Episode Transcript

Rebecca Beavers: Hello, everyone. This is your host, Rebecca Beavers, and welcome back to the Bridging the Gap podcast. Today, we are talking about Crossroads, A DEI in crisis, and I have a special guest with me today. We have our political analyst, also known as my older brother, Zachary. 

Zachary Beavers: Greetings.

Rebecca: Alright, so our first topic we're gonna talk about is in January of 2025, President Trump signed executive order 1 4, 1 7 3, which targets DEI practices at the federal level and pressures private employers to shift toward merit-based systems. From a political perspective, what message was this executive order trying to send and to whom?

Zachary: So I think he's trying to send a message to, his white base, I think it was intended for the white people. Who voted for him, but I think a lot of people can read into it differently.

So I think there has been a lot of anxiety over, people having jobs that other people looking in from the outside think they don't deserve whether his job should be going to someone more deserving, what have you. Now when for his white base, like I said, there's a lot of people who hear things different.

Plessy versus Ferguson came down and the key phrase from that ruling was separate but equal. There wasn't necessarily opposition from white or black people to it at first, but each group heard something different. White people heard separate and black people.

Heard equal, and that's how they approached that ruling from both sides. Now, fast forwarding a hundred and almost [00:02:00] 130 years back to the present, and they say we're s restoring merit based opportunity and eliminating illegal discrimination. White people I think are focusing more on the idea of it being merit based.

And black people are looking at discrimination more broadly. What I think is that a lot of people who wanted to have something good to take from it and looked at that and they said, we're getting merit based opportunity back now from their perspective.

Not from white people's people, but like white Trump supporters. The idea is that. They think that they have put in the work and they're putting in the merit and they're not getting a return. They're not getting the jobs they think they should be getting. They're not getting the positions they think they should be getting.

So when they hear that, they're thinking good. It's a level playing field. It are people of color, they're hearing, eliminating illegal discrimination. That sounds good. It's a good thing. You gotta keep an eye. They're gonna keep an eye on that to see if that happens. And when it comes to each of those groups, I think there's different people that both would agree are unfairly getting jobs that might surprise you.

What I think white people, by and large think that jobs are being taken by immigrants. And I think to them, anyone who is in a leadership position and is not white, they're not getting the job. That they're not, they don't deserve to have that job.

And for white people, they're imagining probably mostly like Africans, Asians, Hispanics. I think for black people there's a lot of Hispanic anxiety. Maryland especially is a very different state today from how it was 20 years ago. The Hispanic population I think, tripled in the last 20 years. A lot of them are coming here. You go to a place where a lot of people who are from where you're from are Right. A lot of Salvadorians settled here first, and now a lot of Salvadorians are moving here 'cause their families are here.

And I think a lot of black people are saying. It's hard for them to get into the job market 'cause black people struggle to get at the middle and higher levels. In general because of systemic holdovers, past discrimination, and I guess a resurgence in that more recently. And they're thinking, if all the Hispanics went away, those jobs would go back to being for them.

Something along the lines of Trump's rant about black jobs last year. I think when he talks about that, I think there's a lot of people who do think there's a lot of immigrants, especially here who are getting jobs that they shouldn't be getting. Americans should be getting them. 

Rebecca: Alright, moving on to my, our next talking point. . PBS recently reported that over 400 colleges have eliminated or rebranded DEI programs in just the past year. Why are universities reacting so so quickly and so dramatically to political pressure?

Zachary: I think it was surprising that Harvard lost that Supreme Court case last year. This is where, that's where it all started. Yeah. Harvard lost that Supreme Court case over affirmative action. And, it's really interesting because I think, what people are imagining is sort of tied to the DEI thing, as well.

This is, these are all related, but I think like people imagine is an institution says we want to have a more diverse workplace. Now, some people mostly white immediately say. Well, what does that mean? And they imagine that there's now this panel of people and they're deciding if there's a hundred seats.

We only want, white people to get a certain number of them. And I think right now, non-Hispanic white people, I think are now finally like 55% of the population, something like that. But I think most white people think that they're like, there's way less of them. There's actually way less of them than there actually are. That there's only that out of those a hundred seats, maybe only 20 are for white people.

And then you have to set aside 10 for trans people from Guatemala or something. But I think the idea that they have in their mind is that like these groups of people, they're just arbitrarily deciding that, once they get, say 50 white people in a group of 100, that's it.

If there's anyone else in that group of people who are applying, and they're white and they don't get included and. I think in reality it was never that, simple. As an example, there's the infamous, meme where Target back in like 2020 was saying, we're gonna make a more diverse, administration at Target corporate, right?

