The attack on DEI is as movement for resegregation

 Pacinthe Mattar, The Walrus, Canada -   So why has the right latched onto DEI so rabidly? As Gabe Schneider of The Objective—a non-profit newsroom examining systems of power and inequity in journalism—says, this is about so much more than the abbreviation, and the media has not been talking clearly enough about what is at the root of the delegitimization: “DEI, taken at its most literal, is ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion," he wrote. “But it would be much more useful for journalists to spell out what the administration is doing: resegregation.”

This long-established skittishness of the media to name things as they are is well documented—using “racially charged” instead of “racist,” for example. “This administration is blatantly blaming desegregation and scapegoating diversity for America’s problems,” Schneider wrote last month. “Some mainstream journalism institutions would treat the idea that the president aims to resegregate the government as opinion. It’s not. It’s a clear reading of the facts.”

It seems, then, that the biggest critics of DEI are in fact themselves the biggest benefactors of a type of “affirmative action,” their gender and race putting them at a historic advantage against their racialized, disabled, queer, gender-diverse counterparts. As Princeton professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad wrote, “The call for color-blindness and merit is a dog whistle for a return to an America where some white people do not have to compete because the rules are rigged in their favor, just as has been the case for hundreds of years in the country.”