The New Yorker Radio Hour - Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

Many of the most draconian measures implemented in the first couple weeks of the new Trump Administration have been justified as emergency actions to root out D.E.I.—diversity, equity, and inclusion—including the freeze (currently rescinded) of trillions of dollars in federal grants. The tragic plane crash in Washington, the President baselessly suggested, might also be the result of D.E.I. Typically, D.E.I. describes policies at large companies or institutions to encourage more diverse workplaces. In the Administration’s rhetoric, D.E.I. is discrimination pure and simple, and the root of much of what ails the nation. “D.E.I. is the boogeyman for anything,” Jelani Cobb tells David Remnick. Cobb is a longtime staff writer, and the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. “If there’s a terrible tragedy . . . if there is something going wrong in any part of your life, if there are fires happening in California, then you can bet that, somehow, another D.E.I. is there.” Although affirmative-action policies in university admissions were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, D.E.I. describes a broad array of actions without a specific definition. “It’s that malleability,” Cobb reflects, that makes D.E.I. a useful target, “one source that you can use to blame every single failing or shortcoming or difficulty in life on.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Well, the opening weeks of the Trump administration seemed to have followed a mantra from Facebook's earlier years. Move fast and break things. And break them into a thousand pieces before anyone will notice. Last week, we woke up to Elon Musk, bragging that he was feeding a congressionally authorized agency with a 40-plus billion-dollar budget into, and I quote, a wood chipper. Breaking things at warp speed is very much the point now.

Many of the most draconian measures have been justified as emergency actions to root out DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. These are typically programs put in place by large companies or institutions or government agencies to encourage more diverse workplaces. But the administration characterizes DEI as discriminatory. nation, and broadly is the root of so much of what ails this nation. The temporary freeze of trillions of dollars in federal grants since rescinded was described as an anti-D-EI measure, and the tragic plane crash in Washington, the president also suggested

might well be the result of, yes, DEI. To understand what's happening here and why, I sat down the other day with Jolani Cobb. Jolani Cobb is a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, and he's a historian. and the Dean of Columbia University's Journalism School. Jelani, barely two or three weeks in office, Donald Trump has gone after academia, journalism, and diversity. So you're a dean, you're a journalist, and guess what? So how you hold it up?

You know, it's kind of like a barrage from all directions. And the one thing that those disparate communities all seem to have in common is a sense of despair about, you know, what happens next and how do we navigate the trials of this moment. Let's break this down then. What are the fears that you're sensing, for example, in academia where you're spending most of your days? You're at Columbia University. In academia, the fears range. So there are people who worry that, you know, their work, if it touches upon any sensitive subject matter or anything that the trumpet,

administration looks unfavorably upon that they won't be able to get funding. And in some instances, these are projects that people have worked on for years. And so that's a huge fear for people. And then there's the kind of political pressure. I've talked to untenured junior faculty who worry that if they research a subject related to race or related to gender, related to sexuality or gender identity, that that may make it more difficult for them to get tenure or more difficult for them to get grants and that kind of thing. So very much connected to career concerns. Are those reasonable concerns, Jolani, since the people that are making the tenure decisions are senior faculty and deans? Well, I think that there's a question of whether or not

university administrators will stand up for faculty who research topics that are unpopular. There's the maybe not so unreasonable fear that you could become a target of a news story that paints you to be a kind of caricature of what you actually are interested in researching. One of the things that's really notable is the extent to which people have begun kind of pulling the historical literature on universities during the McCarthy period that talk about how we navigated that particular crisis. What executive orders that have been issued so far

related to DEI concern you host? In the conversations I've had with people, some of whom are fairly knowledgeable on this, they've been of the more than one way to skin a cat persuasion. So if they're not able to freeze federal funds around DEI or related subject matter, there may be other ways.

of kind of arm-twisting people into compliance. There's fear about endowment taxes being levied against large universities, particularly wealthy ones. There are fears about whether or not students from abroad will be able to get visas with the same sort of ease that they once did, and that will, of course, have a financial implication. And then there's the kind of other power of the purse string, which is the ability, coming out of the civil rights movement, the ability to withhold federal funding for institutions that discriminate on the basis of race. The conversation around DEI has overwhelmingly pointed to DEI as a kind of anti-white discrimination. Well, Jolani, what is DEI at its best, in your view, and are there abuses of it?

