Olatunde Johnson
Appearances
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Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
I kind of was thinking Mariah, but I'll mix it up and say Whitney. You know, I got to say, I would have guessed either.
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Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
Exactly, sissy. Yeah.
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Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
I'm not sure which one, actually. Yeah, I'm just going to go with I have a dream because I mean, I love the mountaintop speech, but well, I'm not. It trails a little at points. So I'm going with an A. All right.
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Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
Oh, that is wonderful. And hopefully we got a chance to educate people through our mistakes.
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Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
Thank you. Thank you so much, Brittany.
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Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
So when I saw private companies in the wake of the election rolling back their DEI initiatives, I thought, oh, they're beginning to see that Trump may win. And they're fearing either federal government action against them or state and local because there had also been state laws purporting to ban DEI. So they were looking at some of the political tea leaves. I will mention one more thing.
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Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
There was some shareholder activism even before the election to try to get rid of DEI. So they were facing pressure in some cases from shareholders.
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Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
Yeah, I mean, I thought it was interesting that you were talking about DEI as a cultural moment, right? Because there's cultural language around the attack on DEI. It's a political movement, but the term is not a really clear concept legally.
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Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
Nevertheless, we've seen this really intensive campaign against something that people who oppose affirmative action call racial preferences, and that's the explicit use of race as a factor. And it starts in higher education.
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Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
You get this case, SSFA, which you mentioned against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill saying that they are practicing race conscious affirmative action. It violates the equal protection clause. So the court says in that case, You can't do that.
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Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
But immediately afterwards, you see a move by conservative activists, state attorney generals in some states to apply it to the employment context. The case mentions nothing about employment. A lot of private employers aren't covered by the Constitution.
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Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
But there's an attempt to say that any kind of consideration of race, even to bring people together in a workplace or to remedy past discrimination, is going to violate the Equal Protection Clause. It's really a big leap. It hasn't been established by the Supreme Court, but that's what is the effort. It's a political effort to use that legal ruling in a very different context.
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Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
Oh, there are so many. Pauli Murray, Bayard Rustin. I might pick Ted Shaw, who a lot of people don't know about, but who headed the NAACP Legal Defense Fund for a long time and is a professor at UNC. He is so wise. So I would want to hear from him.
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Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
Yeah, I think it's going to lead to a lot of confusion in the private sector. There is a fear in the language, both in the executive order and then some of the surrounding language, that private companies might be investigated as if they are violating civil rights laws just by having DEIA offices. And because that term is so broad, and as we talked about,
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Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
It may lead to confusion about what do we now, can we not celebrate these holidays? Can we not acknowledge this history? And what groups does it apply to? And how does that meet our statutory obligations to enforce civil rights law?
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Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
I think on all of us. It can make workplaces and other arenas less inclusive, tolerant, equal. I think it has a severe impact on all of us. I mean, one of the questions I always ask myself is, what's the vision of society at the end? And this was... referred to also by Wesley in his comments, this kind of vision of scarcity.
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Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
And I think about Heather McGee's wonderful book, The Sum of Us, which is to say, what if we envision the creation of public institutions, social goods, economic goods, not on a model of scarcity, but one of true full participation and thriving so that we're not at each other? What's the end game here? And this kind of
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Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
we all have to fight for this limited pie could really lead to a society where you're getting back to forms of hierarchy or entrenching forms of hierarchy around race and sex. It can also really, I think, lead to the demonization of particular groups.
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Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
I mean, I think some of the most vulnerable populations, least protected by majoritarian politics, as we'd say in the law, are on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. And you worry about violence, demonization, and real sort of casting out of people based on their background or identity. And that would be unfortunate.
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Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
And I think we should all feel like that's a harm to our moral core as well as affects our economic bottom line.