Why DEI Scares Trump and Project 2025 and Why It Should

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Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams from Crooked Media.

I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.

This week, we're taking on an issue that affects all of us.

Yet it's often one of the most misunderstood and increasingly one of the most politically weaponized.

And that's the conversation about diversity, equity, and inclusion, otherwise known as DEI.

Now, opponents of DEI have a very clear strategy.

They want to demonize diversity, they want to invalidate equity, and they really want to block inclusion.

And that's because DEI isn't new.

I know it feels like you've been hearing about it a lot recently, but it's been around for more than 240 years, basically since the start of the country.

And even more concerning to those who oppose it, it's working.

You see, as our nation has evolved, we have done the work of actually making our country match our mission.

And as we continue to evolve, those who oppose these foundational values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, they're panicking.

Since the country got started, DEI has been the way we've built ourselves.

It's the way we've opened doors of opportunity for millions.

It's the way we've responded to the terrible mistakes that we've made and how we've corrected ourselves when we realize that we have more work to do.

Now, we tend to think about DEI only in terms of race and gender, which is absolutely accurate.

But it's that and it's so much more.

Yes, it's the 13th Amendment that outlawed slavery.

That was a DEI law.

But so was the 19th Amendment, the law that gave women the right to vote, and Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in education.

But there are other DEI laws that have expanded access.

You've got the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act.

You've got Title I, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which funds the poor students in our country, not to mention the Family Medical Leave Act and the Respect for Marriage Act.

Each time our country has corrected its bad actions and enacted new laws to prevent or remedy discrimination, that's DEI.

And more importantly, these laws have created new avenues for advancement and for success for more people.

We're talking veterans, young people, the poor, all of whom simply want their shot at the American dream.

You'll hear a little passion in my voice because DEI is important to me.

You see, my grandfather was conscripted into World War II and the Korean War.

And yet each time he returned home to Mississippi, he was legally denied the right to vote until he was in his 40s.

40s.

It took DEI, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to grant him the full measure of citizenship.

We know that in our country, we often have to take steps to make right what was once done wrong.

And that's why last year I founded a series of organizations that together are known as the American Pride Rises Network to defend and expand DEI because I fundamentally believe in the American dream.

Now, the fact that I have the right and the ability to found these organizations that are challenging the cowardice of Meta and Walmart and McDonald's, that's the power of DEI because it applies to everything from education to economic opportunity to electoral power.

In short, it's about doing things right.

But it's not just the people who've been historically blocked from opportunity who benefit from DEI.

The good news is that, and studies show, that investing in DEI actually works for all of us.

It's a net positive.

NASA understood the public benefit of DEI.

We wouldn't have gone to the moon if not for a brilliant black woman mathematician, Katherine Johnson.

Her work laid the foundation for the Silicon Valley Titans and wannabe space explorers.

You see, a lot of us have forgotten.

or never knew how important DEI was to our country.

And with the second Trump administration about to begin, dismantling DEI is a top priority for his administration and Project 2025.

When they mock and lie about what DEI is, they are being very clear about their intentions to resurrect barriers to opportunity and cut off access to the American dream.

Now, it is tempting to hear these terrible headlines and give up.

But here's where we come in.

At Assembly Required, we believe that we can and should tackle the challenges that society faces no matter how big they seem.

In fact, the opponents of DEI are counting on us to not fight back.

The best way to meet their opposition is by understanding what's at stake, speaking up about our support, and demanding our leaders take action.

So my next guest is so important

because we have with us Kenji Yoshino.

Kenji is a professor of constitutional law at NYU Law School.

He is also the director of NYU's Metzler Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.

The center advances thought leadership by doing research and sharing other people's research on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Kenji, thank you so much for being on Assembly Required.

I've been trying to connect with you to have this conversation for a minute, so I'm glad we got to do it today.

Thank you so much for having me.

So, you know, DEI has been in the news a little bit lately.

