Saturday, March 15, 2025

From DEI to SCAWM

Whenever social progress occurs in a society there inevitably follows a backlash.

I will start with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries speech defining and supporting DEI:

Diversity, equity and inclusion are American values. The motto of the US is E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. That’s diversity. The 14th Amendment provides equal protection under the law. That’s equity. We pledge allegiance to the flag. In that pledge, we promise, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. A-L-L. That’s inclusion. Not complicated. Diversity, equity and inclusion are American values. It’s about economic opportunity. It’s about merit for everyone, based on what you know, not who you know.”

The DEI movement towards fairer hiring practices for ethnic and gender minorities got a huge boost following the death of George Floyd. The backlash started immediately with claims that the protesters were organized by Antifa.

Ideally DEI means that if a member of a minority has equal or better qualifications for a job then they should be seriously considered or even preferentially hired. The majority, long used to preferential treatment in the workforce, perceives this as a threat to them and considers it a form of reverse discrimination. The resentment of this majority led to the MAGA policy of anti-DEI.

At its worst the anti-DEI movement considers any member of a minority in an important position to be a “DEI hire” (there was even an accusation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett being a DEI hire after she voted with the liberal justices on a recent Supreme Court case). Implied in this accusation is that no woman, person of color, gay or trans person could possibly be qualified for such a position. Such accusations, such as Trump’s knee-jerk reaction to the January 29 helicopter-plane collision in Washington, assumes that anyone hired under a DEI policy would be unqualified for their job.

That of course is rarely if ever the case. More than doubling the pool of potential employees by including minorities necessarily increases the quality of the hires rather than decreasing it. When Norway mandated a minimum 40% of corporate board members for both genders, the qualifications for all board members increased.

Imagine you are tasked with hiring 25 new law graduates for your firm. Of the 100 that applied you eliminate 50 because they are women, 15 because they are black or brown, and 10 because they are gay or trans. It’s highly unlikely the 25 that are left are the best qualified.

When Katanji Brown Jackson was nominated for the Supreme Court in 2022, Joe Biden had said that he would pick a Black woman. That qualifies her as a DEI hire. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t qualified for the position. Here is what the Senate Committee on the Judiciary wrote about her:

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is an exceptionally well-qualified jurist whose credentials, experience, and evenhanded approach to the administration of justice make her an outstanding candidate for the Supreme Court.

At the time I imagined having a conversation with a Republican supporter who objected to her nomination, arguing that the nomination should have been made on merit rather than gender or ethnicity. My rebuttal would have been that Brown is more highly qualified than any of Trump’s three nominations, so in that case why didn’t Trump nominate her?

The Republicans who are busy eradicating every remnant of DEI from the federal government want Americans to think that they are replacing it with merit. Looking at Trump’s horribly unqualified nominations for secretary and other posts, and the quality of the people they are replacing (e.g. Fox News host Pete Hegseth replacing Four-star General Lloyd Austin for Secretary of Defense) quickly disillusions one of that notion.

Rather, they are replacing DEI with their own version, what I call SCAWM for Straight Cis Abled White Men. To give credit where it’s due, there are several women in Trump’s cabinet, and one at least (Attorney General Pam Bondi) has some experience in her position, and FBI Director Kash Patel’s parents were immigrants from India.  But here in Trump’s cabinet the deciding quality in the candidates is unswerving loyalty to Donald Trump and a willingness to break the law should that be required of them.

Let’s start an anti-SCAWM movement.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/13/trump-war-dei-american-straight-white-man-diversity-equity-inclusion

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/judge-ketanji-brown-jackson

https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/dicereport111-rm2.pdf

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From DEI to SCAWM

Whenever social progress occurs in a society there inevitably follows a backlash. I will start with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries ...