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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning everyone. Well, with so many Trump initiatives and orders in his first few days, we'll take another close look at one of them right now. It's the halting of all federal government diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and the removal from the federal workforce of all employees who work on such programs. They were all being put on temporary paid leave as of 5:00 PM yesterday. The reporting on this is that they'll be reassigned if the government has the right openings or laid off.

One notable part of this is that Trump canceled a nearly 60-year-old executive order from President Lyndon Johnson that required nondiscrimination and affirmative action by federal contractors. It was one of Johnson's initiatives after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Here is LBJ the following year.

President Lyndon Johnson: You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him. Bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "You are free to compete with all the others" and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Brian Lehrer: On Monday night, Trump canceled that executive order, saying this as he signed the reversal.

President Trump: Here's the big deal. Merit. Our country is going to be based on merit again. Can you believe it?

Brian Lehrer: With more on this and to help invite calls and texts from federal workers and others is Russell Contreras, justice and race reporter at Axios, who's been on this story. Russell, thanks for coming on with us. Welcome to WNYC.

Russell Contreras: Good to be with you brother.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, you can help us report this story. Any federal workers listening right now who have been placed on paid leave because your job involves diversity, equity, or inclusion work? 212-433-WNYC. We would love to hear from you. Any owners or employees of federal contractors who can tell us what the 60-year history of LBJ's executive order has been, with regard to how you meet nondiscrimination and affirmative action goals? 212-433-WNYC. Anyone listening who works at other private sector companies now revisiting their DEI programs?

Axios notes that McDonald's and Meta are among the companies that are eliminating, or cutting back on, DEI programs. If you are an employee who maybe works in a DEI training program or other related position in any workplace or has felt aggrieved by your company's practices or policies in this regard. 212-433-9692. Maybe you work at a company like McDonald's or Meta where DEI policies have recently been scaled back under the recent political ascendancy of the backlash against them. 212-433-WNYC. Anyone in any of those categories.

Curious if we have any federal workers who've been put on leave as of last night because of the president's executive orders, or anyone with a long view on the LBJ federal contractors’ affirmative action policy that Trump has canceled. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. Call or text. Russell, there's a lot to get to, obviously, but let's start with a little history lesson about this LBJ executive order. The headline of your article calls it a bedrock civil rights measure. Can you tell us more about what it did at the time?

Russell Contreras: Yes, he signed this in September of '65, right after the summer march. Two years after Martin Luther King gave his well-known I Have a Dream speech at the march in Washington. There was a lot of optimism about civil rights, about voting rights. At this time, you start to see a shift where even Dr. King is saying that we need to do a little bit more because if we're going to access the American dream, we need to talk about systemic inequality. This order that he signed was the beginning of that, that federal contractors who do business with the government need to revamp its whole approach and not discriminate against people of color, the employees.

At this time in 1965, there were companies openly defying civil rights and saying, "I have a right not to hire people of color. It's my free speech." You look at the old clips and you hear people saying, "You can't change men's hearts." That's the language of the time. When he signed this law, it was a jolt to say, "Look, that old world is gone." That it is part of the federal government's role to monitor at least companies who do business with the federal government, that they do not discriminate against people of color. Now, that executive order was amended over the years. Obama amended it, George W. Bush amended it, to include other groups that protected women, LGBTQ+. It is a 60-year building of an effort.

This little small area is about how the federal government deals with contractors and how they can enforce civil rights and equity. Now, over the time, conservatives have always been against it. It started with segregationists who say, "Look, this is against our culture," and so forth. Over time, there was an intellectual response by conservatives, moving away from the segregationist argument, to something more like, "Well, this is about meritocracy." It's problematic. Over time, that fringe argument became part of the mainstream. That's what you saw the other day when Trump signed it. This was the building up of six decades of resistance to policies like this. It came through with this executive order.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Here is a text already. An example of the language that people use in objecting to the affirmative action programs. Listener writes, "Love the terms nondiscriminatory and affirmative hiring. Literally a contradiction in one breath." There’s a very short articulation of the objection to that from one of our listeners. You note, as a matter of intrigue, that Trump did not reverse LBJ's affirmative action rules when Trump was president the first time. Why not? What changed?