To be more responsive to our minority consumers. And, they specifically, they said they wanted to [00:07:00] hire more black. People in business. So that would be PE black people who have SBS ABS in business or MBAs, right? And then when the hiring practice just never really panned out that way, they ended up hiring mostly white people at the end of the day.

And like the number of black people hired in those positions only increased moderately in the next year. Target just replied, like throwing their hands up and saying, there just aren't a lot of black people in business. And, there's more black people with MBAs. There were more black people with MBAs in 2021 when they said this than there had ever been before.

So they were out there. If Target was willing to go and look, but like in, in reality, what I think Target was shooting for, and it, I don't think they even met their own internal goal. It was that they wanted, say if they were gonna hire 15 people at administration, maybe they would hire some additional people to work as like in that type of outreach.

And they wanted them to be black or something. And Target was never bothered to really look, because most hiring is done based on referral. It's gonna be hard to find black people on referral. And it's similar for like college admissions. I think it's a little more flexible from what I understood, some colleges were doing that where there would be a set number of people and then if it was a 600 seat group, they would set aside only, say 10 of them had to be black and then 10 of them had to be Hispanic, and then 10 of them had to be this.

And then they would try and be a little bit more open to, an open process for admitting people. Based on their background, but not really with the idea of their race in mind. And then some schools, from what I understood, they would do a normal admissions fill up and then they would add additional seats for particular minorities.

So the normal admissions process would happen, and then if a minority person didn't get in, they might get a second chance at whatever it was their idea of trying to avoid excluding white people too much already as it turns out, all the people doing these programs are white.

But there's just a mismatch between how that worked and the reality of that's not how people saw it as working. And in general, I think if you want to have a truly like fair society, you gotta look at it from both ways, and it becomes way more complicated. And that's partially why Harvard lost that case.

I think it's very hard to say that you are making admissions on the basis of racial equality and you're doing affirmative action, which is very, which is, that's not a racially equal process. Now the argument for why Martin Luther King Jr. made the argument in favor of it back in the admission, it wasn't racially equal, but you can't start treating people equally when certain groups are already at a disadvantage.

That was the idea. Are black people in a better position to not have affirmative action today than they were 60 years ago? I would say yes. Things have improved a lot. Were we ready to drop it? I don't know, I think you can only say that with the benefit of hindsight.

So we'll have to see where black people are 10 years from now. If we were ready to drop it. But I think affirmative action programs like that just never were going to survive a Supreme Court challenge. It just took this long to get there, I think it's because the culture now has very obviously shifted. The Harvard lost that case and then the American people returned to party. That campaigned on getting rid of all that and punishing people. Who believe in it, as harshly as power and gave them a trifecta.

And so that trifecta now compliments the court that they all lost the case in before. So that's, it's just an acknowledgement that there's writing on the wall. They can't afford to all keep going to court like this repeatedly and keep losing, and there's no sense that they would win in the future.

Rebecca: Alright, so my next. Point that I have on here is we're also seeing a shift in federal priorities, like increased funding for HBCUs that cuts to Hispanic-serving institutions, which there aren't many of. How do moves like that fit into the broader political strategy around DEI? 

Zachary: I think and a lot of black people are worried because, Trump is not very friendly to black people. But I think the movement. It in general, the reason why it got so many supporters, not just from white people, but from across the, black people had a little bit more of a sluggish performance in the past, in 20, 24 elections than they had before. Not to degree of like Hispanic voters. But it was noticeable enough that people said, or even though black people turned out 89% for Kamala, they normally turn out like 95% for whoever the Democrat is.

And I think that's because. MAGA as a movement had been marketing, DEI in different ways to different people, how people want to hear it. White people in general, I think are just very anxious about anybody who isn't white, getting these types of positions and calling it DEI. But then other groups who aren't white have their own idea of how that is, how that looks like to black people.

I think there's a lot of Hispanic anxiety in the black community. I don't think black people like having a lot of Hispanic people be around. And I think Hispanic people. They've brought their own problems racially from their own countries. And a lot of Hispanic people I've noticed who don't hold high opinions of Africans as an example. And then Africans bring their own problems.

So they all interpret it in that, from the context of that, this movement is saying we're gonna remove the people who don't deserve it. And those people who don't deserve it are the people you don't like. It was, how do moose like that fit into the broader political strategy around you.

Yeah, the broader political strategy is we want to get, in general what they all have in common. The through line is even for immigrants. To some immigrants, there are immigrants who don't deserve to be here.

