Author: Unknown
Published on: 23/01/2025 | 00:00:00
AI Summary:
Elon Musk has blamed DEI for this month’s massive climate change-driven fires in Southern California. In recent months, those against DEI have also gone after the institutions that support these efforts. Trump, his conservative supporters and the wider far right want to see the end of DEI because they believe these programmes present a real challenge to their efforts to rebuild the “white man’s country” they long for. They want to do nothing short of closing already extremely narrow pathways for social and economic advancement available to people of colour and other marginalised people in the US. For them, DEI is just code for “Don’t Ever Integrate”. The efforts against DEI programmes, affirmative action in education and employment and critical race theory are all part of a larger movement to return the US to a state of quasi-legal racial segregation. For conservatives like Ward Connerly and Edward Blum, any correctives meant to work against the ingrained white supremacist racism of the American systems and institutions are overcorrections. Edward Blum’s work as an anti-affirmative action and anti-DEI litigant over the decades follows directly in Connerly’s footsteps. In explaining the SFFA’s 2023 Supreme Court victory, Blum doubled down on his vision for a colourblind US. Connerly and Blum are fighting for the end of any onramps for marginalised Americans towards social mobility through higher education and middle-class jobs. The impact of dismantling affirmative action is already evident in reduced Black and Latinx university and medical school admissions over the past 18 months. Connerly, Blum, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are merely exercising the narcissism that comes with their socioeconomic, racial and gender status. They place the blame for setbacks and failures on individuals, and not on systems that primarily affirm white folk and especially affluent white men.
Original: 1472 words
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Percent reduction: 79.08%