Apparently, it is responsible for airplane crashes, bridge collapses, the NBA failures, and the LA fires.

So given the specter of DEI and the absurdity and asinine claims that have surrounded what DEI has

fomented in our country, can you talk to me about why we should be defending and protecting DEI at this moment?

Well, my favorite person to quote on this without embarrassing you, Stacey, is you.

So I think that the thing that makes me want to spit is when someone says that DEI is somehow un-American.

And I heard you once give a speech.

We will not name the location because it was a board meeting.

Yes.

But you gave a talk about how the value of DEI could not be more American.

Because if we think, and I say this as a constitutional law professor, about the things in our country that we're proudest of, so many of them relate to expanding the circle of who matters.

And one of the things that you said that's remained with me is that our country began as a group of very propertied, white, male, landowning individuals who controlled everything.

And the whole history of progress, whether that's the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments for race, the 19th Amendment for gender, the Chicano rights movement, the LGBTQIA plus movement.

Every generation has tried to expand who counts as we the people.

So if we're proud of the 14th Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause, as I am, if we're proud of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote, which I am, I think we should also be proud about DEI.

So I think it's so important to plug DEI into that earlier prestige discourse.

of who we are as a country.

And you did that beautifully in your speech.

So I'm just mirroring back to you what I heard you say to me.

Thank you.

So let's talk about the current discourse around DEI.

And I want to start with the fact that the Daily Show has had to mock this conversation twice in the last couple of weeks, that we have seen DEI blamed for every potential failure or blip in the matrix.

Can you talk a bit about why in this moment DEI is so threatening and so frightening to so many?

I think it's frightening because we are seeing such broad, irreversible trends in this country.

So, just to take a few details, and I don't actually like Stacey quoting like the McKinsey study or this study because everyone sort of begins to quarrel about the methodology or whether or not the data was right or what have you.

I just want to take things that we know are true.

So, in 2042, we'll be a majority-minority country.

That's already true with regard to race.

For the under-18 population, there's no racial or ethnic group that is the dominant group in the under-18 set.

Since 2019, a majority of college-educated workers are women.

20% plus, and this is Gallup, says that 20% of Generation Z self-identifies as a member of the LGBTQIA plus community.

So the demographics of this country and the perceived demographics of this country are changing in ways that will make it unrecognizable for people who grew up in the era that you or I were growing up.

And so I think one of the things that's going on is that people see the writing on the wall.

They see that the demographics of this country are changing and that demography is a kind of destiny.

They see that we're not going to be able to survive, much less thrive, unless we can talk across difference.

But they don't want that world.

They want the kind of world that kind of never was, right, but that they look back very nostalgically on.

And I think that that's what's funding so much of the backlash today.

We use different language to describe the same ethos.

So the popular term that most people have heard of is DEI, which stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The Messler Center actually uses diversity, inclusion, and belonging.

Can you talk about the idiomatic differences and the similarities, why

we should hold to the principles even if we use different different initialisms to describe it.

Absolutely.

So I will say first that it's Meltzer Center, Roger Meltzer, our founder.

I know you'd get really mad at me if I didn't correct you there.

But in terms of the terminology.

I apologize, Roger.

But I think that really

we're after the same thing.

I think I can speak about it most

directly with regard to my own center.

We thought about, you know, diversity as just table stakes, of just recognizing the diversity that already is.

So diversity is just a fact, and it's inclusion that's the choice.

So we begin with diversity, and then the question is: you can have a diverse group of people, but if you're not doing anything to bridge the divides between you and them, then you're not going to have a successful organization.

So I do think that one of the things that the proponents of DEI have to get better about is in just underscoring that it's not diversity itself that is going to automatically lead to better outcomes.

It's properly managed diversity that will yield those outcomes.

So, diversity in of itself is not going to do it.

We're going to actually need affirmative inclusion strategies to make sure that everyone has a fair shake at flourishing in that environment.

