EP 25: The DEI CON

In Episode 25 of Khannecting the Dots, I come full circle — back to one of the main issues that pushed me to start this show: DEI.
After Trump blamed DEI for everything from plane crashes to institutional failure, corporations raced to roll back diversity programs. But the backlash was never really about policy — it was about power.
This episode breaks down how “DEI” became a coded scapegoat, why DEI succeeded in some places and failed in others, and how zero-sum fear keeps working people divided while wealth is extracted at the top. The alternative is solidarity — and building a bigger table. 

Check out my substack page where I tackle some of the episode topics in depth and write about other issues our country and the world are facing today. https://substack.com/@ktdpodcast

Transcript

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Welcome back to another episode of Khannecting the Dots As the year comes to an end. I'm excited to bring you my 25th episode. This time, I'm circling back to one of the main issues that motivated me to start this podcast in the first place, DEI. In early 2025, as a Trump administration came into power. I watched them systematically attack anything related to diversity, equity and inclusion race baiting, attacking anyone who didn't put their definition of acceptable. And I was furious. And then I watched company after company, Amazon, Walmart, target, McDonald's, Pepsi, and so many others. All cave to pressure campaigns and roll back their DEI commitments. They weren't just quietly ending programs. They were racing to announce it, competing to see who could distance themselves fastest from DEI. And I started boycotting them, made a whole list, told myself I wouldn't give them another dollar. Even though the boycotts were making an impact, I felt like I needed to do more. I needed to understand what was really happening, not just the surface, the deeper pattern. So. I started this podcast and over the last several months I've published 24 episodes; immigration, Palestine, DOGE's dismantling of Federal Agencies, and many other topics covering this administration. And now episode 25, I'm coming back to DEI. Because I've been thinking a lot about this lately. Why DEI worked when it did, why it failed in so many places, how it got weaponized so easily, and what we can do moving forward to actually build the society that Dr. King so eloquently described in his dream. So let's start from the top. In January, 2025, just after a tragic plane crash near Reagan National Airport that killed dozens of people, Donald Trump blamed, DEI. He posted on social media that the federal a Aviation Administrations diversity initiatives were responsible, that hiring people based on diversity rather than merit had made our skies less safe. He did this even though there was no evidence that played any role, and air traffic control is still overwhelmingly white and male. The actual investigation pointed to understaffing outdated equipment and overworked controllers. But Trump didn't need facts. He needed a scapegoat. And DEI was perfect. This wasn't new. In 2023, when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, conservative commentators immediately blamed DEI. The bank had a diverse board. They said that's why it failed. Nevermind that the collapse was caused by risky investment strategies and poor risk management decisions made primarily by white male executives. When wildfires raged in California, when Boeing 7 37 max had safety failures, DEI was blamed again, even though leadership in those institutions remained overwhelmingly white and male. The pattern is unmistakable. Any time something goes wrong, a plane crash, a bank failure, a bridge collapse, there's a rush to blame diversity rather than look at the actual systemic failures. Deregulation, budget cuts, corporate greed. As Wajahad Ali wrote in The Guardian DEI has become America's new scapegoat for literally everything. And the administration continues to escalate. In just the last few days of December, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice Department has launched investigations into major companies like Google, Verizon, and big automakers demanding documents about their DEI programs under the False Claims Act. A law meant to catch actual fraud against taxpayers. The argument is that if a company has federal contracts and also has DEI programs, they defrauded the government. In other words, inclusive hiring is being treated as potential fraud. This is how to turn a culture war slogan into corporate compliance through fear. To understand how we got here, let's take a quick look at what happened after george Floyd was murdered back in May, 2020. The protests that followed weren't just about police brutality. They forced America to confront centuries of systemic racism, and corporations responded. They pledged billions to racial justice, committed to diverse hiring, board seats, leadership pipelines. Some of it was genuine, a lot of it was performative. Then the backlash started. By 2022 Republican-LED states were banning critical race theory in schools. By 2023, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions. By 2024, Trump was running campaign ads, painting, DEI as dangerous, divisive, and anti-American. And by early 2025, after Trump won, companies started folding one by one, reversing their commitments, dismantling their programs. It didn't matter if DEI was working or not defending it had become politically costly. But here's the thing. The polling about DEI policies shows something fascinating. In late 2024, Ciena College did a poll. They asked Americans about DEI in two different ways. First, they described the principles without using the term DEI. They asked, do you support workplace policies that increase diversity, promote equity and foster inclusion? 