Trump administration horrifies the left by attacking DEI practices that violate the law.

This Washington Post article is called “Civil rights agencies that once promoted DEI now work to wipe it out.” The Post seems to find this development ironic and unfortunate. But what it fails to recognize is that (1) the statutory role of these civil rights agencies is not to promote DEI, but rather to enforce rules that prohibit discrimination and (2) by promoting DEI, these agencies often promote discrimination.

Consider the first paragraph of the Post’s report:

Aiming to end what President Donald Trump calls “illegal DEI,” the federal government is moving to expunge diversity programs from all corners of society while refocusing civil rights enforcement to banish practices that offer advantages based on race and sex.

(Emphasis added)

Right. Offering advantages based on race and sex constitutes race and sex discrimination. Federal law bans race and sex discrimination. They are illegal, just as Trump says. And the proper role of the federal agencies in question is to banish these forms of discrimination.

It’s a symptom of the DEI rot that the Post could publish a sentence that reflects as profound a misunderstanding of anti-discrimination law as the one I quoted above. But thanks to that lack of understanding, the Post is able to admit that, yes, DEI is, in part, about offering advantages based on race and sex.

This is a reality that DEI’s proponents have stopped acknowledging, as they try to save their regime. But the reality of DEI is apparent from the words it stands for — diversity, equity, and inclusion.

A diverse workforce may or may not be a workforce that complies with anti-discrimination laws. If the blacks in the workforce got their jobs based on individual merit, there is no tension between diversity and non-discrimination in that instance.

But if diversity was achieved by “offering advantages to blacks based on their race,” then diversity has operated at cross-purposes with non-discrimination. Indeed, the two are in conflict. The same is true of “inclusion.”

“Equity,” as defined by the DEI crowd, means blacks and women get a share of benefits, including jobs, commensurate with their representation in the general population or (if we’re lucky) the population from which beneficiaries are drawn. In effect, it denies the possibility of tension between diversity/inclusion and non-discrimination by insisting that, absent discrimination, blacks would be included exactly to the degree they are represented in the population.

But that’s not always true. For example, absent practices that advantage blacks, it’s unlikely that blacks would enjoy proportionate representation among lawyers at a law firm because they are underrepresented in the population of lawyers. In addition, it’s unlikely that, absent such advantages, blacks would be represented at top law firms even in proportion to their presence among lawyers in the community unless blacks do as well in law school as whites.

Do they? Law schools do their best to suppress information about how black students perform, but in those rare instances when the wall is breached, it turns out that they don’t perform as well as whites (and those do the breaching are punished for it). This performance gap isn’t surprising, given that many blacks who attend top law schools do so only because they are offered advantages (e.g. forgiveness of subpar LSAT scores) based on their race.

Speaking of which, the Trump administration’s crackdown on offering such advantages is supported by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Harvard and University of North Carolina cases that ban racial discrimination in admissions. The Post grudgingly acknowledges this by saying:

Trump’s campaign has benefited from the June 2023 Supreme Court ruling against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

That’s one way of putting it. A better way would be to say that Trump’s campaign is an effort to enforce the law of the land, as set forth by the Supreme Court in these two cases.

The Post continues:

In finding that race-conscious admissions policies violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause, [the Supreme Court] unleashed a flood of lawsuits challenging like-minded programs in the public and private sectors. That movement was largely undertaken by private plaintiffs and conservative law firms, and it scored numerous victories that included the upending of longtime federal programs and widespread adjustments in the private sector.

Now, the Trump administration has largely institutionalized that work, with the EEOC and the Justice Department “supercharged to target race-based policies,” said [Dan]Lennington, [a] conservative legal activist.

But the EEOC exists to “institutionalize” the targeting of race-based policies. That was my job as an EEOC attorney in the 1970s — to help vindicate, in concert with the private civil rights bar, the right of Americans to be free from racial discrimination.

Federal civil rights enforcement efforts shouldn’t suddenly be viewed negatively based on the identity of the persons and/or groups that are having their rights enforced. Yet, this is how the Post seems to view it, now that it’s the rights of whites being enforced.

The Post quotes Jenny Yang, who led the EEOC during the Obama administration. She complains about the “effort by the administration to use all of its levers to intimidate employers, corporations, universities and private actors from engaging in activities that this administration doesn’t like, even if they have the lawful right to engage in those activities.” But employers, corporations, universities, and private actors have no lawful right to offer advantages based on race or sex. It’s not just the Trump administration that dislikes this. So does the law.

The current leader of the EEOC understands this:

“We know there are large-scale civil rights issues that have gone not only just unnoticed, but actively mishandled by the prior administration,” Andrea Lucas, acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), said in an interview with The Washington Post. Citing claims of antisemitism and “gender ideology” along with DEI initiatives, Lucas said, “We’re going to be cleaning them up.”

Have at it.