Russell Contreras: This is part of the larger scale of where his executive orders are coming from. The first administration was disorganized. What my colleague Brittany Gibson and I have been looking at is, this time-- They've been an administration in exile for four years. They've been studying things. They've been rewriting these executive orders. When he retook office and he signed these orders, these executive orders were locked and loaded. They had been work-shopped. Now they feel they have more legal foundations where they can withstand challenges stronger than they can.

That's not necessarily saying they will stay, but they are doing things like, "We're going to study this or we're going to study that and we're going to rescind this." They’re walking in with a lot more armor this time. The 100 or so executive orders, were ready to go. When they came in, they had an idea of what they wanted to do. Now, the first administration was more-- They had more dreams of things, but not necessarily a plan. Remember, he didn't think he was going to win. This is where it's fundamentally different. Now, this administration in exile was work-shopping this and they walked into the office with a plan and now they executed that plan.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Administration in exile, or another way to look at it is this is very Project 2025.

Russell Contreras: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: I looked up the labor section of Project 2025 this morning. We did a segment on that when it was new during the campaign. It says, "For example, the President should issue an executive order banning and Congress should pass a law prohibiting the federal government from using taxpayer dollars to fund all critical race theory training." Now they use the term critical race theory. Trump doesn't and people who work in DEI, they don't say critical race theory. That's a slur in this context, but they're talking about the same thing.

It goes on from Project 2025's document. "Direct the Department of Justice and the EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act." It says, "The President should direct the Department of Justice and EEOC to enforce Title VII to prohibit racial classifications and quotas." Then it says, "Amend Title VII. The next administration should work with Congress to amend Title VII to prohibit the EEOC from collecting EEO1 data and any other racial classifications in employment for both public and private workplaces." They want to change the civil rights laws. I don't think Trump went there yet, to not even see how underrepresented certain groups are. Right?

Russell Contreras: That's right. If you don't have the data to show the systemic problems, then you can say it doesn't exist. You can then revise history or say, "Look, it's raining outside." No, it's actually sunny. You can do that. Especially with social media now and our distrust in media. As long as you take away data and facts, you can change the narrative. This is all over the place. With immigration, for example. I'm doing a number of things on immigration where a lot of those folks who support the executive orders on immigration restrictions will say it's because of crime.

When you show data that immigrants don't commit crime, in fact, less than 1% of those who are getting deported right now are being accused of any crime. That when you change the data and you change that. You can change the narrative. This is what's happening here. It's reframed as critical race theory, as you mentioned, and also DEI. You’re going after fundamental civil rights, which many of us thought was litigated decades ago, that this was a good thing, that this is not going to be under attack. We're at a time where we can't even reaffirm the Voting Rights Act.

We can't reestablish that, and Congress can't get their votes to pass it again to reaffirm that. This idea of DEI and critical race theory being a threat, again, that was a fringe idea a few years ago. It was on talk radio, it was on social media. Now it's not so much. It comes in part of the time, that some of my colleagues at Axios have reported, that Trump was going in with the idea that he wanted to correct grievances of white Americans. They feel like they're the most discriminated. That's the new civil rights movement from his perspective.

It's part of that whole narrative and it's also part of this fringe idea about white replacement theory that people of color, women, gay and lesbians, were working to displace white males from positions of power. This was an old idea. It was fringe, usually on the neo-Nazi part of the dark web, but now it's mainstream. It’s part of this narrative of attacking DEI. Many civil rights leaders and civil rights organizations were predicting this. Some were thrown off and did not know that they would be this strong. Those of Covenant saw this tide building and now here we are.

Brian Lehrer: We're getting a call from an employment attorney, I think for a private company. Let's hear what she has to say. Rebecca in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Rebecca.