80% said yes. Then they asked, do you support DEI efforts? Only 50% said yes. Same policies, different labels, 30 point gap. And here's where it gets darker. 41% of respondents said, DEI is brainwashing. So what happened? How did the same principles go from 80% support to almost half calling it brainwashing. Because the term DEI stopped being about the policies. It became a weapon. Medi Hassan wrote a piece in The Guardian with a blunt headline,"what Republicans really mean when they blame DEI", he traced the lineage. In 1954, segregationists openly used racial slurs to defend Jim Crow. By 1968, after the Civil Rights Act, they couldn't say that anymore, so they talked about state's rights instead. By the 1980s Republican strategist, Lee Atwater, explained the evolution in a now famous interview."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. 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". Atwater said the quiet part out loud. The goal stayed the same, the language just got more abstract. And now in 2025, the abstraction is DEI. It's become the new N word. When Trump called Karine Jean Pierre, the Biden White House press secretary, A DEI hire, he wasn't critiquing her qualifications. He was saying she doesn't belong in that role because she's black. When he said the same about Kamala Harris, he wasn't questioning her resume as a prosecutor, attorney, general senator, and vice president. He was de-legitimizing her authority. As Laura Morgan Roberts wrote in the Harvard Business Review labeling someone A DEI hire is a way to police power not jobs. Van Lathan, a black podcaster, took it even further. He argued that"DEI is now worse than the N word and has become the worst slur in American history". He goes on to say that the term"DEI hire is now just being used to undermine the qualifications, capability and readiness of black people. DEI is placing the blame of all society's ills at the feet of these people." So that's the con. DEI became the scapegoat, the weapon, the new coded language for old hatreds. But what was DEI actually, what did it do and why did it fail in so many places? At its core, DEI was supposed to promote fair treatment and full participation of all people, especially groups historically underrepresented, marginalized or discriminated against. The goal was never to elevate minority groups over others, but to ensure all groups had a seat at the table. But here's what often gets missed. White people benefited enormously from DEI. The biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action and diversity programs. White women. They were the majority of people who gained access to jobs, promotions and educational opportunities because of those policies. Veterans, students from rural areas, first generation students, and people with disabilities all benefited too. DEI was never only about race, it was about opening doors that had been closed for lots of arbitrary reasons. But that nuance gets lost because once DEI got coded as favoring black people, even progressive white Americans, started abandoning it. It is the zero sum mindset. If they're winning, I must be losing. But was abandoning. DEI Worth it? Let's take a look at what happened when companies maintained DEI versus when they caved. Let's look at Costco. In January, 2025, a conservative activist shareholder proposed that Costco end its DEI programs. Costco's board and CEO publicly defended their DEI efforts rejected the anti DEI shareholder proposal by an overwhelming margin, and reiterated that diversity is good for business. The company's stock comfortably outperformed the broader market over the course of the year. Delta Airlines did the same thing. When asked if they'd rolled back, DEI under Trump administration pressure, CEO, ed Basian said, we don't have DEI initiatives. We have people initiatives. That's the core to who we are. Delta continued its commitments and even in the third quarter of 2025, reported strong financial performance. Then there's Target. They rolled back Major DEI initiatives in early 2025. Cutting programs, rebranding supplier diversity and pulling back from PRIDE and L-G-T-P-Q partnerships. Target didn't just roll back its programs, they went further in May, 2025, the company let go of two senior female executives who had championed DEI efforts, including its chief legal officer who had advocated for diversity programs and its chief strategy officer who led target's$2 billion commitment to black owned businesses. Both were classified as involuntary terminations. Then in August, CEO, Brian Cornell, who had led the company for 11 years, announced his resignation amid the backlash to DEI Rollbacks. Target stock fell from$145 to$93 per share. Store visits dropped 8% year over year. The company lost$12.4 billion in market value. In some ways target's an outlier. Other companies rolled back their DEI initiatives, but they didn't suffer as badly. Why? Because Target had built