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What Republicans really mean when they blame 'DEI' | Mehdi Hasan

In 1981, Lee Atwater, the most influential Republican party strategist of the late 20th century, sat down for an off-the-record interview with the political scientist Alexander P Lamis. At the time, Atwater was a junior member of the Reagan administration, but he would later go on to run George HW Bush’s presidential campaign in 1988 and then become chair of the Republican National Committee in 1989.

In perhaps the most revealing, and most infamous, portion of the interview, the hard-charging Republican operative explained to Lamis how Republican politicians could mask their racism – and racist appeals to white voters – behind a series of euphemisms.

You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘[N-word, N-word, N-word]’. By 1968 you can’t say ‘[N-word]’ – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites … ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘[N-word, N-word]’.

Got that? No need to utter the N-word out loud as there were plenty of other “abstract” ways to say it.

Today, more than four decades later, DEI has become the new N-word; the new rightwing abstraction deployed by Republicans to conceal their anti-Black racism. DEI – short for diversity, equity and inclusion – is thrown around by high-profile conservatives, from the president of the United States downwards, for the express purpose of undermining Black people in public life.

Don’t believe me? In a recent interview on Fox News, the White House counselor and former Trump lawyer Alina Habba declared that the administration’s 27-year-old press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, “is overqualified, brilliant and was well-versed and ready … she didn’t need a thick binder ... unlike our last press secretary who was put in there for … DEI reasons”.

For the record, the “last press secretary”, Karine Jean-Pierre, is the Black daughter of Haitian immigrants. Is she less qualified than her successor? Well, let’s compare résumés, shall we?

Neither Habba herself, nor Leavitt, are Ivy League grads.

Jean-Pierre is.

Neither Habba herself, nor Leavitt, worked in two different administrations before securing their top White House positions.

Jean-Pierre did.

Neither Habba herself, nor Leavitt, has served on three different election-winning presidential campaigns across three different decades.

Jean-Pierre has.

So when Habba says Jean-Pierre was appointed White House press secretary for “DEI reasons”, what else could she be alluding to other than that she is a Black woman?

When the Republican congressman Tim Burchett called Kamala Harris – the then sitting vice-president, former senator and former attorney general of the country’s most populous state; a woman who would have entered the Oval Office with a longer record in elected office than Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump – a “DEI hire” within 24 hours of her becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, what else could he have been referring to other than that she is a Black woman?

When a viral tweet (26m views and counting) from a popular far-right account (that is also amplified by Elon Musk) referred to Brandon Scott – the mayor of Baltimore who was elected with 70% of the vote and previously served eight years on the city council, including a stint as city council president – as the city’s “DEI mayor”, what else could it have been trying to point to other than that he is a Black man?

DEI is the new N-word. In fact, the Black podcaster Van Lathan argues that DEI is now “worse than the N-word” and has become “the worst slur in American history”. The term “DEI hire”, he explains, “is not just being used to undermine the qualifications, capability and readiness of Black people … DEI is placing the blame of all of society’s ills at the feet of these people.”

Plane crash? Blame DEI. Wildfires in LA? Blame DEI. Bridge collapse? Blame DEI.

DEI is a racist dogwhistle. Blame Black people is the not so unsubtle message.

You now cannot turn on the television or log on to social media without coming across a prominent conservative blathering on about the evils of DEI. To quote the loathsome Fox host Greg Gutfeld, DEI “can be used to explain everything … except, unlike racism and climate change, which the left found under every rock, every issue, DEI is, indeed, under every rock because the Democrats put it there.”

This isn’t a good-faith critique of diversity programs or policies – whether they actually work or not; whether they restrict free speech; whether they are corporate box-ticking exercises. No, this is the weaponization of a three-letter term to denigrate Black people and pretend the political and economic advancement of minority communities over the past 60 years was a mistake. (“If I see a Black pilot, I’m gonna be like, ‘Boy, I hope he is qualified,” the rightwing activist and top Trump ally Charlie Kirk casually remarked last year.)

So why on earth is our “liberal” media credulously giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt on this? Treating their obsession with DEI as anything other than what it is? Anti-Black racism. The new N-word. A three-letter slur that seeks to, once again, mainstream bigotry and discrimination in the United States. (“DEI halftime show,” tweeted the far-right influencer Jack Posobiec during the Super Bowl on Sunday night.)

For years, Donald Trump has been plagued by allegations that he used the N-word while filming The Apprentice. In 2024, a former producer on the NBC reality show claimed Trump used the racial epithet in 2004 to describe Kwame Jackson, a Black finalist on the first season of The Apprentice. In 2018, the former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman claimed in her book Unhinged that Trump was caught on tape during the making of The Apprentice saying the N-word “multiple times”, according to three of her sources.

At the time, Trump vociferously denied that he had ever used the N-word: “I don’t have that word in my vocabulary, and never have.”

But the awful truth is that, these days, he doesn’t even need to have such a word in his vocabulary. He and his acolytes have another, more insidious one that serves a similar racist purpose: DEI.