been shaped by economic, political, and social forces. It means rejecting the idea that people are permanently locked into racial identities that define their entire experience. And it means moving beyond an approach that focuses primarily on representation and inclusion toward one that addresses material conditions to redistribute power.
DEI’s failure provides an opportunity for the left to rethink how it engages with race and identity. We need to stop seeing race as an unchanging structure and start understanding it as something that can be transformed. Morgan Freeman put it bluntly in an interview, stating, “I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.”
This is the kind of shift we need—one that integrates historical understanding rather than segregates it, one that moves past “race”—which we know doesn't exist—as a fixed identity category toward a broader, more holistic vision of justice.
The goal should not be to replace DEI with another top-down, bureaucratic approach, but to build a new paradigm that is open, flexible, and capable of fostering real solidarity.
If the left fails to do this, it will keep losing to the right. And if that happens, the backlash against DEI will not just be the end of a flawed initiative—it will be a major setback for the broader struggle for justice and equality.
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Working-Class Unity Key to Defeating Oligarchy, Says Sanders in Response to Trump SOTU
"We can win. We will win," said the senator. "Let's go forward together."
Mar 05, 2025
If working-class people in the United States were wondering why President Donald Trump had "very little to say about the REAL crises facing the working class of this country" in his State of the Union address, said U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders Tuesday night, they need look no further than the people Trump surrounded himself with at his inauguration in January.
"Standing right behind him were the three wealthiest men in the country," said the Vermont Independent senator, naming billionaire mogul and "special government employee" Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "And standing behind THEM were 13 other billionaires who Trump had nominated to head major government agencies. Many of these same billionaires—including Musk—were there tonight."
Despite Trump's repeated campaign promises to address the rising cost of living for working people, said Sanders, the State of the Union address offered the latest proof that "the Trump administration IS a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, and for the billionaire class."
Watch Sanders' address in full:
LIVE: President Trump’s Congressional Address needs a response. Here’s mine. https://t.co/O9yN04isIw
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) March 5, 2025
Sanders amplified the message he has sent on his National Tour to Fight Oligarchy—which he is scheduled to continue this week with stops in Warren, Michigan on Saturday and Kenosha, Wisconsin on Friday.
The senator called on working people of all racial identities, religions, and sexual orientations to join together to fight Trump's agenda and the billionaires who would benefit from his tax cuts, slashes to essential public services like Medicaid and food assistance, and efforts to divide people by demonizing immigrants, transgender people, and people of color.
"Yes, the oligarchs ARE enormously powerful. They have endless amounts of money. They control our economy. They own much of the media. They have enormous influence over our political system," said Sanders. "But, from the bottom of my heart, I am convinced that they can be beaten."
"If we stand together and not let them divide us up by the color of our skin or where we were born or our religion or sexual orientation; if we bring our people together around an agenda that works for the many and not the few—there is nothing in the world that can stop us," he said.
In his address, Sanders remained laser-focused on issues that impact working people—raising the federal minimum wage of just $7.25 per hour to a living wage of $17 per hour, repealing the Citizens UnitedSupreme Court ruling to end corporate influence over elections, and Trump's desire to pass a "big, beautiful" budget that would cut Medicaid by $880 billion, leaving up to 36 million Americans, including millions of children, without health insurance.
His response to the State of the Union address contrasted sharply with parts of the Democratic Party's official response given by Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who spoke out against the "unprecedented giveaway" Trump wants to give "to his billionaire friends" but also signaled the party leadership's disinterest in focusing primarily on issues that impact working people when she spoke positively about former Republican President Ronald Reagan.
"After the spectacle that just took place in the Oval Office last week, Reagan must be rolling over in his grave," Slotkin said, referring to Trump and Vice President JD Vance's attacks on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. "As a Cold War kid, I'm thankful it was Reagan and not Trump in office in the 1980s."
Historian Moshik Temkin wondered why the Democratic Party chose to hold up Reagan as a positive example of a president—considering his deregulatory, anti-taxation policies and promotion of so-called "trickle-down economics" that helped pave the way for rising economic inequality and the decimation of the middle class—instead of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who introduced Social Security, reformed the financial system, and provided relief to people who were suffering due to the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression.
"Who was this for?" asked historian Michael Brenes of Slotkin's address. "You don't rebuild the New Deal coalition with Cold War nostalgia and deference to Ronald Reagan. A better message: national security begins with economic security."
In contrast, Sanders' response, said former journalist and author Paul Handley, "is how you respond to Trump and define him for the American people."
Sanders ended his address by acknowledging the challenge of fighting against a political system increasingly controlled by billionaires, but warned, "despair is not an option."
"Giving up is not acceptable," said Sanders. "And none of us have the privilege of hiding under the covers. The stakes are just too high. Let us never forget. Real change only occurs when ordinary people stand up against oppression and injustice—and fight back."
"We can win. We will win," he concluded. "Let's go forward together."
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When Will Public and Private Sector Workers Unite Against Mass Layoffs by the Billionaires?
Billionaires eat the jobs of working people for breakfast so there's no real point in distinguishing between the "good" and the "bad" ones. Until workers of all kinds are united against our common enemy, there is little hope for the kind of society the working class envisions—and deserves.
Mar 05, 2025
The destruction of jobs, both public and private, creates billionaires. But most working people don’t know that, and the Democratic Party is afraid to say it.
