DEI Didn’t Start With ‘Wokeness’ — Here’s What Trump Gets Wrong – Capital B

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Federal Government Under Siege is a multipart series that explores the impact of the Trump administration’s overhaul of the federal government on Black communities.
President Donald Trump and his allies have turned diversity, equity, and inclusion into a catchall slur.
The administration claims to be eliminating DEI, but what it’s doing is conflating issues, attacking long-established civil rights protections that it’s calling DEI, sociologists and historians told Capital B.
“It’s a kind of misinformation. It’s a kind of racist, sexist, anti-LGBTQ, ableist misinformation that allows [conservative actors] to target folks who have historically been marginalized in the U.S.,” said Victor Ray, a sociology professor at the University of Iowa.
The administration’s war on DEI is especially acute among Black Americans, who fought for civil rights protections in the 1960s. DEI sprang from presidential actions taken in response to this activism, though DEI and Civil Rights Era demands for equality aren’t the same thing. Even so, Trump and his camp have transformed DEI into a boogeyman, and Ray and others said that exploiting the term is an attempt to chip away at basic freedoms and whitewash history.
Trump used his speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday to further swipe at DEI.
“We’ve ended the tyranny of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ policies all across the entire federal government,” Trump taunted, only minutes after Rep. Al Green of Texas was ejected for protesting during the address. “And our country will be ‘woke’ no longer.”
A wide range of vulnerable communities have been swept up in the administration’s anti-DEI purge, which is part of an old playbook by opponents of equal rights.
Observers have likened the assault on DEI to some lawmakers’ attacks on critical race theory a few years ago. The primary threats to the country’s social order, per Christopher Rufo and other conservative activists, were CRT and “woke.” Their campaign led to dozens of states passing or introducing legislation to ban CRT in classrooms.
But since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted affirmative action in higher education in 2023, they’ve found a new menace in DEI, Kimberlé Crenshaw, a pioneering critical race theory scholar and the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum, previously told Capital B.
Ray, the author of the 2022 book On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters and Why You Should Care, explained further: “Basically anything that the administration doesn’t like, it’s saying that it’s because of Black folks and Latino folks and disabled folks and LGBTQ folks.”
As the backlash against DEI continues, it’s important to understand how we got here.
DEI is an array of organizational measures — from anti-bias training to diverse recruitment outreach — designed to inject fairness into the federal government, corporate America, and other environments where it’s long been missing. You can detect the bones of DEI in some of the advancements made during the Civil Rights Movement.
On March 6, 1961, recognizing the deep inequality facing Black workers, President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10925. This established the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity and mandated federal contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”
To give the committee some teeth, the order allowed the body, which Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson initially chaired, to impose sanctions for failure to comply. Kennedy commented that this power of enforcement illustrated the federal government’s “determination to end job discrimination once and for all.”
Johnson assumed the presidency following Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, and bolstered federal workforce protections for Black Americans and other marginalized groups. By the time he delivered the commencement address at Howard University on June 4, 1965, he had signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.
Still, he wanted to do more.
“Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences — deep, corrosive, obstinate differences,” Johnson told the crowd. “These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. They are anguishing to observe.”
He added that “if we are ever to reach the time when the only difference between Negroes and whites is the color of their skin,” then these wrongs “must be faced, and they must be dealt with, and they must be overcome.”
A few months later, on Sept. 24, he signed Executive Order 11246, outlawing employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, and national origin for organizations receiving federal contracting and requiring federal contractors to work affirmatively toward creating equal opportunity for marginalized groups.
These orders were “a godsend for so many people who live in this country and love this country and want their fair shot at making a living and having a good life,” Marcus Board, an associate professor of political science at Howard University, previously told Capital B.
It’s unclear who coined the term “DEI,” but the concept likely grew from this drive for equality in the 1980s. Companies forged “equal employment opportunity programs” and “diversity programs,” offering a variety of initiatives to improve office environments.
At times, there was opposition to this movement, including from President Ronald Reagan. The actor turned politician sought to scale back diversity efforts when he entered the White House in 1981, pushing to deregulate workplace antidiscrimination policies. Reagan’s plans faced widespread backlash, and he eventually abandoned them.