its brand as a progressive company, openly supporting LGTQ rights, racial justice, and inclusive hiring. When they cave to political pressure, their supporters felt betrayed. Despite that, there's still a lesson here. Abandoning DEI is not a good business model. As Laura Morgan Roberts wrote in Harvard Business Review,"homogeneity, lower standards. It's group think. It's echo chambers. It's missing blind spots until they become disasters. Diversity when it's real, when it includes people with actual decision making power leads to better decisions, more innovation, fewer catastrophic mistakes". But let's be honest, DEI wasn't perfect in a lot of places, it was performative. Companies issued statements. Hired a chief diversity officer, ran some trainings, put diverse faces in their annual reports, but they didn't change who had power. They didn't change pay structures, they didn't promote people or give them real decision making authority. Diversity without equity is just optics, and in many cases, DEI programs operated within a framework of artificial scarcity. There's one promotion available and it would get framed as the most qualified person versus the diversity candidate, as if those are mutually exclusive. That framing makes it zero sum. It pits people against each other. It also assumes scarcity is natural, that there can be only one winner. But the real question is, why is there only one promotion? Why aren't we creating more opportunities? Why aren't we expanding the table instead of fighting over seats? DEI tried to redistribute scraps without challenging, who controlled the whole meal, and in a system built on scarcity, that was never going to be enough. I think there's another reason DEI failed. It's something I've thought about a lot. The fear of equity triggers a deep primal response, which isn't unique to white Americans. This is a human problem. Look at the Gulf States. Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, they've built entire economies on imported labor from South Asia and Africa. Those workers have no path to citizenship, no labor rights. They're exploited. Disposable. The justification, the hierarchy is natural. Their workers. We're citizens. Look at India's caste system. Ds, the so-called untouchables. Still face discrimination in employment, education, housing. The justification. It's tradition, it's the way things have always been. Look at colorism across Latin America, Africa, Asia, lighter skin gets preferential treatment. Darker skin gets marginalized. The justification is just how society works. Hierarchy and domination are universal human problems. They show up everywhere in every culture, across history, and the people at the top of those hierarchies, no matter where they are, share the same fear. If we let others rise, we'll fall. In America, racial hierarchy showed itself as white supremacy. The specific format took slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, redlining, mass incarceration was built on the idea that whiteness meant superiority and blackness meant inferiority. And for generations that hierarchy was maintained through violence law and through custom. But it was also maintained through a story, a zero sum story. Let's talk about that story and how the fear of world reversal has been weaponized to keep people divided. Heather McGee in her book, the Sum of Us, puts it this way,"the zero sum story of racial hierarchy was born along with this country, but it is an invention of the worst elements of our society. People who gained power through ruthless exploitation and kept it by sowing constant division, decade after decade, threats of job competition between men and women, immigrants and native born black and white have perennially revived. The fear of loss at another's gain, but the people setting up the competition and spreading these fears are never the needy job seekers. They're the elite". That's the key. Throughout American history, whenever working people started organizing together across racial lines, the elite found a way to divide them because here's the insight I keep coming back to. People who climb to power through domination can't imagine sharing power through solidarity. If you spent your whole life believing that success means someone else has to lose, then equity sounds terrifying. Because in your mind there are only two positions, dominant or subjugated. If black people gain power, white people must lose it. If women lead men must follow, if immigrants thrive, native born citizens must suffer. It's not that they oppose equality in theory, it's that they can't imagine equality in practice because they've never experienced power as anything other than zero sum. And this explains so much about the reaction to Barack Obama. Obama's election in 2008 was historic, the first black president, and for millions of Americans, it felt like progress. Like the country was finally living up to its ideals. But for others it felt like a violation of the natural order. The Tea party emerged almost immediately, ostensibly about taxes and government spending, but look closer. The rhetoric wasn't really about policy. It was about Obama himself, birtherism claims he was secretly a Muslim, that he wasn't a real American. The tea party wasn't a tax revolt. It was a reaction to a black man occupying the highest office in the land. And when you talk to people who felt that