Rebecca: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. A lot of what's been happening over the past three days is very upsetting. I'm going to focus on this one thing. I am responsible for our EEO1 filings and our affirmative action filings. We are a subcontractor of the federal government. Obviously, that aspect of my role is now illegal. What we utilized that collection of data for, something that you and your guests mentioned a couple minutes ago, is that we utilize that data to see what our workforce looks like, where we have issues, where we need to be more inclusive, where we might need to recruit a more diverse pool of candidates. If that data collection is now going to be unlawful, we lose that ability to collect that data and we lose that touch point.

One thing that's going to be really difficult here is the states are going to make up for this and it's going to become a compliance nightmare. Because California and New York are going to do one thing and then you're going to have Texas and Florida and it's going to become a web of chaos. 60 some odd years of affirmative action data collection wiped away is so upsetting and really going to be difficult on us. Having a touch point of what our workplace looks like. It's really upsetting.

Brian Lehrer: Since you work for a federal contractor as an employment attorney, can you describe for our listeners at all what you've done, what your company has done to comply with the executive order from LBJ as it has existed? How do you demonstrate to the federal government that you have been engaging in nondiscrimination and affirmative action in your hiring or promotion or whatever other employment policies?

Rebecca: We do statistical analysis every year. We use an outside law firm to do statistical analysis of us on our hires, our hiring pool, our promotions, our attrition, voluntary and involuntary, to see how our population reflects the population of certain state cities and localities, to see whether we're on par with our hiring and certain protected characteristics that we're allowed to collect for the federal government, the ethnicities that we're allowed to collect. We do affirmative action plans for each of our office locations every year, and then we sign off on an attestation every year for the government, letting them know that we're compliant with that.

Brian Lehrer: what does an affirmative action plan in this regard look like? Because I think Trump is trying to make a distinction between nondiscrimination and affirmative action, which he defines as discrimination.

Rebecca: An affirmative action plan, basically, you are talking about the different ways in which you're trying to get at that population where you're not maybe meeting the percentage that they are in the community in your workforce, and talking about all these different ways that you're reaching out to them, whether it's specific job pools or specific schools, et cetera. Then you also have placement goals, which is where if you're under a certain percentage or statistically significant, you'll have certain placement goals for hiring or promoting a certain protected characteristic in a certain role.

Brian Lehrer: That's where Trump would say, quotas.

Rebecca: Yes, but they're not. We don't call them quotas. They're placement goals and they were protected by the federal government.

Brian Lehrer: Rebecca, thank you so much for your call. Thank you. We really appreciate your honesty about your feelings about this as well as giving us so much context about what at least one company does. Russell Contreras, from Axios, thinking anything as you were listening to that exchange?

Russell Contreras: Yes. Rebecca says something interesting is that it could become a compliance nightmare if the states step in and try to take over the collection of this data. I keep thinking of, when she mentioned that, how we tried to collect data on our schools. Every state has its own system. When you try to say, "Let's look at the achievement gaps of, say, Black and Latino students," every state, when you do that and you try to compare, say-- I live in New Mexico. New Mexico, when it's compared to Massachusetts, immediately people here say, "Well, it's different. They collect the data different."

It's an easy way to for a state to dismiss its role in falling behind other states to say, "Massachusetts does it differently. New York does it differently." That could be a problem. If every state collects this data differently, how they define race could be different. You don't have a central data collecting place like the federal government, if every states do it. Some states honestly won't collect any data. We're going to have various holes and it's going to be hard to compare to see how companies are doing statewide and if there's even any consistently. It is going to be a nightmare if that's the case.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call. Here's Michael in Washington Heights. Michael, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Michael: Good morning, Brian. There are two things I wanted to ask you and your guest about. The first relates to the emails that the agency had sent to federal employees yesterday asking them to effectively inform on other employees or departments that are misleadingly titled in order to find DEI related roles. I was wondering if there was any precedent for that in the context of a new administration, a threat of consequences for not complying with a purge like that. Then the second issue I wanted to raise is I think that this executive order relates to the federal government, to DEI and a for accessibility employees.

