The Blaze columnist Auron MacIntyre tried to tie the Civil Rights Act to modern-day diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts earlier this week. He said that the Civil Rights Act created “institutional racism” and blamed it for the fact that “corporations hold mandatory trainings on how to be less white.”
This idea is mistaken. DEI is, in many ways, the opposite of both the Civil Rights Act and the Civil Rights Movement that gave rise to it.
The Civil Rights Movement was grounded in the principles of classical liberalism. The core idea was that every human being has equal and intrinsic worth and dignity regardless of the color of their skin.
This idea took the concept of universalism, embodied in the immortal words of the Declaration of Independence, and simply extended it to a new class of people who had been previously excluded. Or as Martin Luther King Jr. put it in his most famous speech a year before the Civil Rights Act was passed, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”
This concept of universalism is not just a piece of classical liberalism; it is the foundation of the entire Enlightenment project. From universalism springs the idea of individualism and of individual rights. As John Locke put it, humans are all “equal and independent.” No man is born above or below another, and no person ought to have greater or fewer rights based solely on their immutable characteristics. From this flows a rejection of totalitarian governments as well as of racism in all forms.
Some libertarians and conservatives oppose the piece of the Civil Rights Act that bars private businesses from discriminating based on skin color. This is a reasonable philosophical concern, but the foundational idea that the Civil Rights Act sought to uphold is the essence of the Enlightenment. We cannot discriminate on the basis of race — let alone tell our government to do so — and still adhere to the idea that all humans are born “equal and independent.”
By contrast, much of the modern DEI movement is openly against universalism. Some DEI activists suggest that a person’s worth is tied to their skin color. An article submission to the feminist journal Hypatia suggesting that white students should be put in chains as a form of “experiential reparations” was praised by peer reviewers. In their New York Times bestseller White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism And How to Do Better, Saira Rao and Regina Jackson say terrible things about an entire demographic group based solely on the group’s immutable characteristics. They dedicate their book to “all Black, Indigenous, brown, and non-white girls, women, and non-binary identifying folks who are sick and tired of white women’s bull****.” It’s hard to square Locke’s notion that all people are “equal and independent” with a cottage industry of scholar-activists who attack people based on their skin color.
It’s not just universalism under attack. If the foundational goal of the Civil Rights Movement was to extend the rights and dignity proposed by Enlightenment thinkers to people of all skin colors, the goal of many DEI scholars is to do away with Enlightenment thinking altogether. In their book, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic lay it out:
“Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”
While praising Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, some DEI scholars are quietly turning their backs on the core ideas of the Civil Rights Movement. In Is Everyone Really Equal? Robin DiAngelo and Ozlem Sensoy critique the idea that “[p]eople should be judged by what they do, not the color of their skin.” They call this idea “predictable, simplistic, and misinformed.”
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DiAngelo and Sensoy admit that their radical ideology is at odds with the core aims of the Civil Rights Movement. It’s time that we believe them.
Julian Adorney is a writer and marketing consultant with fee.org and contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He has previously written for National Review, the Federalist, and other outlets.