A Fraud the Institutions Could Afford
How the language of liberation ended up in an HR binder — and why the left saw it coming first.
Trump killed DEI with an executive order in January 2025. You don’t need an executive order to kill something already dead. Someone needs to claim the corpse.
Liberals and their institutions own this failure. They built DEI, funded it, defended it, extended it into every institution they touched, and called anyone who questioned it an enemy of equality. The right despised it, so liberals doubled down. DEI became a litmus test, a line in the culture war, and that made it nearly impossible to say what needed to be said: it was never built to cost them anything.
By liberal I don’t mean the left. I mean the heir to the Rockefeller Republican: comfortable on social questions, loyal to the economic order. Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, Clinton again, Biden, Harris. Every one a protector of the arrangement. I also mean the professional class that built the DEI apparatus and lives off it — HR, the endowed chairs, the consulting. Some believed it. Some only sold it. This essay goes easy on the first. The second earned everything that follows.
The racial wealth gap has not moved in forty years, the same forty years in which diversity training became the liberal answer to structural inequality and racism. The Chief Diversity Officer (CDO) proliferated across corporate America while union membership continued its decline. A title was added. The structure was not touched.
It wasn’t that long ago, and it wasn’t safe.
Civil rights activists faced police dogs, fire hoses, and federal indifference. SNCC organizers were murdered in Mississippi for registering voters. The FBI ran a covert program — COINTELPRO — not to monitor Black leadership but to destroy it. Fred Hampton was assassinated in his bed by the Chicago Police Department and the FBI working in coordination, before the phrase “systemic racism” had been processed into a corporate onboarding module. Four students were shot dead at Kent State by the National Guard for protesting a war abroad. The movements of that era understood empire and domestic repression as one system.
They were not monolithic. They disagreed about strategy: integration versus separation, reform versus revolution, the ballot versus the street. But among their more radical currents — SNCC, the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity — the dominant question was not how to prove the structure took the problem seriously. It was how to dismantle the structure and rebuild it.
Malcolm X did not want a seat at the table. He wanted to know who built the table, who owns the wood, and why his people were expected to be grateful for the invitation.
Those were strategy arguments worth having. DEI managed by a CDO isn’t one.
DEI began as a hire. Through the 1990s, corporations and universities built the machine — a Chief Diversity Officer, an annual equity report, a training everyone had to sit through — a full generation before it had a canonical text. I was a manager at Coca-Cola until 1995. Women and minorities were moving into jobs that had only ever gone to men, the lawyers could see the backlash coming, and I sat through the training like everyone else.
It didn’t work. In 1999, four years after I left, Black salaried employees sued. In November 2000 Coca-Cola settled for $192.5 million, the largest race discrimination settlement in American history. The centerpiece of the deal was a court-appointed task force, and one of its jobs was making sure managers received annual diversity training. Coke’s lawyers did not invent that structure. They took it from Texaco, which settled its own race case in 1996 for $176.1 million and funded a task force to build the training and monitor compliance. The machine spread the way boilerplate spreads — through legal departments. The training had been running for years before the lawsuit. The remedy was more training.
The exchange was simple. Take the language of the civil rights movements, hand it to human resources. The institutions bought it because it was cheap, and because the alternative asked something of them. The CDO does three jobs at once: proof of commitment, absorber of grievance, human shield against accountability. Black CEO representation in the Fortune 500 stayed near one percent through 2023, after decades of commitments and billions spent to change it.
Executives perform empathy with the assurance of people trained to perform it. The unconscious bias workshop runs from 10 to noon. Lunch is provided. At 1 p.m. everyone returns to the same structure they left at 9:59. The process became the point, and the process never ends.
There’s an explanation for this, and it isn’t new.
For generations, America’s institutions — corporate, academic, and political — have mastered the art of using the language of justice to keep the same people on top. The Nigerian-American philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò gave that move a name — elite capture — and a 2022 book, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else).
The boardrooms added a face or two while the rent soared. Universities issued equity reports while food deserts spread. HR departments held bias trainings while the unhoused froze on the streets. DEI did not cause these conditions. It gave cover to the institutions that could have changed them and didn’t.
Liberals needed a hero. Enter Robin DiAngelo, a white academic who could tell white audiences the problem was them. White Fragility became the canonical text of what John McWhorter named the third wave of American antiracism. Strip the vocabulary and a religion is what remains. Original sin, confession, penance. What it never offers is absolution.
Here is what DiAngelo argues: white Americans become defensive when confronted with racial discomfort, and that defensiveness is itself part of what keeps inequality in place. Any denial of racism is proof of guilt. Disagreement is evidence the framework is correct. You cannot rebut it. You cannot opt out. The only available response is contrition.