I worry that the accessibility aspect of this has been lost in the shuffle. There's important things the government does for disabled people, obviously, ensuring their access to services. It seems like that is also being removed here. I wanted to ask you both your thoughts on those items. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Michael. Yes. On his second point, on his second question, I've been reading through the text of the executive order as you published it in Axios. I'll read a few more excerpts from it as we go for the listeners. I don't see anything about anything other than race being explicitly rolled back here. Am I missing it?

Russell Contreras: No. It's actually women, too, as well, LGBTQ+. Because it's been amended so many times over the years. Accessibility, that's also there that it is. It encompasses everything. We focused on race because of the attack on the LBJ. Basically the initial response was this attack on the LBJ that focused on race. Over time it developed to include other classes. Even George W. Bush admitted it to include people of faith, religious minorities and so forth. He was mainly focusing on evangelicals to make sure they weren't discriminated and so forth. In that particular--

Brian Lehrer: That, I should add, is part of the Project 2025 labor section. I didn't read that particular part a minute ago, and I was excerpting from it. While it seeks to have the administration roll back all these protections for other groups, it explicitly says there should be protections for religious liberty.

Russell Contreras: That's right.

Brian Lehrer: Which I guess means for business owners who want to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people, that kind of thing.

Russell Contreras: Yes. The other thing is that we have to keep in mind that when the LBJ signed this, especially in the south, religious conservatives, Christian evangelicals at the time, said it was their theological preference if they wanted to discriminate against African Americans or even Latinos in Texas at the time. There’s always been a religious component who resisted integration, who resisted giving people of color opportunity. That was--

Brian Lehrer: That was Barry Goldwater's position.

Russell Contreras: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: The Republican candidate for President in 1964 who said, "Look, it's not up to the government to tell people who they can associate with." Which is another way of saying, if you don't want black customers in your business, that's your right in the private sector.

Russell Contreras: That's right. The irony of that is he had a tattoo on his body, some Native American art. That was always the irony when he said that. I always thought that was interesting, especially in 1964. Nixon would tone it down, but he would a wink, wink, nod. Even Nixon himself supported programs like this because he thought that this was the right thing to do because it was good business at the time. There was also a radical response to it, an anti-capitalist response. Many of these laws are saying, "No, we want to integrate. Integrate you into the market." We see this as a necessity.

On the emails, that is something that's interesting. I've never seen-- Anytime there's been transitions, there's always been suggesting that the new administration is sending veil threats. I've never seen it like this. Asking federal employees to snitch on each other is what some employees have told us. This is a snitch operation. Then there's an attempt to change the names of programs to try to keep the same goals going. The emails that were suggested say, "No, let us know about those efforts, because we don't want anything to deal with any DEI, whether you rename it or anything. We're trying to get rid of it all."

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Well, the thing that the employment attorney who called in was talking about-- Is that your understanding that some of those things would now be illegal for the federal workforce. That is, if you have a job opening, you don't post an ad wherever you post ads for job openings these days to the "general population." In order to be reaching out to groups that are underrepresented compared to their local population, maybe you'll put the ad particularly in a Black oriented newspaper or reach out to colleges that might be graduating people who tend to be in certain demographic groups, in HBCU, or something like that. Would that now be stopped at the federal level as a matter of this new executive order?

Russell Contreras: I think so. I think we might see it. We really don't know. I do see a world where people may have advertised, say, a trade publication that targets workers of color, that they may have done that. I believe that those probably are at risk now. Those advertising and say an HBCU or Hispanic Serving College Institute, they can go around it and say, "No, we're looking for regional diversity and reported workforce." They may be able to get away with that, but for how long, I don't know. Now, we have to keep in mind, there's going to be challenges to these executive orders.