But even the idea of inclusion, Stacey, sort of raises a question of who is including whom.

So, we thought, you know, well, what is the end goal here?

And the end goal for us is belonging.

And I think that anyone, no matter where you are in the kind of demographic sort of divides that separate us as American society, I think that we can all understand that belonging, which we define as you have a stake in the community and the community has a stake in you, is something that all of us want and all of us can relate to.

So even if I go back to Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where he has this kind of pyramid of the needs we need to get satisfied as human beings in order to go to a higher level of consciousness.

He says, of course, like food and water and shelter are are like the first and most immediate things that you need.

But right after that, he says, belonging is what we need as human beings.

Like, we can't survive simply on food and water alone.

We need to feel like we belong to something that's bigger than themselves.

And whether that's, you know, faith, whether that's, you know, a common enterprise, whether that's work, you know, you name it, it can be anything.

But we all need that community where we feel like I am bigger than just me.

And then other individuals are investing in me and care about what happens to me.

And that sense of belonging is something that I feel like is so universal.

And so, in some ways, the project of DEI should be this universal aspiration of making everybody feel like they belong in a community and that the community cares about them.

It's just that DEI has traditionally focused on the groups that have not had easy access to that.

And I think that dominant groups, historically dominant groups, have either said, well, we already feel included, we already feel like we belong, so we don't need to care about this, or alternatively, they say, Just because we belong to this dominant group, you know, I, you know, don't feel like I belong.

Just because I'm like a straight cisgender white man doesn't mean like I feel like I belong in the world.

In fact, I often feel like excluded and marginalized in this world.

That person, too, is saying, I have barriers to belonging.

And to that person, I want to say, well, let's hear you out.

Like, what is the barrier and how can we help you remove it?

Like, you're part of this project and you will benefit from this project as well.

I love that framing of it because part of my approach to DEI, when you and I met at that board meeting, it was after I'd started a group of organizations that we refer to as American Pride Rises.

We call it the American Pride Rises Network.

And the intention was to think about how do we all belong in the conversation about the American dream.

This very ephemeral notion of the idea of an American dream.

It looks different for every person, but we all believe that there is this notion.

There are some people who believe that the notion exists, but they'll never get to participate.

There are others who believe that the pathway is their birthright.

And so a lot of the conversation for me and for our organizations has been around how do we anchor the conversation of DEI and to your point, the inclusion and belonging notions of DEI around how everyone can move towards their version of the American dream.

The way I think about it is that there are three pieces to it in an American society that we all have some say in.

So one is education, what you know.

The second is the economy, what you do.

And the third are elections, who's in power, who controls what happens next.

One of the things that I love about your work is that you tackle all of those pieces in different ways.

Can you talk a bit about the policies and the practices that people might not even realize fall under DEI, under that umbrella?

When you're having that conversation with the white guy who feels left out,

how do you bring that person in?

How do you talk about where DEI sits and how we all get to the American dream?

It's a very long question, but.

Thank you for that.

So I had a very recent occasion to reflect reflect on this because I was put on this bipartisan panel with an adamant opponent of DEI and chat of house rules applied there.

So I won't name the individual, but if I did, you would recognize the person as a die-hard opponent of DEI.

So I thought, you know, sitting in that green room, like, what is my goal here?

Because obviously I'm not going to convert this person over to my side, right?

But what can I convince him of, given everything that I know that he said in the past that I disagree with?

Is there some sort of piece of it that's important, but nonetheless I can move him on?

And what I realized is that he had stated over and over again that all of diversity, equity, and inclusion was illegal.

And so he just thought, you know, after the Supreme Court's SFFA decision in 2023, which is the case that abolished affirmative action on the basis of race and higher ed, that all of diversity, equity, and inclusion was illegal.

So when I sat down with with him, I started out with this gambit, and I think this goes under the employment rubric of your three E's.

And I said, you know, just help me with this hypothetical.