I think black women are very assertive. I think it's very hard to find black. Women who don't do that, especially if they've made into positions of authority in the workforce. And as we all know, white people in general, white men in particular, and also men in general.

We have throw black men in there too. They have an issue with that. And I think there's been, there's always been a cultural undercurrent that women in general, black women specifically don't have a lot of business being in the workforce. what people are reading from the message of MAGA is that there are people who you don't like who are getting things they don't deserve to.

A lot of people, black women, don't deserve having a lot of those positions because they don't like 'em. So in the DEI roll back, anyone you don't like is DEI and they don't deserve it. So I think it's probably just as simple as that. I think to black women who are finding themselves struggling, it doesn't matter how those guys arrived at those positions.

Rebecca: Alright, our last and final topic for this episode is with new lawsuits, federal executive orders, and hundreds of campus. DEI cuts. Do you think DEI is being dismantled, rebranded, or reshaped into something else entirely? 

Zachary: People who are educated know that there is a value in diversity and language is a very fluid construct.

What we've been watching, for instance, from the right is them hopping from word to word to find. Ways to make words that were used by people who they don't like, appropriate them to make them negative. So we had DEI, which originally was just administrative, corporate legal jargon for saying we want two black people instead of one black person in the boardroom.

Now that's bad. There's a war in schools, it's still going on, but that war has shifted. Now instead of trying to get control of schools, the right is obsessed with getting rid of them altogether.

So CRT is no longer a useful tool for that. And I think partially it's [00:15:00] because there was a lot of fighting against school administrations and against, as it turns out, parents. And that just never really panned out the way they won. They couldn't win control of the schools in the way that they wanted. So now they're trying to focus on just getting rid of them in the same way they jumped onto woke. Woke is a word that they're really obsessed with because people who they don't like or using it in a positive way for themselves, and we can't have that. So it's being trying, they're trying to appropriate it and make it into something negative, and I think they've largely succeeded. 

I think that we won't be seeing woke being used in a positive way for a long time. And there have been words they've jumped to from woke. They've tried to do it with trans. That's not really working because there are millions of people who just identify as that. So it's hard to turn an actual identity into that, but woke is more of a concept.

It's easy to do that, but it works the other way too. We'll see the language of diversity. Inclusion change because while they're attacking the language, they are not winning control of the culture in those spaces. Like I said, educated people know that having different people around is good. So they'll try and find ways to keep making that happen and they'll even use other language to describe it if they have to Eventually.

Wars of language are never won by those in power. These colleges are gonna find new and different ways of doing what they want to do, because at the end of the day, the only way that the right would win is if they won control of the culture. In the schools and they don't seem to be too interested in doing that anymore. 

Rebecca: Adding on to what you said, this just came to mind. It's already happening at some schools. I know At GW their DEI program is not called DEI, it's called MSI, minority Serving Institution. 

Zachary: Yeah. UMD, they dropped the language. I forget what they changed the name of the office with it's like within their student engagement division, but it used to be called diversity, equity, and inclusion. The mission of the office hasn't changed.

They've just changed the name of it. I Harvard, ended up changing the name and then changing. And MIT said they were not changing the name of their thing, but it wasn't called a DEI office in the first place. But there were people demanding that the name be changed and the policy be changed. And they said no, okay. But for the most part we're, what we're watching changing the paint.

Because also the fighting right now over these cultural issues is very surface level. It's partially because the base of the Trump administration doesn't seem to be actually all too interested in the details of what's going on. Just whatever makes them feel like they're winning. And at the same level, Trump administration itself a good, consistent, way of keeping their attention on something the moment it disappears from their site. So like Harvard lost that case last year and Trump was like really happy about it. But then he didn't, after that, Harvard had moved out of sight for him. He didn't care anymore.

But Harvard didn't really change much of anything. They changed how the admissions process worked. , But then they said, we're not gonna be considering race for the makeup of the class. But it can still be used in our decision-making for admissions. They're not really changing anything, or they're not changing the consideration waiting or whatever.

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But no one paid attention to that announcement. So there's a lot of fighting over that. But as long as the right remains obsessed with something that looks like that. And they don't try and go through the effort of making sure that whatever changes they're trying to force stick, then we're not gonna see a level of change.

Rebecca: Alright. Thank you so much for joining me today. It was nice having this conversation with you. Okay, so that is it for today's episode. Tune in for our next and final episode, where we talk about where we are going from here.

This is Rebecca Beavers, and together, we are Bridging the Gap.