Wesley Lowery
Appearances
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
That's what I was going to guess, too. I was going to guess B, zinc.
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
We agreed before this, we were just not going to get any of the questions right.
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
So this is, yeah, this is hard.
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
It's all under investigation. I understand that.
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
I'm pretty sure they didn't give him a Grammy for the Vietnam speech. That seems very unlikely. And I also prefer the mountaintop speech, but my guess here is going to be the I Have a Dream speech.
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
That's educator right there. Look at that.
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
Because I have common sense, okay? And unfortunately, a lot of people don't.
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
Yeah, that's right. I just think that it was... unfortunately unsurprising that kind of we had seen this coming, this playbook being run and played even before Donald Trump was elected. That shareholder activism, the set of conservative activists who were pushing around these ideas and also doing everything they could to take something that had been seen as a positive and
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
And yet what we saw was a very effective campaign over the course of several years to divorce the concept of diversity, equity, inclusion from what it actually kind of was intended to mean at its core by its best practitioners and to associate it broadly with any initiative, any program, any policy, any scholarship, anything that may in some way work towards remedying some type of disparity or inequity.
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
A lot of it is, and I actually think that's a really important point. I think that for many people, certainly probably from the middle of the political spectrum towards the left of it, there's a very specific belief and idea of what terms like civil rights mean or what they invoke, what we're talking about, right?
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
But what we have to remember is that there are more expansive definitions or people who use those terminologies in different ways. And so what we see frequently with the partisan turnover at the White House is that you will see different administrations who begin to interpret the charge of, say, a division like the Civil Rights Division.
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
And so to go to times that were a little less charged – although having lived through them, it's funny to think about this era as less charged, although it objectively was –
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
When George W. Bush comes in and he is running the federal government and he's got a Republican attorney general, the people who he was appointing to run the civil rights division of DOJ operated very differently than the people who had been there during the Clinton administration before him and very differently than the people who ran it under Obama afterwards, right?
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
That there was a different understanding of what would be prioritized, what would be sought after, right? And what we see – is this question of how much of the work of creating an equal society is in front of us versus how much of it's behind us. And so therefore, how should we behave today?
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
No, of course. Well, and to build up off of that, when a government plants a flag in the ground and says, we are going to actively oppose something. And in fact, we're going to raise the specter that we might investigate people who do X, Y, and Z. What you end up having is a bunch of companies, corporations, nonprofits, universities, other institutions. None of them want to be the test case.
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
That is an excellent question. I think my answer to this is the Reverend James Lawson, because he trained so many of the activists when they themselves were younger. And I feel like he would have some pretty good behind the scenes stories about everybody else, which would then make for a pretty juicy podcast.
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
None of them want to be the ones. So they are starting and they're looking around and they're going, could someone call this DEI? Because if so, we're getting rid of it. And so what we know is that there are going to be a lot of – there are a lot of programs today that by –
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
any actual definition don't even fall into the type of DEI that we are talking about or where there may actually be some type of substantive legal debate about, but that it's a scholarship for an urban reporting workshop scholarship. And it's like, wait, is this a black people's scholarship? That sounds like DEI to me. Get rid of that, right? Wait, women in STEM? That sounds like DEI.
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
Helping veterans? We are seeing just a very different posture than the one that has been held towards these types of programs by, frankly, both Democratic and Republican administrations for much of the most recent history, the current president excluded.
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
Well, I think that there are a few things. I think there are people who genuinely believe that. I also think there are people who see this as an extremely convenient political tool.
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
And what we know is historically in the American context, fear of immigrants, fear of other people, plays to nativism, plays to a purity of quote unquote white identity have been some of the most powerful forces in the history of our domestic politics. And there is a consistency in messaging that that argues that to put something in my pot is to take something out of yours.
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
It plays to a very fundamental fear of scarcity that we all have as humans and all biological creatures have, right?
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
Your race, your bloodline, your whomever. And so we're so focused on giving it to Black women or to trans men or to who, that, what about me? What about us? And so it's that feeling of neglect or that feeling that you have lost something, even if objectively you have not.
It's Been a Minute
Did DEI D.I.E.? Welcome to a new kind of 'civil rights' era
Thank you for having us.