The Weaponization of DEI: From Civil Rights to Cultural Erasure
How Trump’s rollback of diversity and inclusion is less about policy than about rewriting belonging, legitimacy, and citizenship itself
I was hiking with my dog in the desert when I took a wrong turn and found myself in a gated community. The homes were immaculate, yet what struck me wasn’t the architecture—it was the feeling. I didn’t belong. That unease is the daily experience of millions. Not just those without papers, but those whose presence is marked as deviation. Class, race, gender, ethnicity, and religion have long served as sorting mechanisms, ritualized justifications for differential treatment. Despite civil rights laws and decades of DEI protections, exclusion remains intact.
When I first read the Project 2025 plans to dismantle DEI programs, I recognized it as an assault on civil rights. What I didn’t foresee was the precision with which DEI itself would be turned against its own aims. This is more than rollback—it is inversion, a model for authoritarian rule that goes well beyond workplace trainings or university programs. It is part of a project to redraw legitimacy itself—who has standing, who counts, and who can be defined as an enemy.
Through his executive orders, Trump rebranded DEI as promoting “race and sex stereotyping.” These orders outlaw diversity trainings across federal agencies and contractors. The key legal strategy the administration used to attack these programs is “colorblind equality,” which equates inclusion with preferential treatment. It casts DEI as ideological contagion to be eradicated—and in the process teaches the public to see inclusion itself as corruption.
The logic is not new. After Reconstruction, the political participation of freedmen was recast as corruption and stamped out through Jim Crow. In the 1960s, civil rights protections were reframed as “special rights” that supposedly undermined the majority. Each era dressed exclusion in the language of fairness, turning rights into threats. What is distinct today is that this logic has been elevated into an explicit project of cultural rewriting. Civil rights history is not only rolled back but reinterpreted: not as a story of expanding inclusion, but of dangerous overreach. This rewriting sets the precedent for a broader project—the redefinition of citizenship and dissent, where entire groups can be marked illegitimate.
The Department of Justice has expanded this reframing into enforcement. Universities, corporations, and city governments are being targeted in the name of equity for alleged violations. The University of Virginia was compelled into a compliance agreement that effectively froze its DEI practices through 2028. Institutions under scrutiny must now submit quarterly compliance reports—bureaucratic rituals parading the absence of DEI as ideological purity. The message is clear: those who open doors to wider membership in public life will be punished, and those who renounce inclusion will be restored to favor.
DEI has become a political instrument. Cities are warned they risk losing federal disaster relief if they do not certify that they are free of “discriminatory equity ideology.” Federal contractors face the same choice: strip away DEI programs or lose government contracts. Survival—aid, contracts, funds—becomes conditional on exclusion, forcing institutions to equate recognition with risk. For immigrant communities, this echoes long-standing bureaucratic practices of conditional recognition: access to health care, disaster relief, or schooling tied to proof of status. What is new is that this precarious logic is being extended to the entire fabric of public institutions.
The administration’s messaging has been unambiguous. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon declared, “Either DEI will end on its own, or we will kill it.”[1] The choice of words—kill, enemy, adversary—makes clear that this is about more than administrative compliance. It is the language of purification and threat, redefining citizens as foes when they cross the boundaries being redrawn.
DEI has always functioned as a symbolic system of recognition—encoded through repeated acts. Hiring initiatives, training modules, and outreach programs are rites of institutional citizenship, each affirming the moral coordinates of inclusion. Undermine one and the others falter; strip several away and the bonds holding people within the circle of legitimacy unravel. What replaces them is a new moral order—where exclusion is virtue, membership a privilege, and dissent recoded as disloyalty.
This campaign reflects a broader ideological shift. DEI is no longer treated as a civil rights advancement; instead it is framed as a threat to constitutional order. This approach reframes inclusion as exclusion and equity as bias. Legal and financial tools are conscripted to enforce cultural rollback. It is a kind of juridical necromancy—resurrecting the language of equality to entrench hierarchy, and in the process legitimizing a broader project of institutional capture and cultural erasure.
There is also a temporal dimension to DEI programs. They encode historical memory: the legacies of feminist, labor, and immigrant movements. Their erasure severs intergenerational continuity, teaching the next generation that inclusion was a mistake and that exclusion is the natural order. And when memory of civil rights is reframed as excess, the same logic can be applied to delegitimize other histories of struggle—labor, gender, immigration—marking them as corrosive deviations from the “true” nation.
The spectacle of enforcement reinforces the lesson. Public investigations and settlements become cautionary tales, with institutions paraded as examples of what happens when inclusion is defended. The goal is less to eliminate DEI entirely than to stigmatize it so thoroughly that few will dare to practice it.
What is happening with DEI is not a technical fight over trainings or compliance reports. It is a struggle over inclusion itself—who is admitted into the national community and who is cast out. But DEI is only one terrain. The same logic is being extended to immigrants, to protestors, to educators, to journalists—anyone whose presence or voice unsettles the boundaries being redrawn.
By turning DEI into a weapon, the state has revealed the deeper project: to redefine legitimacy itself. To declare who counts and who is branded an enemy. This is not rollback but a rewriting of America’s moral fabric, recasting history’s struggles for recognition as mistakes, equality as excess, and dissent as disloyalty. The weaponization of DEI is a warning shot in a larger campaign to redraw the boundaries of America—deciding once again who belongs and who is cast out.
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Endnote
[1] Statement by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon during Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on DEI, July 28, 2025. ” https://www.hrbrew.com/stories/2025/07/28/senate-judiciary-committee-holds-hearing-on-dei-focusing-largely-on-dei-rebrands
Suggested Readings
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.New York: New Press, 2012.
Appadurai, Arjun. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House, 2018.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
Urciuoli, Bonnie. Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996.
Wedeen, Lisa. Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Williams, Brackette F. Stains on My Name, War in My Veins: Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
Thank you for your summary of a president, administration and partisan Congress making America 🇺🇸 great for only a few. Without DEI America 🇺🇸 loses what made America 🇺🇸 great in the first place. We become a country that fears what we don’t understand or that believes others are taking advantage of the system. The melting pot or mosaic which is America 🇺🇸 becomes nonexistent.
One of MAGA's great successes has been identifying any circumstance of social unease, though
insignificant in frequency of occurrence, and inflate that to a general condition of fear and outrage that requires authoritarian oversight to correct a situation for which democracy is cast as inadequate.
One violent crime committed by an immigrant is expanded and promoted as an example of general immigrant criminality, though statistics show that immigrants are less inclined to criminal behaviour than the wider citizen population.
The same thing has happened to DEI. Certain over-zealous conduct of DEI objectives, such as that resulting in physical "males" competing in women's sports and their presence in women's dressing rooms, has inflamed the MAGA right against DEI in general, rather than creating an issue for rational compromise on fringe DEI objectives.
Over-zealous DEI application has played directly into the hands of those who condemn Liberal policies and repeatedly inflate and misrepresent to the seemingly obvious conclusion that Liberals are out of touch with American, Christian values.
Along the same lines of reasoning, such examples are expanded to support the assertion that Liberals are also avowedly anti-religious.
The conclusion of this strategy is to cast The Left as the enemy of American values, appropriately in line for hatred, violence, and exclusion from the national commentary.