It’s Time to Banish DEI and End the Obsession with Race and Sex
In 2020, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) grew to the status of a household catchphrase. By 2024, DEI was on life support. In 2025, we’re finally pulling the plug.
Companies went woke, some went broke, and now DEI is going up in smoke.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, recently announced it was killing off its DEI programming immediately.
Race, sex, and other protected characteristics would no longer be key factors in the hiring process. Diversity mandates would be axed along with other changes.
Meta’s announcement capped off a bad week for DEI advocates.
On Jan. 8 of this year, McDonald’s called it quits on sweeping DEI commitments that spanned the fast food giant’s hiring, internal programming, and suppliers.
Race and sex quotas for staffing and leadership: Gone.
Supply-chain diversity mandates: Gone. The diversity human resources team: Refocused.
Additionally, the company will no longer cave to outside pressure groups who collect and publish diversity data as a shaming tactic. Nor will McDonald's pressure suppliers to impose diversity training and mandates on their employees.
These companies join a growing list of companies doing away with DEI commitments, including Lowe’s, Walmart, Boeing, Coors, Jack Daniels, Ford, Toyota, Nissan, Harley Davidson, John Deere, Tractor Supply, Caterpillar, and Black & Decker.
This list will keep growing as companies rouse from their woke stupor and end their zombie-like march to the DEI drumbeat.
This is good news for all Americans.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion is discriminatory, unfair, and should be intolerable.
Treating specific groups better or worse based on immutable characteristics is a repugnant practice that perpetuates — it does not correct — mistreatment.
It was morally wrong to discriminate against Blacks through segregation and employment discrimination, just as it is wrong to discriminate against Asian students in college admissions or against white men in the hiring process for firefighters and tech jobs.
Diversity efforts have been employed to remedy past ills, but the willful denial of equal treatment to all people and the purposeful degrading of classes of individuals because of their ethnicity or sex should rightly be rejected.
The U.S. Supreme Court has made this clear.
Both Meta and McDonald’s specifically pointed to a shifting legal landscape in deciding to end their DEI programming.
They refer to the 2023 SCOTUS decisions ending affirmative action in higher education (Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina and Harvard College) because such programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
While attention has focused on how colleges and universities would respond, many of us expected the decision to reach into other realms such as corporate America.
As companies assess their DEI programs in light of SCOTUS’s decisions it was a matter of time before they questioned the legality of their efforts.
At least these companies are admitting that their DEI practices may be discriminatory and need to end.
Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan explained that they are reaffirming their commitment to "longstanding principles that discrimination should not be tolerated or promoted on the basis of inherent characteristics."
It’s time for other private companies and organizations as well as public institutions to pledge the same.
This writer would argue that companies are responding to their bottom lines and fear of damaging civil lawsuits.
The Bud Light and Target boycotts were effective because they were long, sustained, and costly, causing both financial and reputational damage to their brands.
Firms have also secured important legal wins by targeting colleges and companies that promote discriminatory programs for lawsuits.
It worked with Harvard and also worked with Fearless Fund, a venture capital firm that ended a grant contest for Black women business owners.
Red state policymakers are not taking a backseat.
They are gutting public colleges and universities of DEI by laying off or moving personnel, slashing departments, and defunding programs.
In 2023, Florida started this trend by passing legislation to defund DEI throughout the state’s postsecondary public institutions.
Last year, Texas followed, along with Utah and nearly two dozen states.
It’s time to banish DEI and end the obsession with race and sex. Everyone deserves to be treated fairly and equally. DEI undermines that simple principle and should gladly be put to rest.
Patrice Onwuka is director of the Center for Economic Opportunity at Independent Women and co-host of WMAL’s O’Connor & Company. Follow her on Twitter: @PatricePinkFile. Read Patrice Lee Onwuka's Reports — More Here.
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