There will be lawsuits like there are with the immigration thing. Employment is a little different because, what Project 2025 argued and, some conservatives, said, "No, we already have laws that outlaw discrimination." What civil rights leaders say is what these executive orders did, they gave teeth to enforcement. What one person told me is now this is giving a message that we're no longer looking. We're not looking that way. You can go back to pre-1965 world. Now, will that happen? Has the world changed enough? That's the question that we have to ask ourselves.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Russell Contreras, juice and race reporter at Axios, as we take a deep dive into the executive order from President Trump this week, repealing, reversing, canceling the executive order From President Johnson 60 years ago in all the ways it's been amended by subsequent presidents to have nondiscrimination and affirmative action, affirmative action in particular, and DEI programs in the federal government. We're going to hear another clip from Johnson from 1965. We're going to hear a clip from Mark Zuckerberg from the other day on Joe Rogan, in this regard, and take more of your calls. Stay with us.

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President Lyndon Johnson: This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom, but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity, but human ability. Not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and equality as a result.

Brian Lehrer: LBJ in 1965, referring to the executive order that he signed that year that Trump has now done away with in his first days in office, requiring nondiscrimination and affirmative action on the part of federal contractors, as we continue to discuss that with Russell Contreras, who's reporting on it as the ice and race reporter at Axios. Let's take another call. Monique in Tarrytown, you're on WNYC. Hi, Monique.

Monique: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I was calling to say that the whole issue of equity and equality is so very complex, as we all agree. That was 60 years ago and much has changed. 25 years ago I used to work for the city of Chicago and I saw how all of this was gamed where husbands would put their wives in charge in order to be a WBE. Where folks that were very wealthy, but they happened to be born in Latin America, got minority status. Things could get so twisted. Then what happens is that certain things should be merit based, like a cardiologist, a pilot. Then what happens is that you have a stigma to those Black and Hispanic professionals. Are they here because of their melanin or because of their merit?

However, things that are non-skilled, that should be based on reflecting the community and not by connections and be reflective. Finally, I want to say that if you want equality, you need equality in education, in nutrition and health. Because if we have smart, strong, loved, young people, all Americans, they can all have an equal shot and do it on merit. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Monique. Interesting complex take. I don't see anything in the executive order. Tell me if it's there, Russell, that makes the distinction that Monique made between certain jobs where, for whatever reason, pure merit should apply. Of course, I don't mean to suggest that there really are unqualified cardiologists out there, to use her example, who are being hired anywhere because of the color of their skin. That’s the example that she used as opposed to lower level, less skilled jobs where it does make sense in her opinion, to be sensitive to the population in the workforce compared to the general population. There's no such distinction in this rollback of the longstanding executive order by Trump. Right?

Russell Contreras: No, I don't see any distinction at all. Because when the federal government looks for engineers, for example, you have to reach certain criteria. I couldn't apply for a job as an engineer. They say, "Oh, look, here's Russ, as Spanish guy, let's give him the gig." You still have to follow certain guidelines and you have to meet certain criteria. I would say in the cardiologist, where this could be effective is if it goes down all the way down to the state level. This becomes something that rolls down. You could prevent that Black cardiologist into medical school that now we don't have these opportunities. You may not even get a black cardiologist. Yes, we all want, if I have something wrong with my heart, I want the best. The idea of the Black cardiologists are coming out of the woodwork--

Brian Lehrer: On what you said, I think Monique is suggesting that there's an assumption in the way you put it that Black students aren't going to qualify to go to medical school unless they get preferences.

Russell Contreras: That's always been the argument. If you look at how we define meritocracy, what it basically is, is looking down on who we think is qualified. We don't take a second look. That's always something I'm always cautious about. Now she says something interesting and she mentioned class where like a wealthy person from Latin America. That's a good point. If we look at our Spanish language media, for example, it is not reflective of Latinos in the United States. These are a lot of wealthy folks from Latin America who come and report. You don't get a lot of Mexican Americans or Puerto Ricans, especially in New York, who are reporting on that. Yes, I think that's good. There's always been the criticism of these programs that it's not class based.

