DEI fantasies (1)

 

Divisiveness, exclusion, and inequality

By William Wetherall

17 November 2025 

What goes around, comes around. Federal and many other Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs have been cancelled, or are being heavily revised and rebranded, to the delight of some and the dismay of others.

DEI programs emerged in the 2000s and 2010s on the foundations of the civil rights movements that spread from the 1950s, and the affirmative action, sensitivity and diversity training, and multicultural education that began in the 1960s and gathered momentum in the 1970s and 1980s.

By the time I graduated from high school in 1959, I had passively acquired the race-box mentality that has characterized the United States throughout its history. Race boxes in federal censuses have continually evolved since 1790.

From my late teens, I was checking race boxes as a matter of course, like sex and religious preference. In San Francisco, where I partly grew up, race didn't seem to be a big deal. The problems of Little Rock seemed far away. This proved to be a naive impression, as racialism and racism were much closer to home that I imagined.

By the end of the 1960s, however, I was crossing out race boxes wherever I found them, including college and job application forms, and of course on census sheets. And during the 1990s, I began supporting Ward Connerly's racial privacy movement when it began in California. Connerly sought to end race boxes in the belief that race -- whatever that might be -- is a personal matter. The government should not racialize people, and people should not racialize themselves or others in the public square.

So I, for one, have welcomed the demise of DEI as something that was long overdue. Which is not to deny that there are many problems to be solved, which appear to involve race, sex, disabilities, ad infinitum.

Affirmative action and DEI -- both driven by ideologies of race, which heavily depend on race-boxes, and by theories of marginalization and victimization -- are simply the wrong way to address them. In the name of equal opportunity -- which originally meant exactly that -- they fostered divisiveness, exclusion, and inequality. And they distracted attention from the root causes of the difficulties faced by individuals of all putative castes and classes in all countries.

Last revised 15 December 2025

Divided States of America

Territorial imperatives

By William Wetherall

16 November 2025

Once upon a time -- though not that long ago, only 4 generations back in my family, when my great-great grandparents were in their 20s and 30s, and their children were toddlers or in their teens -- the United States of America (USA), then comprised of 34 Union states, became 23 states when ll of its states seceded from the Union and formed a new republic called the Confederate States of America (CSA).

USA regarded the succession as illegal, thus refused to recognize CSA as a legitimate state. For this reason, the succession -- and CSA's military actions against USA -- were considered a rebellion or insurrection. Hence those who supported and fought for the Confederacy were treated as rebels rather than traitors. Many decades would pass before the federal government conceded to call the war the Civil War, and include Confederate veterans and widows in its Civil War pension and disability scheme.

The Union's aim in prosecuting the War of the Rebellion in 1861 was to preserve its territorial integrity. Accepting the Confederacy as a fait accompli threatened its expansionist dream of becoming a "sea to shining sea" empire. Forcing the rebel states to rejoin the Union was urgent and paramount. Emancipating slaves and abolishing slavery became the objectives of total victory midway through the war. Freeing slaves and ending slavery were predicated on capitulation of the Confederate states and their return to the Union's territorial fold on Union terms.

Union rules

After the Confederacy surrendered to the Union in 1865, the United States of America mandated that a defeated Confederate state, in order to regain its status as a semi-sovereign Union state, had to emancipate its slaves and essentially recant its stance on slavery as a state prerogative. Each Confederate state had to establish a new government with a new constitution approved by the Union -- ratify Amendment 14,  which recognized all persons born and naturalized in the United States as citizens, and guaranteed all citizens equal protection under the law -- and agree to ratify future amendments that were expected to address Reconstruction issues.

Amendment 14 was passed by Congress on 6 June 1866. The first state to be readmitted was Tennessee, on 24 June 1866. Amendment 14 was certified as having been ratified by three-fourths of all states on 9 July 1868. The last state to be readmitted was Georgia. It had been readmitted in July 1868, but was expelled in December for its treatment of black legislators, and was not again readmitted until 15 July 1870.

Racialist ideology

The United States remains, today, a seriously divided nation. Advocates of libertarian, laissez faire capitalism with minimal government controls, who favor the privatization of health insurance, remain at loggerheads with camps pushing for socialized medicine in the form of national health insurance.

The divisions are not about slavery but immigration and how to write and teach history. They are more ideological than racial, in that some ideologies champion the racialization while others seek deracializaton. 

This writer sometimes speaks of California as being between the United States and Japan. At times I speak of Northern California and Southern California as independent states with territorial disputes. Breaking up California is legally more plausible than secession from the Union, but neither is very likely. Today's civil wars are, for the moment at least, being fought mainly in state and federal legislatures and courts.

Cartoon source

Image source -- The Wall Street Journal, Saturday-Sunday, 8-9 November 2025, page C9. Image attributed to Alamy (ID CWAGK8) but captioned by TWSJ.

www.alamy.com metadata attributes the cartoon to the Everett Collection. Alamy's image, which appears to be of a contemporary copy, is captioned 'The True Issue or "Thats Whats the Matter"' [sic]. Alamy describes the background of the cartoon as follows.

Cartoon about the 1864 US presidential election, favoring the Peace campaign of Democrat George McClellan, in the center between a tug-of-war over a map of the United States by Lincoln (left) and Jefferson Davis. McClellan says, The Union must be preserved at all hazards! Lincoln says, No peace without abolition. Davis says, No peace without Separation.

Postscript -- The True Issue

George Brinton McClellan (1826-1885), a West Point graduate, served in the Mexican War of 1846-1848, and was a railroad executive and engineer at the outbreak of the Civil War. Commissioned as a Major General, became the Commanding General of the United States Army from November 1861 to March 1862 under President Lincoln.

During the "True Issue" debates that predicated the 1864 presidential election, as the Democratic Party nominee opposing Lincoln, McClellan argued that the original mission of the Union Army had been to restore the territorial integrity of the Union. He was convinced that reunification should continue to be the paramount political goal of the Union cause -- not abolition and emancipation. He was thus praised or condemned in the press as a so-called "Peace Democrats" -- the minority faction of the Democratic Party that supported the Union but favored reunification through a negotiated peace with the Confederacy.

Peace Democrats varied in their personal views of abolition and emancipation, but agreed that returning to the pre-succession political status quo was better for the Union than to push for a military victory at the risk of an endless war and dissolution. Republicans, who by then favored conquest and capitulation at any cost, for the sake of abolition and emancipation, commonly disparaged Peace Democrats as venomous "Copperheads", and political cartoons caricatured them as such.

Last revised 22 November 2025