The attacks on DEI by President Trump, Elon Musk, and the MAGA mini-mes have reached hysterical levels. In both careless remarks and a formal White House memo following the plane crash at Washingon’s DCA airport that killed 67 people, Trump suggested that DEI programs at the FAA may have contributed to the crash because they led to the hiring of unqualified people. Elon Musk blamed the extensive damage done by the Los Angeles wildfires on DEI programs that he claimed inhibited the fire department’s ability to respond.
But my favorite DEI-related statement comes this week from Attorney General Andrew Bailey of Missouri. Bailey is suing Starbucks because their workforce is today “more female and less white” than it was in 2020. In the lawsuit, Bailey incredulously claims—again with no evidence—that this workforce shift has forced Missouri consumers to “pay higher prices and wait longer for goods and services,” because DEI programs “skew the hiring pool towards people who are less qualified to perform their work.” (For more on Bailey, including his attempt to gut programs supporting children with disabilities, see Jess Piper’s recent Substack post here).
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It doesn’t get much clearer than the Boolean logic of what I’m dubbing Bailey’s Axiom (Forgive me, I was a math and computer science major.):
~Male && ~White —> Less_Qualified
(Translation: IF NOT Male AND NOT White THEN Less_Qualified.)
Just as an axiom is a proposition taken to be self-evidently true in mathematics, the various absurd expressions of Bailey’s Axiom advance as if they need no evidence. They are mere assertions designed to appeal to the already accepted racism and misogyny within the MAGA Republican base. When pressed for evidence for his assertion that a DEI program was a possible cause of the plane crash, for example, Trump replied, “It just could have been.” He then asserted that his justification for that conclusion was because “I have common sense.”
Albert Einstein astutely observed that “common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach eighteen.” That seems a pretty apt description of the sensibilities of the new broligarchy, whose views about nonwhite people and women, along with their moral development, seem trapped in their childhood worlds: Trump’s by the segregated blocks and buildings in New York City and Musk’s by racist Apartheid laws in South Africa.
The MAGA DEI logic, in the final analysis, is merely white supremacy masquerading as self-evident universal truth. When pressed for evidence for its audacious claims, it responds in the way power always does, with an indignant QED.
What White People Who Demonize DEI Efforts are Really Saying
The following excerpt from my recent book is a confession. It is my honest attempt to transcribe the half-conscious narrative I also inherited and relied upon, for far too many years, to justify my own place as a white straight Southern Baptist guy growing up in the faltering days of Mississippi’s hierarchical, closed society. I believe these sentiments are not too far off the mark in expressing the worldview many contemporary white Americans, particularly white Christians, are still defending and promoting with their anti-DEI crusade.
We would like to hold these truths to be self-evident:
That we bear no responsibility for the actions of our ancestors, nor for the effects of their actions on the present. That hard work and individual merit are the key to understanding both the path to the present and the possibilities of the future; the haves and the have-nots of today received what they deserved based on the virtues of their individual past actions. It follows that no one, particularly hard-working white Christian people, should be made to feel uncomfortable because of what we now have. If anyone asserts otherwise, we are the ones being discriminated against.
This land is our land, from California to the New York islands. We deserve to keep everything we’ve worked so hard to take. We have deeds in safe-deposit boxes with our names on them, the veracity of which are guaranteed by a notary seal and a state we created for this purpose. As for the vast amount of wealth locked away in individual trusts and institutional endowments, we have histories that document our industriousness and our cunning, along with quarterly and annual statements that testify to our now long-held legal ownership. Furthermore, what we have done, we have done with the ultimate authority. Jesus is one of us. Just in case there was any doubt, we made a likeness of Jesus in our image, the most widely distributed portrait in human history.
We insist, both for ourselves and for others, on an inevitable present, one in which what was leads to what is, and what is will always be. It is not that we are against history. We know the importance of a good origin story. History, done rightly, explains how we got here—with our fences transforming land into property, our ledgers turning labor and crops into capital, and our hands holding the receipts. The history of America, founded in 1776, is a genesis story justifying the divinely ordained now, not a sloppy mess of narratives with multiple beginnings and contingent outcomes.
Those who looked like us owned the publishing companies who hired our writers to tell us the story of how we came to be America. Those executives also had the right connections to sell those packaged narratives to our public school boards, who handed books and lesson plans to our teachers, who in turn faithfully taught these stories to our children. And the circle remained unbroken, by and by, Lord, by and by.
We know that slavery was a blemish on the country’s record and that this was, mostly, the cause of the Civil War. Still, there were good and noble people fighting on both sides. Even though slavery wasn’t always as brutal as Hollywood depicts it, we’re glad that that sinful practice has ended and that the whole unfortunate episode is behind us now. What we didn’t get right after the Civil War was finally rectified by the good Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose eloquent words we now read in our churches and whose birthday we celebrate alongside Robert E. Lee’s.
On the occasions when we think about it, we also feel bad about what happened to the Indians. But we privately share Laura Ingalls Wilder’s sentiments about the land in the early days of the country: “[T]here were no people there. Only Indians lived there.” In any case, we weren’t personally a part of all that. And it was, after all, our missionaries who brought the Indians, with their primitive and savage ways, out of the darkness and into the light of Christian salvation. It was our government and our churches that coaxed those lost children out of the woods and into boarding schools, saving their souls and disciplining their bodies for more industrious pursuits like farming and factory work. We still honor their history with our athletic team names, mascots, and, more recently, with the occasional “land acknowledgment” ritual at public events. We did finally give the Indians reservations of their own, and they seem to be doing fine now with their casinos and government-provided health care.
Finally, though of course there have been times when some Christians acted badly, they were acting against and not with the spirit of our faith.
This is the history we want our tax dollars to teach public school children (many of our children are already getting this history in private Christian academies). We want our children to know that America is good. Just like us.
-Excerpt from The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future, pp. 304-306.
In my book, I conclude with these words, directed particularly to white Christians who are so desperately clinging to our national myths of impossible white innocence:
We white Christians no longer represent the majority of Americans. We are no longer capable of setting the nation’s course by sheer cultural and political dominance. But there are still more than enough of us to decisively derail the future of democracy in America. If we wish to do otherwise, we can no longer credibly pretend that the democracy and [white Christian nationalism] are, or ever were, compatible. We can no longer pay tribute to one while benefiting from the other. We must choose. And if we choose democracy, it will require not just confession but joining work already underway to repair the damage we have done. Through that transformative engagement, we may finally illuminate and walk the path that leads to a shared American future.
I’m still shaken by the fact that most white Christians—evangelicals, mainline, and Catholic—voted to usher in the regime that has thrown the switch and is now propelling us rapidly toward authoritarianism and fascism. I believe the path to a pluralistic democracy remains reachable. But I am worried, because that future is contingent on white Americans developing a consciousness that rejects the pull of the old siren songs and a courage to act that has yet to appear.
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