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