Eliminating DEI is less an attack on diversity and more an embrace of unity
By Gary Abernathy
For our nation’s future, working toward unity is more important than ‘celebrating’ our many differences
USA Today recently did a story raising alarms over the fact that the Trump administration’s crackdown on initiatives promoting “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) has led many corporations to withdraw their support for various DEI programs, particularly regarding “LGBTQ” recognitions.
“Despite a long track record of supporting the nation’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer population, corporations are shrinking budgets and downplaying Pride marketing as President Donald Trump's administration cracks down on diversity, equity and inclusion programs and transgender rights emerges as a culture-war flashpoint,” according to the story.
I don’t see the downplaying or elimination of DEI projects as an attack on minorities. Rather, it’s an effort to move away from our focus on what divides us and get back to concentrating on the things that unite us.
Celebrating our diversity is a notion foisted upon us by groups and people across the political left. While some — including former President Biden — insist that “diversity is our strength,” it is, in fact what makes national unity more difficult.
The United States is and always will be, by its very nature, a nation made up of diverse people. When the Statue of Liberty invites the whole world to “give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to be free,” the result will be a society comprised of individuals of all races, creeds and cultural backgrounds.
Everyone — white, black, brown, red, however one wants to describe their race or heritage — should take pride in their ancestry. Remembering and honoring our forbearers is the right thing for each of us to do. But the strength of a nation lies in its shared values, culture and identity, not its differences.
Years ago, most people acknowledged the importance of national unity and the need for immigrants to assimilate into American society. “Assimilate” means to “become absorbed and integrated into a society or culture.”
Because of our welcoming attitude and the acknowledgment that we are a nation of immigrants, the United States has always had a bigger challenge with assimilation than many other nations. In the U.S., it’s difficult for us to even agree on what our core identity is — i.e., what are we asking newcomers to assimilate into?
But answering that question and settling on a general concept of what it means to be an American is crucial to any hope of enjoying national unity. It’s vital that “the United States of America” be connected — united — by some very important aspects of a shared identity.
That’s why the Trump administration’s effort to downplay or even eliminate programs designed to highlight our differences is actually a good idea. Our differences are on full display every day without programs designed to emphasize them. What we need is more of a focus on the things that unify us.
First and foremost is the need to recognize and require the use of a common language. We made a big mistake years ago when we began providing Spanish-speaking Americans with dual-language school programs and other options to make it easier to stick with the language of their ancestry rather than the language of their new country. (“Press 1 for English, press 2 for Spanish” should never have become a thing. It helps keep us divided.)
Rather than identifying more ways to bind us together with our fellow citizens, it seems that every month is devoted to recognizing and celebrating a specific group of Americans.
February is Black History Month. March is Women’s History Month. April is Arab-American Heritage Month. May is Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month. June is LGBTQ Pride Month, Caribbean-American Heritage Month and African-American Music Appreciation Month. September is National African Immigrant Heritage Month and National Hispanic Heritage Month. October is Filipino American History Month. November is Native American/American Indian Heritage Month and Black Catholic History Month. The full list is actually much longer.
In a Washington Post column in 2023 I noted:
Clearly, our diversity is a big reason for our national disharmony. It’s not popular to say that, but most Americans know it. Just examine the opinions about our growing racial and ethnic diversity. In 2020, the Pew Research Center surveyed attitudes about the U.S. Census Bureau’s forecast that in a couple of decades, Black, Latino and Asian Americans will — combined — displace Whites as the majority population. Most respondents said the development was neither good nor bad. Eleven percent called it bad. Only 24 percent declared such a prospect a good thing — up from 14 percent in 2016, but far from an endorsement of diversity as, as then-candidate Joe Biden once tweeted, “our greatest strength.”
White people are, unsurprisingly, the least enthusiastic about the shifting population shares, Pew found. But interestingly, fewer than half of Black, Hispanic or Asian respondents called a more diverse population a good development, despite their projected growth. People of all races and backgrounds know diversity can be hard.
The rhetoric is that “our diversity is our greatest strength.” The reality — as Pew found in attitudes shared across races — is that diversity is, well, divisive.
As for DEI, I presume that the supporters of such programs care more about the “E” and “I” — equity and inclusion — than the “D,” diversity. Ensuring equity and inclusion for all people will be accomplished more effectively by focusing less on diversity and more on discovering our similarities.
Our differences — in race, background, religion, gender — are on full display. We hardly need to come up with ways to focus everyone’s attention on how different we are. What we need is to find more ways to identify and rally around the things that unite us — a shared language, a common culture, a unity in patriotism and love of country.
