The Real ‘DEI’ Candidates

Before Tuesday’s debate, Donald Trump and his supporters insisted that Kamala Harris was a lightweight who was barely able to speak coherently. Trump has called Harris “dumb as a rock,” “low-IQ,” “unable to put two sentences together,” and “unable to put two sentences together without a teleprompter.” Republicans have said that Harris was chosen “because of her ethnic background,” that she’s a “DEI hire” who “gets more favorable treatment because of her race and gender.”

After all that, focus groups, public polling, Trump’s advisers, and the conservative-media figures who maintain his cult of personality all concluded that the Republican lost the debate, despite his protestations otherwise, and his refusal to try again confirms this. “THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!” Trump posted. “You want to know who won? Find out who refuses to” debate again, Mike Collins, a Republican representative from Georgia, posted on X. I guess we know!

Conservatives have fixated on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in recent years as, in their view, a kind of reverse discrimination against white people, white men in particular, that elevates people to jobs they are unqualified to do. Inadvertently, their reactions to Harris, and her subsequent thrashing of Trump, illustrate why diversity outreach is important and necessary in a world where people still face discriminatory assumptions because of their race and gender.

Many conservatives have focused on DEI not because of their moral and sometimes practical objections to diversity efforts—which can be meritorious; not every diversity initiative is good or appropriate—but because it allows them to express underlying assumptions about the inherent inferiority of Black people and women implicitly, without sounding like they are making those assumptions themselves. This way they can argue that it is not that they think Black people and women are inferior; it is that diversity initiatives inherently elevate people who are unqualified. For example, when Harris announced that she and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, would do the traditional postconvention interview with both of them (as Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, did), conservatives suggested that she must be incapable of being interviewed alone.

After Harris’s performance on Tuesday, conservatives tried to reconcile the difference between their perception of her as an idiot and the reality of what they saw onstage. Conspiracy theories abounded—Trump insisted that she’d had the questions beforehand, while conservatives on social media speculated that she had speakers in her earrings that were telling her what to say. I don’t want to overstate the importance of debating—being a good debater says very little about whether you would be a good president—but the right’s assumptions about Harris’s intellectual capacity were clearly invalidated by her performance.

[Adam Serwer: What Trump’s Kamala Harris smear reveals]

Now, it would be simpler for conservatives who claimed Harris was an imbecile to admit that maybe the current vice president and former senator, attorney general, and district attorney is just smarter than they were giving her credit for. But that would require abandoning the assumptions about Black people and women that drove them to make their initial assessment. They cannot do that, because doing so would illustrate why diversity efforts are necessary in the first place: that plainly competent people are often wrongly assumed to be stupid because they are not white men, and denied opportunities as a result.

Indeed, former President Barack Obama faced almost identical criticisms from the right, despite the ease with which he can extemporaneously discuss complex policy matters. The best statistical evidence shows that racial discrimination in employment remains pervasive, in part because of the pervasiveness and power of these assumptions, which not even Black people in the most elite professions can escape. If people like Harris and Obama are constantly facing a barrage of insults about their intelligence, what do you think things are like for regular people who have to face these assumptions every time they apply for a job?

Nothing is inherently racist about arguing that a Black person is incompetent; what is racist is assuming that because he or she is Black. Harris ran a weak Democratic primary campaign in 2020, and doubts about her strength as a candidate were totally rational. But those were not the criticisms that conservatives offered. Rather, their objections were far more extreme—debasing her political and intellectual talent—objections that were all conditioned by prejudiced assumptions about the capabilities of Black people and women.

Conservatives have taken to referring to DEI as “didn’t earn it.” But to the extent that the candidates are running on unearned advantages related to personal biography, this better describes Trump and Vance than it does Harris, who worked her way up from local to state to federal office over the course of decades.

Trump was born a multimillionaire who drove one business after another into the ground, and his reputation as a brilliant businessman is largely due to him playing one on television. His term as president was mired by incompetence and corruption despite being relatively uneventful, and when faced with a real crisis—the coronavirus pandemic—he proceeded to bungle it in a catastrophic fashion that led to needless deaths and economic calamity. Vance has spent very little time in elected office, an office he won mostly on the success of his memoir and a Trump primary endorsement in a red state. He appears to have been selected as the vice-presidential nominee on the basis of his willingness to debase himself on Trump’s behalf. Neither of them has a compelling record of public service.

That’s the irony—the actual “didn’t earn it” candidates are the two white guys running on the Republican ticket.