disruption, the fear is palpable if they're in charge, what happens to us? There's data on this by Trump's first term. Survey showed many white Americans reported that discrimination against white people was a bigger problem than discrimination against black people. Despite the measurable racial gaps in wealth, incarceration, and policing. That wasn't based on reality. It was based on fear. Fear that equality feels like oppression when you're used to advantage. And this is where Trump thrives. He doesn't just make people afraid. He makes them afraid of something specific. Not abstract diversity, not vague equity. He points at individual people and says, that person took your spot. Kamala Harris, DEI hire didn't earn it. Kain Jean Pierre, DEI hire doesn't belong there. The air traffic controller, DEI hire, that's why people died. It's the same tactic authoritarians have used forever. Find a scapegoat, make them visible, and convince people that all their problems are caused by that scapegoat. Immigrants taking your jobs, black people taking your college seats, women taking your promotions. And once people believe that, they stop asking the real question, who's actually taking your money? Because here's the truth, white Americans are being robbed. They're losing economic security. Wages are stagnant. Housing is unaffordable. Healthcare is bankrupting families, college costs of fortune, retirement feels impossible. All of that is real. None of that is because of DEI. While people were arguing about diversity in our institutions, here's what was actually happening to their money. Social Security and Medicare are funded through payroll taxes. If you're a worker making$50,000 a year, you pay a percentage of every dollar in payroll taxes. Same if you make a hundred thousand or 150,000, but once you hit a certain income level, the social security portion stops. That cap means someone earning millions of dollars effectively pays a much smaller share into social security than someone earning 50,000. Workers carry the load while high earners get a discount. That's legal theft, and nobody's talking about it because we're too busy arguing about DEI. Here's another one. How income is taxed. If you work for your money, if you're a teacher, a nurse, a truck driver, your income is taxed as ordinary income. That tops out at 37%. If you make your money from investments, stocks, real estate capital gains, the top rate is 20%. So a nurse working 60 hours a week can end up paying a higher tax rate than a billionaire whose money makes money while he sleeps. The system rewards wealth over work and that gap keeps growing. So if DEI wasn't the solution. What is? Laura Morgan Roberts, a professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business argues that to truly help all employees flourish, organizations need to cultivate for freedoms at work, the freedom to be our authentic selves, the freedom to become our best selves, the freedom to fade into the background when we need to, and the freedom to fail in ways that help us learn. These freedoms sounds simple, but they're unevenly distributed. People in majority groups often have access to them and take them for granted. Meanwhile, people in marginalized groups have to fight for them every single day. When you're the only woman in the room or the only person of color on your team, you can't fade into the background. You're hyper visible. Every mistake gets scrutinized when you're constantly code switching to fit in. You don't have the freedom to be authentic. When you face a praise deficit when managers assume you got here because of diversity rather than merit. You don't have the freedom to become your best self or the freedom to fail. And DEI tried to address this. Some companies showed it could work when leadership genuinely committed to it. Costco and Delta maintained their DEI efforts even under political pressure, and both continue to perform well financially. Most companies treated as performative. They hired diversity officers, ran trainings, but didn't change who actually held power or how resources were distributed. And even the companies that did DEI, right, were still operating within a broader economic system built on scarcity and competition. A system where one person's promotion means someone else doesn't get one. Where employment is tied to healthcare, where economic insecurity makes people afraid to take risks. So, DEI, even good DE, I couldn't deliver these freedoms on its own because the freedoms people need aren't just about workplace culture, they're about economic security. So what comes next? Kevin Gann, a researcher at the University of Edinburg, puts it this way."What comes next needs to be anchored in solidarity across shared struggles. DEI schemes are not a special dispensation nor bending to a lower standard, but above all else, they're about ways of working that empower everyone to excel". Solidarity across shared struggles. Ways of working that empower everyone. That's the shift we need to make. Because here's what happens when we don't. The sum of us, heather McGee tells a story that captures the essence of the problem. In the 1940s and fifties, towns across America had public swimming pools, beautiful pools, community gathering places. Then civil rights cases started arguing that black and brown people should have the same access to these pools as white people. White