HOW EQUALITY WINS

A vigorous defense of DEI by two of its leading legal exponents.

To hear the Trump administration tell it, DEI is a new plague on the land, one that has wrought untold damage on the nation. Yet, New York University legal scholars Yoshino and Glasgow counter, “What our society has come to call DEI is just the latest embodiment of a project of advancing equality that goes back centuries,” falling under the rubrics of equality and human rights. Although the acronym itself has been tarnished, the ideas underlying it are not: Half of Americans, the authors report, oppose “DEI,” yet three-quarters agree that “more needs to be done to guarantee everyone is advancing.” In any event, the authors argue, the horse is out of the barn: In the rising generation of adults, fully a quarter identify as LGBTQ+, more than half of college-educated workers are women, more than half of Americans under 18 are people of color—a picture, in short, of increasing diversity, whether opponents like it or not. Part of the problem, Yoshino and Glasgow write, is that lawyers don’t quite fully understand what DEI is, and DEI practitioners often don’t understand the laws around it—and, they observe, most DEI practices are supported by law, and some are “even legally required.” To remedy this, apart from increased professional education, they urge that DEI supporters turn the script around. If DEI stands for “diversity, equality, and inclusion,” then, as Pete Buttigieg has said, the thing to do is to loudly brand its opponents as supporting “discrimination, exclusion, and intolerance.” The authors also advance a program that advocates universalism as an aid to building alliances and allies, and that truly levels the playing field through using “an identity-neutral approach,” such as evaluating resumes without reference to names that might identify gender or ethnicity.

An eminently practical approach to the premise that equality benefits all.