Companies continued to embrace diversity initiatives. But it wasn’t until the murder of George Floyd in 2020 that DEI gained fresh momentum, as companies responded to demands that the country make amends for the injustices Black Americans have suffered: A LinkedIn analysis found that, from 2019 through the end of 2022, hires for chief diversity and inclusion officer roles ballooned by 168.9%.
Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” is working to realize Trump’s dream of ridding federal agencies of DEI initiatives, destabilizing the lives of thousands of Americans in the process (and ignoring the fact that diverse workplaces tend to perform better).
Federal agencies, including the Social Security Administration and the U.S. Department of Labor, are dismantling their offices that uphold civil rights protections, maintaining that they’re linked to DEI. The U.S. Department of Education, meanwhile, has launched an “End DEI” portal urging people to report public school educators who don’t adhere to its anti-DEI stance.
This overhaul aligns with the goals of Project 2025, the conservative manifesto that referred to DEI as a “managerialist left-wing race and gender ideology” that political leaders must “eliminate.”
The administration’s crusade against DEI imperils access to federal jobs that for decades have been cherished for opening up a pathway to the Black middle class.
“When I went into the government world, I was searching for stability,” a Black former federal employee who was laid off in February told Capital B, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity. “I’m a mom. I’m a wife. We have expenses. Last year, we were hit with a tragedy.”
Her husband was in a severe car accident, and suffered a brain injury. He was in the intensive care unit from the end of October until around the middle of December.
“It felt like my job was the one thing I was really holding on to, because everything else in my life seemed unstable. I had no control,” she said. “I have to start searching for a job again, but I also want to allow myself to feel whatever I’m going to feel so that I have fresh eyes when I do it.”
Notably, the demolition of the federal workforce isn’t new.
LGBTQ federal workers, for instance, have compared some of the administration’s actions — banning transgender troops from the military, axing employee resource groups that once permitted those with shared identities to build community — to the Lavender Scare.
This mid-century moral panic painted gay Americans as a national security threat, and historians estimate that it resulted in the removal of up to 10,000 workers from the federal service. The ripple effects of this purge were considerable: persistent unemployment, community estrangement, financial ruin. A number of those affected took their own lives.
Many observers, including Ray and the legal expert Katie S. Phang, have underscored that DOGE’s machinations echo actions that President Woodrow Wilson took after he entered office in 1913.
Wilson required the federal workforce to be racially segregated, limiting “the access of Black civil servants to white-collar positions via both demotions and the failure to hire qualified Black candidates,” according to a 2020 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that found that Wilson’s order erased the economic progress Black Americans had made during Reconstruction.
Almost immediately after returning to the White House and paying lip service to Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, Trump rescinded Executive Order 11246. He characterized attempts to quash workplace discrimination as “pernicious,” and referred to them as prejudice against white Americans.
Many companies, presumably hoping to avoid Trump’s fury, have responded by withdrawing their support for DEI. This reversal has led some observers, including Crenshaw, to argue that our current political moment resembles the end of Reconstruction, a period that also was rife with acquiescence from avowed allies of racial equality.
Ray, the University of Iowa professor, said that he’s surprised not by the administration’s assault on DEI — Trump promised on the campaign trail that this would be a political priority — but by the speed with which the president’s team of players is laying siege to civil rights protections.
“They’re saying that it’s DEI, but I argue that they’re conflating a whole bunch of different things to attack the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement,” he explained, highlighting that this messaging allows the administration to target policies that enjoy broad support.
“Lots of people get irritated when they have to watch an HR training video on antidiscrimination. But conflating that with civil rights protections so that you can get rid of them is really insidious,” he added.
A federal judge in February issued a preliminary injunction blocking the administration from terminating or altering federal contracts it deems DEI-related, ruling that such orders are likely unconstitutional and “chill speech as to anyone the government might conceivably choose to accuse of engaging in speech about ‘equity’ or ‘diversity.’”
For some Black federal workers, the administration’s anti-DEI purge has scrambled their plans for the future, leaving them professionally adrift.
“I thought that I wanted to work in the federal government until retirement. I was totally content to work at the same agency for like 40 years. That was no problem,” a Black federal employee told Capital B, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “Now, I don’t know. I’m keeping my options open.”
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Brandon Tensley is Capital B's national politics reporter. More by Brandon Tensley
Capital B is a Black-led, nonprofit local and national news organization reporting for Black communities across the country.

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