Transcript: Trump Hasn’t Killed DEI in America

Author Natasha Warikoo says that most Americans believe in achieving greater diversity and equity and that the Trump administration has not permanently defeated those causes.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the September 2 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon.

Perry Bacon: This is Right Now on The New Republic. I’m Perry Bacon, I’m the host. I’m joined by Natasha Warikoo. She’s a professor of sociology at Tufts University. She wrote a great book a few years ago called The Diversity Bargain, and now that we’re so focused these days on issues of diversity and inclusion and so on, I wanted to talk to her about kind of where we are.

She’s done a lot of work on higher education and diversity, and I feel like that’s a great place to kind of start from. But I want to talk about diversity, inclusion, and all the kinds of ways those issues are being affected by Donald Trump. So Natasha, thanks for joining me.

Natasha Warikoo: Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

Bacon: So let me start with the book itself. So the book that you wrote, called The Diversity Bargain, which was written a few years back. And I’m going to tell people, I’ll confess some interest in here, because I went to a college called Yale that very few people went to, but is an elite school. And the book is about, I think it’s Harvard, Oxford, and Brown, and you interviewed both white students and students of color, and you talked about diversity in elite college campuses. But I think the issues of diversity there are relevant to the rest of the society. But talk about what the phrase diversity bargain means.

Warikoo: Sure. Yeah. So I did these interviews with students on the Harvard and Brown campuses, and then also in the UK at Oxford, thinking—I wanted to understand people who are at the most elite places, and how they think about issues of fairness, inclusion, knowing that these places are very exclusive and elite, and certain groups are underrepresented. And the diversity bargain is this, that I found that white students in the United States really did support provisions for equity, particularly affirmative action, which was legal at the time. And they did it, but there was a bargain involved, right?

So they said they supported the inclusion and attention to race in admissions, so that there could be more Black students, Latinx students, Native American students on campus, because they saw it as a benefit to them. They understood that diversity had shaped their worldviews, that they were exposed to different perspectives, that their world was opened up through interacting with people who had very different lived experiences to their own.

But this meant a few things, that they expected underrepresented minority students to integrate at all times. So if they saw a table of Black students sitting together, then they thought that they were not upholding the diversity bargain. Of course, they didn’t notice all the tables of white students on the other side of the cafeteria, but that was OK. They didn’t want it to, quote-unquote, “go too far,” right? That there was this idea of reverse discrimination kind of lurking in the back of their heads.

And so even if they’d gotten—there was one student who said, memorable quote, where they said, “If I hadn’t gotten into Harvard, I would’ve felt that I had experienced racial discrimination if a Black student at my school had gotten in and I didn’t.” And so that script is already in the back of their minds, even though they had won. And so you imagine that student going on to apply to graduate school, apply for a job—the second that they don’t win, affirmative action is an easy thing to blame.

So there were these kinds of expectations that were rolled into the support for affirmative action, in part, and I argue, because there was less attention to kind of racial justice, and that the origins of affirmative action were related to racial equity for underrepresented minorities, frankly, African Americans, in the very beginning. And so that was underplayed in this discourse.

Bacon: So the book resonated with me. I read it, I think—when was the book published, Diversity Bargain?

Warikoo: It was 2016.

Bacon: 2016. So it resonated with me, in part—I think I read it in 2018—in part because, while it was about universities, I felt like, having worked in elite media, having attended an elite college, having worked in think tanks and other things, like, this was not just about universities. This idea that the African Americans particularly in these places needed to deliver some kind of benefit, and to be grateful to be there, and that kind of thing, was not just a college campus thing, but was also reflected in other things I had experienced.

And the reason I thought about the book more recently was, in 2020, I felt, oh, now we’re seeing a movement not just for diversity, but for real racial justice, and I wonder what this looks like. Natasha was hinting that when the demand is not just for Black people or minorities get in the room, but minorities get to shape things, and there’s a call for justice, then the white college students get mad.

I wonder if the rest of our society will feel similar to that, and I wonder if 2020 and the aftergrowth of that—you’ve seen some of the sort of, diversity is OK, but really challenging the structure of America is not OK.

Warikoo: Yeah, it’s been fascinating to watch this unfold. And so, 2020, for many people who care about racial justice and equity, was really an inspiring moment where we thought, “OK, this is what I was calling for,” right? I was calling for greater attention to racial justice, to equity. Systemic racism became, like, a household, an everyday phrase, that left the academy and went into corporate America.

And so it was this moment, and I think it was a hopeful moment, but yeah, unfortunately it didn’t last. I think we’re seeing the kind of backlash towards that movement. It happened pretty swiftly. By September, President Trump is issuing this executive order banning DEI, and so the backlash has been very forceful, and effective, I would add as well.

Bacon: And let’s—I want to talk about the backlash in a couple different ways. The first was, you saw all these, like, red states, I’ll say, right after 2021, passing all these sort of bans on books and ideas about race. You can’t study sociology in this way, or Black studies in this way. So you saw that pretty much 2020, 2021, 2022, that was in red states, that was happening.

So that was maybe not surprising, but that was a sign early on that there was going to be resistance to really studying systemic racism and thinking about it this way, right? That was early on, even when Biden’s president, this very, very strong resistance to academic work around this from the very beginning.

Warikoo: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a kind of back and forth, I think, between the local and the federal, right? So President Trump issues this executive order in September 2020. Biden takes office, rescinds that order, but states and local areas take it up, right? So you have Governor DeSantis in Florida using very similar language. They take on this phrase critical race theory, right?

Very few schools in this country have ever used that phrase, critical race theory, which is a very specific academic term, but they latched onto this, I think, related to this phrase systemic racism, without totally understanding what it was. But having these bans, right? Bans on the teaching of critical race theory, through the state legislatures. Local school boards really got on board with wanting to ban books and, quote-unquote, “parent rights.” Moms for Liberty, that came out of Florida, really helped local school districts elect people who are going to be on board with this project.

Again, you see this legislation and these movements in local areas with very similar language, because it’s a kind of systematic movement supported by organizations like Heritage Foundation. And so this is a very organized effort to attack any kind of policy related to diversity, justice, race, and to build a kind of narrative about this kind of reverse racism, right? To build this false narrative that somehow people of color, trans people, LGBTQ people are getting ahead, right?

And I found it really interesting that the Trump administration started using the language of meritocracy, right? So this idea that we’re going to restore merit by ending attention to inequality when we make selection decisions. And so there is this concerted effort that kind of then, when they’re out of........

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