An argument you cannot lose does something else, too. It flattens more than 40 million Black Americans — urban and rural, immigrant and slave descendant, working-class and Ivy-educated, religious and secular, conservative and socialist — all of it reduced to a single job: producing white discomfort. Black people enter as occasions for white guilt and are asked for nothing else.
Disagreement became evidence, and evidence went in a file. People learned to perform assent in rooms where the alternative was a conversation with someone whose title contained the word inclusion. The framework asked everyone to interrogate their complicity except the people selling it.
An institution can buy the entire machinery of what it called racial reckoning and wake up the next morning with its org chart, its pay bands, and its endowment exactly where it left them. DiAngelo’s listed fee runs $14,000 an event; her agency puts the keynote range at $30,000 to $40,000.
For the liberal professional class, the book was a credential you could display. White Fragility, spine out on the coffee table, staged beside the succulents. A second copy rode in the tote bag, cover angled just far enough to be read across the train aisle. Nobody had to change a hiring policy. They only had to be caught holding the book.
If Portlandia had written the DiAngelo-era DEI script, it would have been hilarious: elite liberals demanding accountability from themselves, dragging the rest of the country along in a parade of mass guilt. Anyone want to guess the dress code?
DiAngelo’s defenders talk about identity politics as though she invented it. It has a serious origin: the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black lesbian socialist feminists who issued a statement in 1977 that remains one of the most rigorous political documents in American history. Their argument was not that race and gender should replace class analysis. It was that race, gender, sexuality, and class are interlocking systems of oppression.
What happened to that vocabulary between 1977 and 2018 is Táíwò’s capture. The words — identity, intersectionality, power — were pulled out of the class politics that produced them. By the late 1990s the CDO had turned all of it into a job description. For the Collective, identity was where the analysis started. For the apparatus, it was where the analysis stopped.
I walked into Emerson Middle School in 1965, the year Malcolm was killed. Twelve years old, out of a middle-class neighborhood a mile away and into a building that was half white and half Black. Emerson stood on the same block as Flint Northern High School.
King was murdered on April 4, 1968. The block erupted. Fights first, then police, then tear gas. I went out a first-floor window and ran. I was fifteen, and the school could not protect me.
Classes resumed a few days later. The doors were locked for control. Robert Kennedy was killed in June. Then came the summer of 1968.
In September, I entered Flint Northern. English, history, and current events classes all collapsed into the same discussion. A room of kids from every income in the city, with the racial history of the country sitting there with them. The English teacher said: “This is going to be a tough year for all of us. I won’t lie to you.” Nothing was resolved. Nothing has been resolved since.
I went to the University of Michigan in the early ’70s as a political science major, when those same fights were the whole air of the place. I don’t recognize the movement of those years in DiAngelo’s theatrics. Too many of us who knew said nothing while the corporate version captured and replaced it.
Adolph Reed Jr., a political scientist and a fixture of the socialist left, was called a reactionary by liberal academics for making this argument, and disinvited from the platforms that had hosted him. He was right anyway.
He wasn’t alone, and none of them came at it from the right. Barbara and Karen Fields spent a book on how a language of race gets used to explain inequalities that class produced. Cedric Johnson traced how Black Power hardened into a Black managerial class, and Touré Reed showed how antiracist demands got severed from the economic reforms that would have delivered. Táíwò named it. The left critique of DEI is older and deeper than the one that got it killed.
Reed’s thesis, plainly: substituting racial identity for class analysis does not serve working-class Black people. It serves Black elites and their white liberal allies, who pose as representatives of Black America while backing policies — charter schools, microfinance, diversity in elite institutions — that lift the Black professional class and leave the Black working class and poor exactly where they are. DEI is that swap, running on a budget. It produces Black faces in high places.
In 1996, in the Village Voice, Reed described a first-term Illinois state senator: “a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics… the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics.”
That was thirty years ago. The senator was Barack Obama, and Reed had described the whole career before it began: form over substance, the identity story carrying the weight the policy wouldn’t. Liberals got the president they called cool and competent — and the bank bailouts, the record deportations, the drone wars. In 2024 the party ran the play again, on the theory that the biography would do the work the policy wouldn’t.
In September 2016, at the dedication of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Michelle Obama hugged George W. Bush. The photograph went viral. Commentators called it bipartisanship. The illegal war, the torture program, and Guantánamo went unmentioned. Nobody found it strange.
I called the liberal an heir to the Rockefeller Republican. Obama said it about himself first. Asked in December 2012 whether he favored a socialist model, he answered: “The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican.”