So, you know, in 1970, which is actually not very hypothetical at all, in the 1970s, 5% of symphony orchestras were women, and now that number is much higher.

It's a plurality, like 40% or something like that.

And the fix was that they had women and men audition behind a screen so that you couldn't tell the gender of the person who was auditioning, and that caused the number of successful auditiones to skyrocket.

So I said, Is that illegal?

And he said, No, of course not.

You know, that's just removing bias from the system.

It's literal gender blindness.

And so, Title VII, which is the statute that regulates employment discrimination, would have nothing to say about that.

That would be totally consistent with every anti-discrimination norm in the United States.

So, I said, you know, I don't mean this as a gotcha, but I think you have to choose.

Like, I think you have to choose between saying all of DEI is illegal and saying that that practice that I just described is legal, because that practice is DEI.

Like, what do you think we're doing when we're advocating for DEI?

Like, a huge tranche of what we do is de-biasing people and removing biases from the picture.

I think we need to distinguish between lifting DEI and leveling DEI.

And what I mean by lifting DEI is the old way we used to talk about DEI, the affirmative action way, which is to say here is a historically marginalized group, and that group has been so deeply subordinated that in order to give them an equal opportunity, we have to target them and lift them up so that they'll be on an equal footing with everybody else.

And I, you know, this may be heretical, but I actually still believe in that.

It's just that I think that that does carry legal risk.

So I think that that's what my party opposite, my friend on the other side here, was taking aim at when he said all DEI is illegal.

But the leveling form of DEI says, well, wait a minute, there are lots of biases in the present day, and so why can't we actually take those biases out so that everybody has a genuine playing field?

So that form of DEI has a very different tenor to it, which is to say talent is everywhere, opportunity is not everywhere, and the way in which we close the gap is to de-bias environments, and that's a project that we're calling leveling DEI.

And the leveling stuff, as a a lawyer, you know, I know you're a lawyer too.

You know, I think we can agree that the leveling stuff is never going to be illegal.

Like no Supreme Court, no matter how conservative it gets, I don't care if you get sort of nine Justice Alitos up there, they are never going to say, right, that taking bias out of a system on the basis of race or gender or what have you is illegal because that's exactly what Title VII of the Civil Rights Act or section 1981 is trying to do.

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I want to touch on your lifting piece, which is the issue of what's legal and what's not.

And I know there has been this belief since Students for Fair Admissions that all of DEI is dead.

And when you look at the number of companies,

not as many as people would like to believe, I mean, you've got a hand, you've got 15 maybe out of 500 in the Fortune 500 who've retreated, but you've got 4,000 public companies in this country.

And so I don't want to overstate what's happening.

But there has been this legal risk analysis that says that because students for fair admissions put these limits on affirmative action in education, all of DEI is dead.

I firmly, categorically, and wholeheartedly reject that idea because even in that decision, the Supreme Court said, yeah, except for military academies, you can still do it.

And they spoke not at all to the issue of funding in terms of scholarships and things like that.

So I would love for you to spend a little bit of time talking about legal risk assessment, because this notion that it's all dead because one thing fell is not the same as there are legal risks.

But here's how to evaluate those risks.

And I know you can't give legal advice on this podcast, but I would love for you to talk a little bit about the framing we should use when we're thinking about what the legal risk is.

I'd love to.

I'd first like to begin, though, by just reinforcing what you said, which was so important about the very public retreat by some companies getting rooted abroad in the news, and that seeming to occupy so much of people's mind share.

So it's not just that it's a tiny sort of nit of an iota of a scintilla of the Fortune 500 or 4,000 public companies that have retreated publicly.

So it is the Lowe's and the Walmarts and the Home Depots of the world.

But the vast, vast, vast supermajority of companies in the United States have either stayed strong explicitly, like the board of Apple or Costco, and I want to call both of those companies out to laud them.

But it's also that even the companies that have publicly retreated, if you actually look at their statements, I know you have, but some of your listeners might not have.

