Rick Perlstein at The American Prospect: I felt similar déjà vuwhen Republicans started calling Kamala Harris a “DEI hire.” The charge is as old as the civil rights movement itself. Back then, they called it “reverse racism,” or “Crow Jim”: same thing as Jim Crow, only with the object of oppression reversed—get it? The jargon changed, but the principle is the same: Any effort at equity for minorities is “racism” against whites: affirmative discrimination, as the title of a 1975 book by the neoconservative Harvard social scientist Nathan Glazer put it. You saw that last week when Elon Musk momentarily banned the jocularly named “White Dudes for Harris” account from X, because, after all, X doesn’t allow “racists.”
This same snot-nosed fallacy absolutely saturates Project 2025.
On page 692: The Biden administration’s “‘equity’ agenda” is “racist.” On 342: “officials should protect educators and students in jurisdictions under federal control from racial discrimination by reinforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and prohibiting compelled speech.” Translated from wingnut-ese, they aim to compel teachers in schools run by the Bureau of Indian Education, or schools on military bases, not to speak about the racist parts of the American past. To do otherwise would be racist. This old-time religion threads its way through the chapters on the Departments of Labor (582), Education (336, 342, 348, 358), HHS (495), Treasury (708), State (88), Defense (103), the National Security Council (51), USAID (279)—and, naturally, Dr. Ben “Totally Not a DEI Hire” Carson’s chapter on the Department of Housing and Urban Development (515). The solution, naturally, is “colorblindness.”
The same thinking is present in the document’s many attacks on measuring “disparate impact,” the civil rights enforcement technique of measuring discrimination by results rather than impossible-to-discern evidence of intent. Counting how many minorities are represented in a given institution in order to build a case that they are being discriminated against is bad, because “crudely categorizing employees … fails to recognize the diversity of the American workforce.” We’ve noted that quotation before. Mark it well. We’ll return to it.
IN LARGE PART, A REAGAN-ERA HERITAGE FOUNDATION STAFFER who fell asleep on a Friday and woke up exactly 40 years later would be able to return to work the following Monday. All he would need is a copy of the Project 2025 version of Mandate for Leadership and a glossary. He’d surely be delighted to read how much of the language he and his colleagues came up with back then (“During the past 15 years there has been a concerted nationwide effort by professional educationalists to turn elementary school classrooms into vehicles for liberal-left social and political change in the United States”) finds exact echoes today (“Large swaths of the department have been captured by an unaccountable bureaucratic managerial class and radical Left ideologues who have embedded themselves throughout its offices and components.”).
More here.