Any hope of truly being the United States of America in practice and not just in name depends on focusing less on highlighting and celebrating our diversity and more on finding and embracing our commonalities.
No, Americans are not anxiously waiting for this
I’m struck by how often news stories will begin with a presumption that the writer or publication can speak for all Americans.
A recent example is this headline in Time magazine (its digital version, of course): “Five years later, America looks for a way forward after George Floyd.”
In fact, as everyone knows, “America” did focus on the tragic George Floyd case for a few weeks after it happened, and then during the ensuing court cases, and for another year or so had no choice but to focus on the “Black Lives Matter” protests that sprang up, mostly as a result of the Floyd case, but other cases too.
But as we sit now in May of 2025, the George Floyd tragedy has hardly been leading recent conversations among most Americans. The headline would have us think that our nation is hyper-focused on “a way forward after George Floyd.”
In fact, it seemed like the George Floyd case long ago resulted in a number of police reforms and an acknowledgement that policing for African Americans was often unfair in regard to policing for white people.
But overall, it hasn’t been a top-of-the-hour leading news item for a long time. Yet, here comes Time telling us that “America looks for a way forward after George Floyd.”
What seems to have happened is that Time apparently devoted a lot of time and manpower to developing a number of special in-depth stories about racial disparity, the status of policing in America, etc., to present as a package, and to justify it in May of 2025 the editors needed to tell us that we Americans have been sitting around worried about a way forward. Some, individually, may have been doing that. We, collectively, have not.
It’s a fine series of articles and it’s always going to be a topic that is relevant. But please spare us from the notion that most Americans are on the edge of our seats worrying about what to do or how to move forward.
This happens a lot, actually, with writers presuming to speak for the country or to imply that the country is worried about something, when in fact, it’s really only the writer and his or her like-minded friends and acquaintances who are worried. When such stories are based on polling, that’s one thing, although too often pollsters set out to get results to justify a headline telling us that Americans’ opinions happen to reflect the biases of the pollster.
Reflections and analysis on various important topics are sometimes productive. But whatever the subject — especially five years after its most intense level of attention — please don’t tell us that America as a whole has been waiting on some kind of action, or has been spending much time worried about the topic.
Random thoughts on this and that…
Former President Joe Biden did an interview with the BBC and criticized President Trump, and nobody cared. …
… New York Times opinion writer Jessica Grose did an article on “MAGA beauty,” as the headline called it, criticizing Republican women like Kristi Noem, Nancy Mace, Karoline Leavitt and others for, apparently, being too attractive, for wearing makeup and curling their hair, and, of course, for being Christian and white. She wrote, “Their makeup is heavy; the content creator and comedian Suzanne Lambert called it ‘Republican makeup,’ which she explained to me is ‘matte and flat’: thick eyebrows and lashes, dark eyeliner on the top and bottom lids, a bold lip, lots of bronzer. ‘Inappropriate unless you’re on a pageant stage. And in that case, I would still do it differently,’ she said. Their clothes, whether casual or corporate, are form-fitting and often accessorized with giant crosses. They are always thin and almost always white.” This kind of condescending judgment — not to mention apparent blindness — is a big reason that Donald Trump won the last election. Keep doing what you’re doing, Republican women. …
… From the “be careful what you ask for” file comes the case of the Voice of America radio broadcast, which the Trump administration wants to dismantle, but which courts, of course, have stopped from happening for now. No worries. Kari Lake, a senior advisor with the agency that oversees VOA, announced this week that the station will begin carrying the conservative One America News package. Beautiful. Just waiting on a judge now to declare himself a program director and overturn that decision, since we’re in the age of Rule by Judicial Fiat. …
… Finally, Burger King is embroiled — flame broiled? — in a lawsuit accusing it of misrepresenting the size of its Whopper hamburgers in TV advertising. Aren’t you starting at a disadvantage when you go to court accused of lying, and your defense is called a Whopper?
MAGA Republicans Are Already Normal’ — for yourself or for that friend or loved one confused about America today
“MAGA Republicans Are Already Normal — And Other Shocking Notions” is a great addition to the library of MAGA Trump supporters, or the perfect gift for non-MAGA friends and loved ones to help them make sense of the 2024 election results. It’s available on Amazon. Buy it here.
The book (actually much thicker than the illustrations above indicate — the hardcover and paperback are each 453 pages) is a compilation of many of the nearly 200 columns I wrote for the Washington Post from 2017 to 2023 (and a handful of columns I wrote about Trump for The (Hillsboro) Times-Gazette from 2015 to 2017). The columns cover a variety of topics, but they particularly focus on Trump’s rise to political prominence and help explain his appeal.
Here’s a link to a website dedicated to the book.
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