You're not looking at African Americans from the Mississippi Delta. You're regurgitating middle class ethos and those audiences. That's a fair critique. Now, I don't know what she said about Chicago. Of course, we always have our stereotypes about Chicago and city governments and how corrupt they are. It could be any program, whether it's diversity or inclusion or some other program where people tried to game the system. I don't think that deviates from the goals of what any DEI does. Those should always look at case by case. In terms of looking at how we think of meritocracy.

I always caution and say, "Yes, you may not want an unqualified civil engineer working on the highways, but how are we training those civil engineers?" What are we doing on the back end to get them prepared? Are we giving them opportunities? She mentioned all the way in education. Are they getting their opportunities all the way in elementary, in science and mathematics? Are we allowing the systemic racism and the systemic problems we have to be regurgitated all the top and then throw our hands and say, "Hey, it's not our fault they're not qualified." We need to hire the first one. It's always something that we have to question and look inward on.

Brian Lehrer: Your article did readers of service by printing some of the text of the Trump executive order. Because it wasn't just, "I hereby cancel the LBJ 1965 executive order that requires federal contractors to engage in nondiscrimination and affirmative action." It had more text than that and I'm going to read a little bit of it as you printed it. It says, "I further order all agencies to enforce our long standing civil rights laws and to combat illegal private sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs." It continues, "The federal government is charged with enforcing our civil rights laws.

The purpose of this order is to ensure that it does so by ending illegal preferences and discrimination." Then, as you point out, it goes even a step further and orders federal agencies to compile lists of public companies, universities and large foundations for investigations and possible civil action over their DEI programs. Russell, that makes it sound like this isn't just an order to the federal government and the different agencies within the government for what it can do in its hiring or contracting practices. This sounds like a directive to the attorney general and the Justice Department to go out and investigate every large institution and take them to court if they're still having DEI programs and affirmative action.

Russell Contreras: Yes. That's where I think civil rights leaders think they have a court challenge. Because what essentially this is doing is trying to overturn the Civil Rights act that was passed. Now that was passed legislatively. This is the same thing that critics say the Trump administration is doing with immigration. It's attempting to use executive orders to redefine current law. Look at the asylum. There was some executive orders on asylum saying you can't apply for asylum. Current law says you can, when you come through a port of entry, you cross the borders, you can say I want asylum. The same thing with civil rights laws that, that companies have to comply with federal law. What this executive order says is, "No, you don't have to do that anymore," is what some critics would say.

That's where you're going to see court challenges there. Because, yes, it's sending a message to private companies that, "No, you can get rid of your DEI programs." We mentioned, what's going on with Facebook and McDonald's. The difference, I would say, from 1965 to now is the civil rights groups could call for boycotts and they were effective in bringing down either opinion or bringing a company to its knees. I don't know if that's even possible now. I do see some civil rights leaders calling for the boycott of McDonald's. I don't see how that could happen now because the way our neighborhoods are drawn and their food deserts, McDonald's is like a high calorie option, where sometimes that's the only option.

People not are engaged in the news. I don't see that happening. I think a lot of companies think this a different world and maybe people aren't paying attention to and they're not going to respond the same way they did 60 years ago.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. On Facebook Meta, including Facebook, as an example of a company that's now rolling back its DEI program. Here's a few seconds of Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan's podcast last week.

Mark Zuckerberg: It's one thing to say we want to be welcoming and make a good environment for everyone. I think it's another to basically say that masculinity is bad.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to do a separate segment at some point on Mark Zuckerberg's rant on Joe Rogan about wanting to put more masculine aggression into the workplace. To the point of the clip, your colleagues at Axios also have an article about the CEO of Cisco, Chuck Robbins, defending DEI at his company in an Axios interview with the World Economic Forum in Davos yesterday. He’s also the chair of the influential Business Roundtable in the United States, which has a lot of contact with the government over policy and over what businesses want.