And how would you describe them? So at its best, DEI represents an effort from companies, institutions, various kind of walks of American life to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to participate in the actions or the work of those institutions. And recognizing the kind of disparities that are baked into American life, it is an attempt to undo them. So for instance, for African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans collectively represent almost 40% of the population in this country, but only about 16 to 17% of the journalists in this country belong to one of those groups. And often those disparities reflect age-old prohibitions and barriers to entry for different groups.

And sometimes they just represent a kind of inertia of networks that people hire people who they know, people who they know, tend to have similar backgrounds and that kind of thing. And diversity is meant to be a kind of self-aware approach to saying, hey, as opposed to just operating in the way that we always had, let's try to make sure that we reach out to people who might not have been considered previously. And what's so terrible about that? Well, here's the thing. Prior to the last few years, Certainly prior to the rise of Donald Trump as a political force, most of the criticism you saw of DEI was from the left. You know, people felt that it was toothless. It was kind of checking boxes.

When you looked at between 2010 and 2020, the number of non-white lawyers in the United States, according to the American Bar Association, went from 11% to 14%, which means that the number of white lawyers in the United States, according to the American Bar Association, went from 11% to 14%, which means that the number of white lawyers in the United States went from 89% down to 86, but steep drop in that time frame. That kind of progress was seen is really incremental. And in fact, the most cynical views of DEI saw it as a kind of corporate insurance. If anyone said that this institution discriminates, they can say, look at our DEI policies. Well, yeah, and there was, and there was a book about this called Diversity Inc. I don't know if you read this. And, you know, if you stick around long enough at any company, sooner or later you'll be sent to a diversity training.

Right. Which I have to say, certainly one of them that I went to seemed like beside the point at best and a racket at worst, you know, and didn't really have any positive impact on anybody's consciousness, much less hiring. So there can be an abuse of it, no? So, I mean, I think that there's a kind of skeptical way of looking at this, and certainly having sat through various trainings of various sorts, I didn't necessarily leave any of them feeling less as if I was brimming with new knowledge. Yeah. But that's put in a much more elegant way. I appreciate that.

But here's what causes a president in the United States on the eve of a horrible tragedy? like a plane crash, with seeming sincerity and all the chutzpah in the world to blame that horrible accident and deaths of dozens of people on DEI and get away with it. So I think that what's happened around Trump

and, you know, we mentioned, you know, the McCarthy era before. And I think there's an important parallel between Trump and McCarthy. There are lots of important parallels. But in this one particular case, you know, everything that was associated with Joseph McCarthy happened prior to Joseph McCarthy. He didn't originate any of these things, but he did have the instinctive ability to see where the crowd was headed and run out to the front of it. And I think that Donald Trump did very much the same with the politics of racial resentment that have come to be a defining feature, among other.

of things of the Trump era. He understood that there was a set of people, and this is kind of statistically borne out, who felt that white Americans were particularly disadvantaged. And what they were seeking was a kind of public redress, something that would say that the government was looking out for them too. And so for all of the toothlessness of DEI in some in some circumstances, it still made a really potent target to say that you're uprooting it, that you're removing it. And then you've also heard that language bandied about from lots of people in Trump's circle, particularly Elon Musk, to a point that it becomes kind of pretty close to the old race science, you know, the ideas of inherent intelligence and IQ measuring and those

kinds of things. And so the belief is that everything that has gone wrong with America is a product of not operating at a meritocracy, and that meritocracy would necessarily result in these institutions being more monochromatic than they have become over the years. And yet we've seen the vote for Donald Trump among the black community, among the Latino community, increase this last time around. So I think the thing that's interesting, but there are two things here. One is that that increase benefited from the absence of enthusiasm from other people in those communities who just opted for the couch over the ballot box in this most recent election. The other, however, is that the thing that I think Trump has

done more masterfully than probably any other modern American politician is the ability to own both sides of an issue and the ability to operate with particular kinds of wedges. And so for African-American men, whose voting behavior had been more predictable based upon their race, all of a sudden it became clear that there were gender ideas. And the very masculinist dynamics of the Trump movement appealed to a certain portion of that population. I think people saw the same thing with Latino male voters, too. And so it is a kind of house of cards in terms of like the structure of all of it. Once you start pulling at how people understand their interests, this doesn't add up. But Trump is a master salesman.