The 1935 Social Security Act excluded agricultural and domestic workers, the occupations that held most of the Black workforce. The GI Bill was written universal and administered locally, and Black veterans came away with a fraction of the housing and schooling white veterans got. Federal redlining maps drew lines around neighborhoods and settled for fifty years which ones could accumulate value. Historians still argue whether that was animus, political compromise, or administrative convenience. The argument barely touches the outcome. Nobody’s discomfort built it. Legislation did.
That is what Barbara Fields means when she says race is a product of racism and not the other way around. The arrangement came first, and the explanation was supplied afterward to account for it. Which is why the people who own it would rather you examine your soul. What legislation built, legislation can take apart.
Jesse Jackson built the multiracial, working-class coalition that could have done it. The Rainbow Coalition ran in 1984 and 1988 on shared material interest. Rent. Healthcare. Jobs. Workers’ rights. Jackson won roughly seven million primary votes in 1988 on a platform that made no distinction between the white factory worker in Detroit and the Black sharecropper’s son in Mississippi.
Martin Luther King’s last campaign, the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, organized across racial lines explicitly, because King had concluded the civil rights laws had done what laws could do and what remained was class: redistribution, guaranteed income, structural economic change. He was murdered six weeks before the encampment opened on the National Mall.
They did to his memory what they did to his politics: they kept the dream and dropped the redistribution. It isn’t only King. The same swap runs through Harriet Tubman, Helen Keller, Rosa Parks, and a Walmart Juneteenth ice cream — I traced the pattern in Once You See It.
The Rainbow Coalition built a national movement on almost no money. Set that against the best-funded version of the other approach.
In 2024 the New York Times asked a simple question about the University of Michigan’s diversity program: what went wrong. Here is what nine years and $250 million bought. Black undergraduate enrollment rose from 1,255 in 2016 to 1,796 in 2024 — a gain of roughly one percentage point, in a state that is 14 percent Black. The Black Student Union had demanded 10 percent enrollment for decades. The program ended in 2025 without coming close.
Michigan’s own climate surveys showed perceptions of inclusion falling among the very students the program was built to serve. The Black Student Union called its goals left unfilled.
This was not a poorly implemented good program. It was the largest, best-resourced DEI initiative in American higher education — the strongest possible test of the theory. It got the fullest trial and moved the number one point. When the data came back flat, the apparatus did not revise the theory. It issued a Year 1 Progress Report calling the work “successful and promising,” then closed, without ceremony, when the federal government told it to.
A quarter of a billion dollars. Nine years. One percent.
None of this is a mystery once you look at who was doing the embracing. Elite universities are run by the professional-managerial class, people whose standing rests on credentials and on being seen to hold the right opinions. For that class, identity politics is cheap. It asks nothing of the endowment, nothing of tenure, nothing of legacy admissions. Class politics asks everything. Harvard sits on an endowment near $53 billion, has resisted sustained union pressure to pay wages matched to the cost of living in one of the country’s most expensive cities, and assigns White Fragility.
Real progress has a shape. The racial wealth gap closes. Black homeownership matches white. Incarceration stops tracking race. The schools in Jackson, Mississippi and East Los Angeles are funded like the schools in Scarsdale. Those are material outcomes, and they take real policy: redistribution, labor rights, housing policy, criminal-justice reform, universal healthcare. That requires political power, which requires a coalition large enough to win.
Zohran Mamdani ran that plan in New York City’s 2025 Democratic primary — rent freezes, free buses, free childcare, municipal groceries in food-insecure neighborhoods, higher taxes on the wealthy — and built a coalition that crossed racial lines on shared material interest. He did not run on a DEI platform. He ran on what the Rainbow Coalition was practicing in 1988, calibrated to 2025. He took the primary, then the general, and has been mayor since January.
That is what the institutions never bought. They bought the workshop because it was cheaper and asked nothing of them. It is cheaper to hire a Chief Diversity Officer than to restructure who holds power. That was always the whole transaction.
When Trump signed DEI’s death certificate, he only confirmed what was already true: the party that built it lost. The Democratic Socialists of America put replacements on the ballot. Adam Bojak in Buffalo. Mo Brown in Syracuse, who took out a fourteen-term incumbent by about a hundred votes. Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York, who beat sitting House Democrats, one of them the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. They beat the party that built the machine, in its own primaries, on its own ballot line.
Kshama Sawant spent a decade on the Seattle City Council as its only socialist, first elected in 2013, and left undefeated. She is running now in Washington’s 9th Congressional District against Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on House Armed Services, who has held the seat for twenty-nine years. As she put it: “I’m running as an independent socialist against billionaire-backed Zionist Democrat Adam Smith.” She won’t be voting for Jeffries.
The party of Adam Smith is getting its own death certificate.
The line that never changes: you build the coalition on what people share across race and gender and origin — the rent, the wage, the hospital bill — and you win it at the ballot box. It is the expensive thing. It is the only thing that has ever worked.