He said the pendulum swings a little wide in both directions on this issue, which is what Zuckerberg was saying in that clip. Chuck Robbins said DEI is maybe 150 different things and maybe seven of them got a little out of hand. In general on DEI, "You can't argue with the fact that a diverse workforce is better." Chuck Robbins' words. Any thought on that and the pendulum swinging wide in both directions, as he put it, and searching for a sweet spot?

Russell Contreras: Yes, he makes a good point. Because now, 60 years later, the country is so much more diverse than it was in 1965. By midcentury, we're expected to be a "Majority minority country." Also from the civil rights movement to now, a lot of companies have moved on and said, "DEI now makes good marketing sense," with such diverse consumers. If you look at the, the buying power of Black Americans and Latinos, you can say that their GDP is larger than many developed countries. I think Latino GDP, for example, is getting close to Germany's GDP.

Many of these businesses are saying, "Who cares what the federal government or anybody says? We're keeping this program because it makes good business sense. Our consumers will see what we're doing and they'll, okay, they feel part of this family. They'll want to spend dollars with it." There is an aspect-- He sees a different world where despite the political rhetoric, consumers do respond with their dollars. In that case, when you see these companies still advertising in these various communities-- Black newspapers, Latino newspapers are gone. There's very few of them left.

They do advertise in Black conferences. I am a member of the National Association of Black Journalists. A lot of companies will still market there to say, "We're still in the community." Look at all these auto companies, so forth. However, a lot of these organizations may be reluctant to criticize the McDonald's if they're still sponsoring their conferences. They may say things open and a small statement here and there, but are they going to confront them at the policies if they're still sponsoring the late night party at a conference or something? That's something that they're ethically going to have to face.

We're seeing a different dynamic overall. Yes, it swings back and forth, but are we actually going to go back to the world of segregation in 1964? I don't know if that's even possible. What is going to happen is the reaction. Some that are actually pulling back at the DEI when the pendulum switches the other way. Some people are going to have a really long memory and say, "I remember what you did when we needed your backing. Now we're going to respond accordingly with our dollars."

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Javier in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Javier.

Javier: Hey, good morning, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. I appreciate being included in this conversation. I have been a diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging practitioner for over five and a half years. I have a couple of key points that I want to raise. In the DEI work or DEIB work, you can hire whatever practitioner you want. You can hire a conservative person, a moderate person, a white person, a Black or brown person, a queer person, a Trans person. Who you hire as a company, as a government agency, and as an organization is going to give you what you're looking for, or maybe not looking for.

I think the work that I did, I encountered many clients who didn't know what they wanted to do. They didn't know how to change their philanthropic portfolio to address the Black community. They didn't know how to engage Latinex communities in upstate New York. A lot of the DEI work that I would do was deconstructing their practices and trying to create inclusive and belonging practices to do their work well, which helps out their bottom line, their engagement, et cetera. What this all comes down to is that white people got tired of seeing us talk.

White people, white men, white women, got annoyed that we were saying, "Hey, your practices can be improved. Your systems are broken, but this is how you can improve it." They don't like being told what to do.

Brian Lehrer: One of the ways that gets expressed, Javier, is people say, I think Trump said it in one of his appearances this week, that it divides the world reductively into white people who are the oppressors and people of color who are the oppressed. You've heard this?

Javier: Of course, but that's what you signed up for in some instances. Not every practitioner goes hard like that. There were so many Black and brown, indigenous, queer practitioners, they didn't lean in that direction right away. If you hire a practitioner that's going to deconstruct institutional historical racism, they have it in their bio, you know who you're hiring. To act as if people were surprised is BS. People knew who they were hiring. People wanted to hire specific people. Organizations and institutions benefited. What they got tired of is they got tired of seeing our faces.

