The problem is the impulse to defend ‘DEI’ as a metaphor without making the case for its essential value
With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, the US right’s antipathy toward diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) follows a long line of linguistic takeovers. The left can’t seem to prevent the MAGA movement from coopting its terms. ‘Woke’ is now a joke, ‘deplorables’ a badge of honour, and ‘critical race theory’ is reverse-racist. When the left tries the same tactic, it often falls flat. In retrospect, the self-proclaimed ‘nasty women’ in ‘pussy hats’ of 2016’s presidential race did the Democrats few favours.
Now DEI is the right’s latest victim. Its bureaucratic abstraction makes it a potent tool for correcting, or at least patching, systemic inequality. Any institution, from a supermarket to a university, can countermand discrimination through efforts to diversify hiring, programming and other initiatives. A human resources department can instruct employees to avoid prejudiced behaviours in the hope of inspiring greater equity throughout an institution, industry, country and, perchance, world. DEI is a bid for change from within. It has been a downstream fix – no DEI office can change the disparity in income and opportunities between demographic groups essentially rooted in segregation and biases affecting housing, banking and education.
It is not for me to judge DEI’s successes or failures. But it’s an understatement to say that the mood has been shifting (on both the left and the right) against what are now seen as superficial commitments to equity. In the art industry in the US and elsewhere (notably Adriano Pedrosa’s Venice Biennale last year), curatorial premises around ‘identity’ are now openly discussed as being flimsy. Many of the curators of colour hired at museums in the early days of the post-Trump Resistance in 2017 or the Black Lives Matter surge in 2020 left their posts when they realised how exploitative and limited those positions remain, or when they encountered condescending work environments. Public promises have met private resistance. Now that resistance is public too.
Trump’s executive orders declaring DEI initiatives ‘illegal’ aim to reverse the federal government’s decades-long push for inclusive workplaces. The Trump administration put all US federal employees working in diversity offices on paid leave and ended the programmes (although a judge recently blocked the orders), while the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has been instructed to cease funding programs that promote DEI or ‘gender ideology’. In the US, the government-run Smithsonian museums, which include the Hirschhorn and the National Portrait Gallery, have no choice but to follow the leader and scrub DEI from their budgets and websites.
You might think that private institutions have more leeway to stand up for their principles. But the pressure is on there, too. Donors grumble, curators capitulate. Last week, the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC, an international organisation focused on Latin American and Caribbean art, cancelled two major upcoming exhibitions showcasing Black and LGBTQ+ artists, citing Trump’s executive orders and an alleged withdrawal of federal funding. Elsewhere, arts funding so precarious that upright protests among institutional top ranks are vanishingly rare. For nonprofit organisations with shoestring budgets, the loss of even a $10,000 NEA grant can be fatal.
But the weakness of DEI isn’t its results or its ethics. The problem is the impulse on the left to defend ‘DEI’ as a term or a metaphor without making the case for its essential value: that being human entitles you to respect. It’s a distraction to rescue DEI from the perception, lobbed gleefully from the right but tacitly and contextually argued by progressives, that DEI, in and of itself, is (and has always been) cynical and superficial. It certainly can be, especially when deployed less as a bid for change than to keep up appearances. But DEI is a good impulse. It’s ethically essential. It’s bigger than a catchphrase. It’s revealing that supposedly one DOGE-inspired sweep removed a sign from a government office that read, ‘Be kind to everyone’. Let the right condemn that statement on its merits – not because it smacks of DEI or wokeness, but because they want to be assholes and bullies.
Let them admit that the actual gambit is far darker than semantics. The attack on DEI is a way of reenforcing the belief that the present unequal hierarchies are somehow natural. Just an acrid style of bootstrapping. One definition of privilege is not having to acknowledge that other people are real. The politicians and businesspeople clearcutting DEI initiatives see their success as preordained and earned at the same time, but don’t see or acknowledge (or don’t have to) the social, political and economic forces that make their success possible.
Bashing DEI triggers a particular kind of resentment among downwardly mobile Americans across demographics, whose prosperity has been strained by gaping inequality. According to a 2016 study on social mobility, 50 percent of Americans born in the 1980s are set to end up worse off than their parents, a relatively new phenomenon for middle-class white people in the US. This is a group who are ready to cast blame, but not at Trump or Elon Musk, nor the billionaires driving an epochal concentration of wealth; no, they’re primed to target groups and initiatives that the powerful say are unjustly sapping the prosperity they deserve. (If you suggest otherwise, it’s ‘critical race theory’ or ‘socialism’.) Sure, these are oversimplifications. But just try getting a word in, let alone a convincing explanation of what socialism or CRT actually mean. Such a discussion is deemed too elitist by Trump for the ‘poorly educated’ he claims to love, who he has encouraged to be suspicious of ‘experts’.
As perennial straw men in the culture wars and as alienating elitist redoubts, art institutions have a particular relationship to DEI. Responding to bigots and pearl-clutchers, art’s defenders tend to reach for universal, self-evident values – like diversity, equity, inclusion. An open letter to the NEA from hundreds of artists urging defiance of Trump’s orders last month underscores the agency’s mission to ‘foster and sustain an environment in which the arts benefit everyone in the United States’. The signatories are right. Yet appeals to inclusion feel thin at a time when ‘democracy’ is not necessarily a shared value across party lines.
Perhaps a stronger defence would be a reminder of the role of art institutions as important incubators of morally complex thinking. Just look at what the right wants instead. Until a few weeks ago, the NEA’s ‘Challenge America’ grants solicited applications that would bring art to underserved communities. But while other government websites have simply deleted all mentions of DEI (and transgender people) from their websites, the NEA has switched to inviting ‘projects that celebrate the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity by honouring the semiquincentennial of the United States of America’ in 2026. For the right, both cynical and sincere, this is what art is for: Celebrating Our Country! It’s essentially a call for propaganda. And it’s where the left could push back.
The argument against this mind-numbing style of word-for-word, flag-waving, allegorical art is that confusion, uncertainty and ambivalence are American (and human) values. Trump and his allies don’t like being told what to do or how to think. Why would they, or any of us for that matter, accept being told what art should do and what it means? For the right, fixed meanings are strategic high ground, to be captured or die on. The right will give you U dollars to do S, as long as it’s about A. Tell them that those letters mean nothing.
Travis Diehl is a writer and critic living in New York