residents had a choice. Share the pool with black neighbors or close it. Some privatize the pool turning public resources into private clubs where only wealthy white people could swim. Many drain the pools, filled them with concrete, and in some cases turned them into parking lots. Rather than share, they destroyed the public good and everyone lost. That's the cost of choosing racial hierarchy over solidarity. when preserving the pecking order matters more than the public good. Everyone loses. So how do we create solidarity today? It starts with understanding that universal programs, programs that benefit everyone, create the conditions for those four freedoms to exist. Universal healthcare means you can be open about health issues without fearing you'll lose coverage or your job. Affordable childcare means parents can work without choosing between their careers and their families. When everyone has economic security, when your basic needs are met, you have the freedom to take risks, to fail, and to learn to become your best self without the terror of losing everything. Think about social security. It's a universal program. Everyone who works pays in. Everyone who retires gets benefits. When politicians try to cut it, people across every demographic line, push back. Same with Medicare, same with public schools. In communities where they're genuinely public and well funded. These programs create solidarity'cause they're not framed as helping those people at the expense of us. They help everyone. And when everyone benefits, everyone has a stake in protecting it. And here's the tragic irony. America came close to this before, but failed because it was never truly universal. In the 1940s and fifties, public colleges were heavily subsidized, but primarily for white students. White Americans supported job guarantee programs as long as those jobs were understood to be for white workers. When black and brown people started to gain access, white support collapsed. Subsidies, dried up, costs skyrocketed. Programs were dismantled. McGee shows this pattern again and again. Americans built robust public programs, then destroyed them rather than share them. And now everyone suffers. White Americans face crushing student debt. Just like black and brown Americans. White poverty rates have climbed. White families struggle to afford healthcare, housing, childcare. They chose hierarchy over solidarity. Lost both. So the choice now is the same one white residents face. At those swimming pools, build together or keep losing everything. Here's what solidarity can look like in practice. Universal healthcare. Free or subsidized public college. Expand social security. Make the wealthy pay the same payroll tax rate as everyone else. Tax wealth, the same as work. Invest in public goods, parks, libraries, transit, childcare that everyone can access. These aren't radical ideas. They're how you build a society where people see each other as allies instead of competitors. Because here's what DEI could never do on its own. It couldn't change the underlying system of scarcity. It couldn't make more seats at the table. It could only argue about who deserves the limited seats that exist. But solidarity says, build a bigger table, make sure everyone eats, and when everyone's needs are met, the zero sum thinking starts to break down. Four freedoms become possible. Not just for some people, but for everyone. So here we are, episode 25, back where I started. I began this podcast because I was angry about companies abandoning, DEI, and I'm still angry, but I can see the picture more clarity now. DEI was never the problem. It was the scapegoat. But DEI was never the real solution either. The problem is a system that concentrates wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands while everyone else fights for scraps. Every episode I've done since I started this podcast, immigration, Palestine, the dismantling of U-S-A-I-D-C-F-P-B, the Department of Education, it's all the same pattern. Ordinary people are told. The enemy is other ordinary people, immigrants, people of color, women, L-G-T-P-Q, and while we're fighting about who deserves what. Oligarchs are extracting wealth at a scale we can barely comprehend. Race isn't incidental to that extraction. It's central. It's the mechanism. The distraction, the divide and conquer strategy that keeps us from organizing together. The same strategy that convinced white people to destroy their own safety nets rather than share them. And now everyone is worse off. Hierarchy, division zero sum thinking. These aren't unique to white Americans. They're human problems that show up everywhere. White people aren't the enemy, the system is. And the only way to beat the system is solidarity. Not diversity for its own sake, not equity without power, but genuine solidarity, the kind that says, if you're struggling, I'm struggling. If you win, I win. That's what Dr. King was talking about, not just black people getting a seat at the table but building a bigger table where everyone eats. Thank you for listening to my podcast this year. I really appreciated the support. I wanna wish you all a happy New Year, and I hope you're back with me in 2026. And as always, if you found this or any of my episodes helpful, please consider subscribing, sharing with a friend, and leaving a review. Until next time, stay curious, stay critical, and stay connected.