The idea is that you don't really think about what you've bought until you've left the store. And by that point, it's too late. Trump also released an executive order saying he would divert federal funds from schools teaching what he calls discriminatory equity ideology. It also said the government would sanction any school that taught that people can be oppressed due to their race, which is kind of amazing. What does that mean in practice? And how can a teacher reasonably deal with this? You know, if a president says something like that, people should reasonably take it seriously.

And even if this doesn't come from the federal level, in which we'd run into a lot of first amendment complications at the very least, it sets a tone in which a person might well become the subject of digital harassment or in-person harassment, or they may find pressure placed upon their employers in various kinds of ways. And so we've seen this over the course of the years, if you remember, the anti-CRT hysteria, which critical race theory, which just a few years ago turned every school board meeting in the country into the hunger games practically, with WWE, where people were concerned that their children were being indoctrinated with ideas that really were not being taught in elementary in junior high schools in this country.

I'm speaking with Jelani Cobb. He's the author of The Substance of Hope, Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress and many other books. We'll continue our conversation in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I've been speaking today with Jelani Cobb, who's a historian and a staff writer at The New Yorker. We're talking about the Trump administration's wholesale assault on DEI, programs in the federal

government and elsewhere that encourage diversity, equity, and inclusion. DEI is a singular obsession for Donald Trump and his allies. So I'll return now to my conversation with journalist and historian Jelani Cobb. So in 2023, the Supreme Court issued its ruling that ended affirmative action as we knew it. Coupled with that, how are these executive orders going to affect the environment that you're in at Columbia and academia writ large? Everyone is trying to figure that out. I'm at my own institution daily, and I'm in contact with scholars from around the country.

And everyone is trying to figure this out. So affirmative action has been ended by the Supreme Court. And there's a significant VIN overlap between a frame of action and DEI, but they're not necessarily the same thing. Explain that. And so one of the parts of inclusion would be like if we say that we don't have enough African American or enough Latino engineers, well, we're going to create a pipeline program in high schools that have significant numbers of Hispanic or African American students and say, would you like to. to be an engineer? Well, this is a voluntary thing, and it's giving people access to something, is not giving them any consideration they didn't already have, that would fall very much under DEI, but it wouldn't fall necessarily under affirmative action. Is that permissible?

People don't know. And what may be legally permissible may or may not be politically permissible or culturally permissible in this particular moment. And so we're really waiting in an almost case-by-case basis to see how old of this shakes out. And no one has marching orders just yet. How do you evaluate as both a journalist and somebody leading a journalism school, the reaction of the press in these early weeks to what's been going on in Washington? Certainly from mainstream press, it has been notable the extent to which the reconciliation has happened or what has been perceived as a reconciliation with Donald Trump and Trumpism. You know, of course, during the campaign, we saw the LA Times and Washington Post, both spike editorials that

would have endorsed Kamala Harris. Subsequently, we saw ABC News settle a lawsuit with Trump for $15 million that, you know, many people felt that they had a good chance of winning. And we now have seen reports that Paramount may be in talks with the Trump people about settling the lawsuit over the 60 Minutes case, which Donald Trump felt was defamatory toward him. Paramount is control CBS. In almost every one of these cases, though, it seems the problem is that the corporations that own these media outlets have much bigger fish to fry in the corporate world than their media outlets. So Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post and bought it for $250 million,

that to him is nothing compared to the scale of Amazon itself. Critics from the left of American media have been pointing out the potential for this kind of conflict of interest forever. Even when we think about the old ad advertisement-supported model of newspapers, which has gone by the wayside, it was at best an imperfect solution that we had what we call the separation of church and state,

the separation from the revenue side and the editorial side. That was never a great situation. And I think that we're seeing this play out on a much bigger scale. This isn't a new problem. What I notice sometimes speaking with friends who aren't in the press who are doing all kinds of other things, they don't want to engage with the news too much. They feel exhausted.

They feel psychologically self-protected. in the way that is very different from 2017. Any number of people say, you know, I just, I refuse to watch CNN or I refuse to read the paper. And I'm kind of shocked by it. I mean, David, I heard this in the past few weeks from people who are themselves very highly placed in the news business. That's not encouraging at all. It's not encouraging. It seems like a dereliction of duty.

It's still true. I think that also there's another part of this, like the parallel to this is, you know, there are many people who feel like they don't want to watch the news or listen to the news. There are journalists who wonder what the point is. And I've had those conversations, too. Like, is anyone listening to us? Does anyone care? If we point out things that are outrageous or dangerous?