Why? Because billionaires who have killed jobs of all kinds, dominate both political parties with their ill-gotten gains. Money buys silence.
The power of billionaires is rising as their numbers increase. In 1990, there were 66 billionaires in the United States. In 2023 there were 748. And in the U.S. alone, billionaire wealth in 2024 increased by $l.4 trillion, that’s $3.9 billion a day.
How did that happen?
It’s hard to wrap your mind around how much a billion dollars is. If you earned $1,000 per hour, it would take you 68.5 years to reach $1 billion, and at that point you’d have as much money as one thousand millionaires. That’s a lot of money, more than we can imagine, certainly more than any human being needs, ever.
To become a billionaire, you have to be willing to kill jobs with reckless abandon. It is one of the most effective ways to extract money from working people.
But they earned it, right? Isn’t earning billions of dollars a just reward for unparalleled entrepreneurial success? And isn’t criticizing that success sour grapes, the same as criticizing what makes our country so prosperous, free, and strong?
Maybe, until you look under the hood.
To become a billionaire, you have to be willing to kill jobs with reckless abandon. It is one of the most effective ways to extract money from working people.
The carnage started with the deregulation of Wall Street in the late 1970s, widened during the Reagan years, and was then adopted as the mantra of the Clinton administration during the 1990s.
The deregulation of Wall Street allowed companies to buy each other up with few constraints, often using borrowed money and putting the debt on the books of the acquired company. Layoffs are then used to pay off that debt.
Deregulation also led to the legalization of stock buybacks, which allowed companies to repurchase huge amounts of their own shares and drive the share price up. Wall Street investors and CEOs, who were increasingly paid with stock incentives, became fabulously rich as the price of their shares rose, though their company was no more profitable. Layoffs are then used to finance those buybacks.
Before deregulation, corporate leaders were ashamed if they had to lay off workers. They saw that as a sign of their own failure as managers. CEOs then thought themselves to be in the service of their employees, their communities, and their shareholders.
But free-market ideologues in the 1970s waged a successful campaign to favor shareholder supremacy above all—jobs, workers and communities be damned! (Please see Wall Street’s War on Workers, for the details)
Wall Street-driven job destruction happens in a flash. All it takes is a stock buyback, a merger, or a private equity purchase, and jobs will be cut overnight to pay for the deals.
That new cutthroat Wall Street mindset has led to approximately 18 million involuntary layoffs per year, year after year, since the 1990s.
But wait, you probably thought most job loss was caused by new technologies, like those that caused the disappearance of elevator operators and horse and buggy drivers?
Nope. Technological change, even AI, changes overall job composition slowly, over many years, even decades. Newness is expensive, so changes are adopted incrementally as costs come down.
But Wall Street-driven job destruction happens in a flash. All it takes is a stock buyback, a merger, or a private equity purchase, and jobs will be cut overnight to pay for the deals.
Public Employees Are Now Sitting Ducks
When labor unions represented more than 30 percent of private sector workers, from WWII to the 1960s, their wages and benefits improved year by year. So did the standard of living of public sector workers.
In New Jersey, for example, 40 years ago there were 60,000 high-paid auto workers with good pension plans. Public sector workers used them as a yardstick to increase their own compensation, as well. But today, those autoworker jobs are gone, which has put downward pressure on the wages and benefits of public sector workers.
Overall, in 1980, more than 50 percent of all private sector workers had pensions. Today, it’s only 11 percent. Meanwhile, 75 percent of state and local government employees, and nearly all federal workers, continue to have access to such plans. That’s why they are sitting ducks.
Divisive politicians can fire away by saying, “Why should private sector workers like you pay taxes to support public sector worker’s benefits that you don’t even have!”
There’s no way around it. The mass slaughter of jobs, whether public or private, grows billionaires.
That’s one reason why Trump and Musk have been getting away with trashing federal employees, with very little blowback from working people in the private sector, at least so far.
But there’s more.
Musk and his fellow billionaires need to cut federal government jobs so they can continue to stuff themselves at the federal trough. They want job cuts to pay for the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that go to the largest US corporations via tax breaks, subsidies, and fat federal contracts. Last year alone, Fortune reports that Musk received $6.3 billion in federal and local taxpayer funding, and during the past four years the total was nearly $25 billion.
Privatization of public sector jobs also is a bonanza for wealthy investors. Just imagine the billions to be made by turning over the postal service to the private sector.
There’s no way around it. The mass slaughter of jobs, whether public or private, grows billionaires.
“Save Our Jobs from Billionaire Greed.”
Imagine if federal worker unions and Democratic Party officials showed up at the plant gate of a company that was about to close its doors to finance hefty stock buybacks for its billionaire owners. A show of support for their fellow layoff victims and a unity message aimed at stopping billionaire job destruction would be simple to craft and easy to share. It would be news.
Why aren’t the Democrats doing this?
Because they don’t want to upset their billionaire donors by interfering with Wall Street’s pillage of working people. As Ken Martin, the new chair of the Democratic Party put it recently, “There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with the Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money…”
If the Democrats dared to look under the hood, they would find that every one of those “good billionaires” is making money from job cuts that boost the value of her or his portfolio.
I was born and raised as a working-class Democrat, but I know that the slaughter of public and private sector jobs won’t stop until there’s a new party that truly represents the interests of working people.
Only then can we fight back against the billionaires and their two-party poodles so willing to curl up in their laps.
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