We started to take over the expertise and how the organization could run better. We started to give them the advisory roles that had been always given to their friends and others, and they started to get upset at it. The dishonesty of white America about how they see us as people will always grind my gears, because that's what this is all about.

Brian Lehrer: Give us a little primer. If you can do it really concisely for you as a practitioner in this field, for people who haven't been exposed and hear the letters DEI as jargon that they find impenetrable. What's the difference between diversity, equity and inclusion? Why does the title need to include all three of those words? Really short version, if you can.

Javier: Diversity is you have 10 people at the table. We want to create seven of those slots to be dedicated to people who are non-white. That's bean counting 101. Equity. You want to create equity in your practice, your hiring practices, your system practices to ensure that there's maybe more diverse representation or decision making, et cetera. Inclusion. You're at the table making decisions. You as a company can make a decision. Do we want to embrace diversity? Yes, we want to get more Black and brown people, more Trans people around the table. Okay.

Equity. We want to change some systems so that way that we're leading our work, we see that manifested in our product. Inclusion. We have more Black, brown, Trans folks, decision makers. You can make a decision as a company. It's not all at once. I think that that's the lack of education and the dishonesty of white America who allowed this DEI to become a slur.

Brian Lehrer: Javier, thank you very much for participating in this conversation. To wrap it up, Russell, it seems to me, to bring it back to Trump, that there's even a larger frame here. He pardoned the leader of the Proud Boys far right group, as we all know, for his January 6th convictions and a handful of other Proud Boys participants. The Proud Boys, who the AP describes as a male only group of neo-fascists, which describes themselves as Western chauvinists. Trump has never said a bad word about the Proud Boys or any other such group per se. This week it was that they were hostages or persecuted or suffered enough. He doesn't ever center that about Black people, despite this country's history with the same language or the same emotion.

Maybe there's a larger frame here about why a group like the Proud Boys never draws a bad word from Trump, yet programs aimed at writing centuries of discrimination continually do. Trump, who's 78, can be seen as still fighting the culture wars of the 1960s. Maybe these include battles, as we know, over women's equality, LGBTQ rights, Native American rights, environmentalism, rejecting excessive corporate power and the concentration of wealth, and implementing the war on Poverty through government benefits like Medicaid, in addition to race, explicitly. All of which are aimed at sharing the riches of this very rich country more fairly.

The right sees it as taking away from them and they're defending against that. Maybe that's Trump's bigger frame of reference. The equality movements of our country are seen through a lens of discriminating mostly against white men. It's 60 years of resentment that is now getting expressed in executive orders. You think?

Russell Contreras: That's right? Trump represents the boomer part of your discussion. What's happening is there's a new generation led the Stephen Millers who have read various racist texts, like the camp of the saints who are trying to re articulate what you said and into a new world. They see Trump as their muse, their path to what they wanted with this world that you described that was fringe for many years, that now is mainstream. Trump is able to put a boomer spin to this neo view about the world, this anti-diversity world that there needs to be some mechanism for white grievance that's built up through all these years.

It's now articulated, not through the eyes of segregationists, but through the eyes of young whites who believe that their world is changing. Not only are we seeing a more diverse world, we have to keep in mind that people are going to church less. Say white Christian evangelicals who got Trump over the line in this last election. They're seeing church decline. Their power is decreasing. They may have maintained power in one political party, but in the whole culture they're losing their hold. Yet they continue to hold power and especially the way they look about diversity currently right now. Now, will this hold? Will people try to overturn this? That's what remains to be seen. that's something that I'm really fascinated in the next couple elections.

Brian Lehrer: Mark Zuckerberg says the corporate world, which is still so dominated by men at the top, has been too feminized. More on that tomorrow. For today, we thank Russell Contreras who reports on race and justice for Axios. Thanks, Russell.

Russell Contreras: Thanks for having me. To be clear, the most manly men I know are NPR and WMPR listeners. I want to say that.

Brian Lehrer: All right, let's go to a bar. Thank you very much. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Stay with us.

 

 

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