But don't they need to book? Dangerous? Don't they need, I'm sorry, but don't they need to buck? up and stand up to? Sure. Sure, but I think that we have to at least begin by acknowledging that we have this particular problem. Morale is not great. And we have people who think that, you know, they've done their job to the best of their ability and hasn't really made the difference that they hoped it might make. The thing that I point out when I'm talking with my students is we should never allow young or emerging journalists to have the idea that there's a one-to-one relationship

between our effort and the outcome. I quote you, as a matter of fact, in talking about the number of stories that highlighted the misdeeds and misbehavior of powerful men that somehow never generated a Me Too movement. And then all of a sudden, there was one. And we don't know what the ratio is. It's unknowable, unpredictable, completely random.

And my version of encouragement has been that we keep doing the work until we get to that breakthrough moment where it actually really, really does make a difference. For a long time now, Steve Bannon has been talking about the importance of flooding the zone to cause a kind of blitz of news and orders

and activity from the White House with the idea that the media would never be able to focus their attention. I have to say, that seems to be working out just fine for Donald Trump, at the moment at least. I tend to think of this. this as a short-term strategy.

You know, there was a boxer back in the 80s that you might remember named Frank the Animal Fletcher. I do. And you're the first person today to mention Frank, the Animal Fletcher. That's shocking. I find it hard to believe. But you recall his strategy was just to overwhelm his opponent to just crowd him and throw all kinds of punches, nonstop, and so on. There was a flaw in that strategy, which is that. Eventually, you run out of steam, that you can throw up flack and shrapnel and the kinds of things,

and you can do this in terms of flooding the zone for a limited period of time. You're saying a 78-year-old president can't keep it up forever. Yeah, exactly. I think that at some point, this becomes a counterproductive exercise in its own right. I think there's an awareness among Trump's people that that's absolutely the case. But in many precedencies, the first burst of activity, the first hundred, days, certainly the first two years before the midterms, is what's most crucial in getting things done. So a lot of activity can register as accomplishment for him very quickly because of our

inability to account for it, sort it through. That's true. It also rests upon the presumption that the things that Trump and his people have foregrounded in the past, feels like past hundred days, it's actually been the past two weeks, that aligns with the things that people really care about. And that remains to be seen. The culture war things, he's used to great profit. But as we saw, you know, large reason why he lost the re-election bid in 2020 was the pandemic, which was a national crisis that he mishandled. There are other crises that are going to come up. And there are other crises that are emergent even at the moment. And how they navigate those things, I think, will be at least

as important as their ability to flood the zone with all sorts of different distracting, concerning kinds of actions. You mentioned McCarthyism earlier, and you're a scholar of the Cold War, among other things. What are the similarities that you see between the Red Scare, the anti-communist campaign of the 50s, and what we're seeing now with DEI? You know, during the Cold War, you could taint anything by just saying that it was communistic or Marxist. And the interesting kind of connection with the civil rights movement is that when I was kind of young, I was under like, why were people connecting racial equality with communism? Just saying that if you integrate the schools, it's communism. And then at some point it became clear to me that their definition of communism,

was integration. It didn't have anything to do with redistributing the means of production or expropriating wealth from, it was, this is, communism can be anything that you don't like. Right. And so now, DEI is the boogeman for anything. If there's a terrible tragedy, something we would normally have processed in a nonpartisan way, we can all grieve people who've died in a plane crash or a helicopter crash, particularly people who are parts of the military, now all of a sudden that can be blamed on DEI. If there is something going wrong in any part of your life, you can just, if there are fires happening in California, then you can bet that somehow another DEI is there. Do you think this will fade? I tend to think that these things are like fevers. You know, they break at

some point. And the fact is that you do have to, irrespective of how masterful, Trump and those around them have been in playing on particular social anxieties and fears, at some point you do have to actually govern. And that is not easy. And so we'll see. You'll let me know when he does. Jelani Cobb, I appreciate your time. Be well.

Thank you. Good talking to you. You can read Jalani Cobb on politics, race, and much more at New Yorker.com. And at the very same website, on the eve of our 100th anniversary, you can subscribe. to the magazine there too. I'm David Remnick. That's our show for today. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts,

with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, David Prasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccett. And we had help this week from Evan David Roberts. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.