What Trump’s crackdown on DEI means for marginalized groups

U.S. President Donald Trump’s dismantling of DEI initiatives is going to worsen inequality for marginalized groups, according to two Winnipeg political experts.

The University of Manitoba professors also believe it will have profound impacts on the American working class, the wealthy, and even Canada’s upcoming federal election.

“None of Trump’s policies are going to actually get at the root of inequality,” said UM sociology and criminology professor Mark Hudson.

“In fact most of it is going to exacerbate inequality.”

BACKGROUND: Trump order ending federal DEI programs leaves agencies and stakeholders on uncertain ground

The Trump administration has been cracking down on employers with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies the new U.S. president believes veer into discrimination in their attempts to support racial minorities, women and other groups.

Earlier this month, Trump put the federal government’s weight behind the push to end such programs by signing an executive order that would effectively dismantle them from all aspects of the federal government.

“The war on ‘woke’ represents the idea that the United States was great … because it did not constrain the power of capital,” said UM political studies professor Radhika Desai, who specifies the term ‘wokeism’ emerged from the African American movement but has since been co-opted by right-leaning commentators to disparage DEI-style politics.

“And to make America great again, you have to stop constraining the power of capital. That’s what the attack on DEI is about.”

DEI laws and programs have been under attack for years by Republicans who contend the measures threaten merit-based hiring, promotion and educational opportunities of white people, specifically white men.

“They do this with the language of ‘fairness,’ right,” Hudson explained. “So if you look at the executive orders through the whole thing, there’s this language about just restoring the sort of meritocratic ideals of the American dream: ‘hard-working Americans have been shut out from opportunity by these DEI initiatives.’ And so, that’s a loud signal back to their base that they’re not going to end what they call an identity-based spoils system. They are going to reorient it. They’re going to send it back and sort of flash freeze historical disadvantage in time.”

Criticism comes from other sectors, as well. Some Asian Americans argue it unfairly limits opportunities for high-achieving students and workers, and some in the Black community believe it undermines years of progress.

“The difficulty is that as anti-discrimination strategy, the DEI strategy is particularly shallow, and in fact, I would argue, in many ways, even counterproductive,” said Desai, who is also a visiting professor in the department of international development at the London School of Economics. “So that’s why Trump has found it so easy to spout an anti-DEI ideology.

“And the way in which DEI is wrong is essentially it claims, it professes great concern for the problems of women, of non-white people, of a whole slew of other minorities and so on. But its conception of how to address these difficulties is to put a handful of members of these groups in positions of power and leave the rest to cope with life as they must, which leaves the rest in, usually, in at least as bad a position, if not a worse position.

“Because if you are pursuing neoliberalism, which is generally creating inequality anyway, being a woman or a person of color or another such member of another member of another minority group. Invariably, if you’re creating inequality, some of those places at the bottom of the hierarchy have to be filled by somebody, and as often as not they may will be members of these groups, right?”

Hudson agrees in many cases, DEI initiatives were implemented as “performative, symbolic” programs.

“They spent a lot of time lecturing their workers about things like unconscious bias, essentially blaming workers for these patterns of exclusion that are really the result of, like, hundreds of years of capitalist development,” he said.

But overturning them, Hudson argues, will have “really significant consequences.”

“One of the orders that got overturned in Trump’s executive orders was an executive order that Clinton signed way back in 1994 that has to do with environmental injustice,” Hudson explained. “So in the United States, a pattern developed historically between industrialization and racism. That means that now, if you are in the United States and you’re Black or Hispanic, you are much more likely to live in a community that is highly, highly polluted, and you bear the health consequences of that pollution.

“That executive order said federal government agencies are going to take that injustice into account for minority communities and for low-income communities, and say, ‘we’re going to collect data on this, see what the patterns look like.’ And then in your planning, in your funding, you are going to take that into consideration, so that we try to start to reverse that long historical pattern.

“Trump’s executive order stops that process immediately, overturns that executive order, and so that historical pattern is now frozen in time. Those communities who live on the fence line in Louisiana, of refineries, their rates of cancer, their rates of respiratory disease, their rates of neurological disability, they’re still going to be as high as they have been historically.”

Hudson feels Trump successfully tapped into the anger of working-class Americans who have faced worsening economic instability for the past 50 years – and found someone to blame for their hardships.

“They’ve pointed it at immigrants and they’ve pointed it at people who have been historically marginalized and pushed to the side,” the University of Manitoba sociology professor said.

“Less educated white men in particular went in droves to the Trump vote. That he recognizes as his base. So what he’s doing with DEI, what he’s doing with these executive orders is signalling to that base, ‘we’re going to reorient things back towards you. We are going to do away with any of these initiatives that focus on historically marginalized, disadvantaged communities.’”

Professor Desai believes the American working class won’t actually gain from the dismantling of DEI; it will be America’s wealthiest.

Desai says once Trump won in 2016, “the capitalist class members, major CEOs started circling their wagons around him, precisely because they now had to accept that he was going to be president, and they had to come to terms with him, so they came to terms with him.”

Fast forward to 2024, and Desai says a “substantial section of the American capitalist class was” now backing Trump.

“What matters to them is that people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or whatever should get to do whatever they like,” she said.

As Canada heads into its own election season, both Desai and Hudson say the consequences will extend across the border.

“Keeping people guessing, keeping people scrambling is part of Trump’s agenda,” Desai said.

“Some of the language that Trump uses in these executive orders is actually sort of signaling to, and will resonate with, a group of folks who genuinely are prone to racism, misogyny, anti-immigrant sentiment, anti LGBTQ sentiment,” added Hudson.

“And so I think there will be an additional push to try to make invisible those forms of identity, to try to deny their existence. And that’s going to be, you know, a continuing fight for those communities and for allies of those communities, right, to make sure that, you know, we do stand on principles of recognizing difference and making visible identities and communities of people who have been made invisible in the past.”

–With files from The Associated Press