Fascism and Bad Faith

DEI, Segregation, And The Bad Faith That Explains It All

Those on the right should not be allowed to sit behind the DEI shield any longer. If they won’t say what they mean, people should be told what they mean.

When John Roberts declared in 2013 that racism was over, he spoke for a generation of powerful and influential conservatives who very much needed racism to be over in order to remake the United States in their image.

Roberts, who in the 1980s as a clerk for far-right Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist took up the fight against the Voting Rights Act, finally got his chance – this time as chief justice – to strike a deathblow to the civil rights law in 2013. He had seen how it could be done: In 1980, only fifteen years after the Voting Rights Act was passed despite furious right-wing opposition, the Supreme Court – with the segregationist Rehnquist in the majority – ruled against the Mobile, Alabama NAACP because civil rights advocates could not prove a racist voting scheme was, in fact, racist.

It fell on the NAACP to prove racist intent, an impossible bar to clear. That was the point. This constituted the first major body blow to the VRA.

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Roberts learned from Rehnquist the bad-faith legal concept of “colorblindness” in policy making and legal rulings, an intentionally dishonest concept that animated Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential bid as anti-democracy forces began their takeover of the Republican Party. When Roberts arrived in Washington, D.C. in the early 80s, Reagan administration officials panned voting rights legislation as “government-imposed discrimination” that had created “a kind of racial spoils system in America” for historically marginalized groups. People of color, Reagan officials believed, had had it too good for too long.

No matter what the law said, Roberts learned in those early years, people should not be treated differently because of the color of their skin. It made adherents to this bullshit concept sound beneficent, downright egalitarian: No law should favor one race over another. This was the perfect bad-faith lens through which to destroy landmark Civil Rights legislation that sought to create a freer, fairer United States a century after Rehnquist’s ideological (and perhaps familial) ancestors lost the Civil War (to understand how racist Rehnquist was, consider he personally administered literacy tests to voters of color at Phoenix precincts in the early 60s, questioning their voting qualifications by asking them to read portions of the Constitution; he saw the Civil Rights movement as a means of “getting even” for slavery).

So in 2013, with a right-wing Supreme Court majority, Roberts at long last completed the mission of Rehnquist and Goldwater and other racist, anti-democracy forces that had dedicated their lives to shoring up the country’s hierarchies of domination and ensuring constitutional rights would never be applied universally. Roberts and his Republican justices, deploying the most vicious kind of legal bad faith, eliminated “preclearance” for voting law changes, offering a green light to every racist lawmaker in the country to implement any and all discriminatory alterations to election law.

Roberts’ evisceration of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act brought on a veritable avalanche of state-level laws designed to dilute the electoral power of brown and black communities. Republican-majority state legislatures saw Roberts wink from the bench and got to work making the US a more unequal place.

“Things have changed dramatically” since 1965, Roberts wrote in his opinion on the infamous Shelby County v. Holder. “Yet the Act has not eased Section 5’s restrictions or narrowed the scope of Section 4’s coverage formula along the way. Instead those extraordinary and unprecedented features have been reauthorized as if nothing has changed, and they have grown even stronger.”

The Roberts Court had delivered a resounding victory for Jim Crow forces long vanquished, but never forgotten. The ghosts of Rehnquist and other segregationists – those who hate the idea of America – surely cheered that day as the Promised One, John Roberts, finished the job.

Call Anti-DEI Forces What They Are

The Robertsian (Rehnquistian?) idea of how to whittle away at critically important civil rights laws and legal precedents, teeming with immeasurable amounts of bad faith, lies at the center of today’s right-wing backlash against so-called DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) policies. It has been updated to fit the times, to gel nicely with the country’s ascendant fascist movement, but it remains the same on its most basic level. Historical marginalized groups, namely folks of color, LGBTQ people, and women, should have absolutely no policy preferences because that is discriminatory to those (straight white guys) who fall outside the bounds of the prescribed beneficiaries. These policies, the thinking goes, are unfair in a post-civil rights era.

When you hear the president of the United States reflexively blame DEI for the tragic plane-helicopter crash near D.C. this week, what you are hearing is a bad-faith argument for ending all efforts to recognize historical inequities and address those with policies that would offer marginalized folks a fair chance in the workplace or the government or as citizens of the United States.

Trump and President Elon Musk and their henchmen use DEI as a shield in their fight for re-segregating the United States (Musk famously crushed Twitter's diversity efforts the second he bought the company). These men are allowed by many of their political opponents and the media to do this because DEI is a stand-in for what they really want to say. DEI has quickly morphed into a euphemism for words and phrases that are no longer accepted in mainstream circles, and could alienate large swatches of the U.S. electorate. DEI is a cousin to “politically correct,” a phrase used incessantly by right wingers in the 90s and early 2000s to describe any acknowledgment of historical wrongs and imbalances in the application of constitutional rights and the liberty of women, people of color, and LGBTQ folks.

DEI is the conjoined twin of "woke," used as a substitute slur during and after the mass racial justice protests of 2020. Those steeped in discrimination and institutionalized oppression as standard operating procedure have had to get creative with how they talk about their hatreds. These are not the Good Old Days.

As Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said last year after Republicans blamed his being black for the collapse of the Key Bridge, we all know what they want to say. It was hardly a mystery after conservatives came out publicly and called Scott a "DEI official." Their cowardice, in these moments, becomes terribly clear for all to see.

Opponents of fascism and media outlets should stop using the term DEI in their coverage. We need plain language to describe what the right is saying when it blames every last tragedy – from California wildfires to collapsing bridges to this week’s plane crash – on DEI. We need cable news chyrons to say “Trump blames people of color, women for plane crash.” We need headlines to tell folks that President Musk wants black folks and LGBTQ people out of the federal government.

These people should not be allowed to sit behind the DEI shield any longer. If they won’t engage in good faith and say what they mean, people should be told what they mean. No longer can we afford to play this maddening little bad-faith linguistic game with those intent on unraveling the constitutional order, a process that has begun in earnest. Americans need to be told as plainly as possible that those fighting diversity programs are segregationists who see the gains of the 20th century not as a hopeful moment in the fight against injustice, but as a setback to them personally.

And elected Democrats, if you're listening, please stop playing defense and, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – the only congressional Democrat who truly gets it – go on offense. Call this week's plane crash what it is: Not the consequence of a woman or black person having a government job, but the direct result of the chaos President Musk has sown in his hostile takeover of the United States.

Those on the right relentlessly attacking diversity programs in the corporate sector and in higher education claim to oppose so-called DEI practices because they are unfair to white men. Forget for a moment that these policies were non-controversial until fascist hatchetman like Christopher Rufo weaponized the term because people were mean to him online. DEI efforts can only be discriminatory if one believes – or purports to believe – that racism is a thing of the past, a long-dead societal virus that has been extinguished because we’ve had a black president and Oprah is really rich and Denzel Washington was in Gladiator 2 and black singers sometimes get Grammy awards. This is the Robertsian mindset: Diversity efforts are no longer necessary, and in fact constitute a massive, reverse-racist overreach by those who want white men at the bottom of the hierarchy of oppression. With this, the right has all the necessary justification for shredding diversity efforts in every facet of American life. With a new reality in place, this is the only path forward.

In this way, Trump and President Musk and congressional Republicans are only doing what is fair and right and moral. They are putting a stop to favoritism based on skin color. They are the new civil rights champions in a reality so infected by bad faith it can only be described as unreality. The ghost of Bill Rehnquist could hardly be more pleased.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.