It's actually not that they're retreating wholesale from DEI, right?

They're not saying we're not going to do any form of DEI.

They're just saying these are the forms of DEI that we think are too risky, and so we're not going to engage in those anymore.

But all these other things, like full steam ahead.

So we might not participate anymore in this particular survey, right, but we're still going to have advancement programs or unconscious bias trainings or what have you.

So I fault a little bit the media for this because there is a kind of, it's much more interesting to have the man bites dog story than it is to have the dog bites man story.

So the exceptions are getting a lot more news than the kind of vast supermajority that are staying the course.

But I also want them to look and parse those statements more carefully to understand that even the retreats are not really full retreats.

So that's the first thing of let's just understand what empirically is going on.

And just to add a bit of editorial content here, I worry, Stacey, that part of what's going on is this dual messaging where they're just like, we actually want that headline as a company because that will get Robbie Starbuck off our backs.

And so all these anti-DUI lawsuits will no longer be coming our way.

But then when our people or our potential employees or consumers come after us, we can always point to the statement that was much more nuanced and said, you know, we were totally misdescribed in the media.

And so they can have that kind of dual messaging.

But you're asking me, I think, for a deeper analysis of what the law actually says.

And again, I agree with you, which is that if you look at the Students for Fair Admissions opinion, it's actually a much more modest opinion into what it renders illegal, even under a really aggressive aggressive reading.

So if you parse what the Supreme Court says, there are really three P's.

You have your three E's, I have my three P's of like what needs to be satisfied for a program to even be remotely risky.

And the three P's are, it has to be a preference for a protected group with regard to a palpable benefit.

That's specific to Title VII.

So what does a preference mean?

Again, anything that's leveling, anything that's taking bias out of the system is going to be completely fine.

So if I say everyone in this hiring process has to go through unconscious bias training before they hire somebody, because we know that all of us, just as human beings, not because we're good people or bad people, but just because if you have a brain, you're biased, as my colleague David Rock likes to say.

that if you are just hiring without any kind of awareness of your unconscious bias, there's going to be like, likes, like bias.

You're going to have the similarity bias.

You're going to hire the person who's a mini-me who reminds you of yourself.

So we're going to have unconscious bias training to get rid of all of that.

That's leveling rather than lifting.

So there's no preference that's being given, right?

It's really just a removal of an unfair preference that I would otherwise exhibit.

So first of all, there has to be a preference.

Second of all, there has to be a protected group.

So that means it has to be on the basis of, you know, race or gender or national origin, some group protected by, you know, Title VII.

So Title VII prohibits discrimination on the basis of five classifications, which are race, national origin, color, religion, and sex.

Since 2020, sex has been interpreted to to encompass gender, identity, and sexual orientation.

So those are the protected groups.

But there are lots of other groups like veterans, right, like first-gen individuals, like people who have straightened socioeconomic means or statuses, that are completely unproblematic because they're not covered by these statutes.

And then there are other characteristics, and this is something I have to clear up a lot, that are covered by statutes like age or disability, where the statute itself allows for asymmetrical treatment of the group so that you are allowed to have affirmative action for people with disabilities or people over 40, even under the plain terms of the Americans with Disabilities Act or the Age Discrimination and Employment Act.

So, preference, protected group, and then finally there has to be a palpable benefit.

So, I can't say just because I'm a busybody or just because my feelings are hurt, you know, if my colleagues have a woman's only lunch in order to think about, you know, the status of women, you know, on the faculty, I can't say, oh, that's sex discrimination because it hurt my feelings, right?

Under Supreme Court precedent, under Title VII, there has to be some adverse employment action.

So it has to touch on me in some way.

So, unless there's a preference for a protected group with regard to some palpable benefit, you're totally fine.

So, unconscious bias training is fine.

Explicit affirmative action on first-gen status is completely fine.

Like, I can't go and ensue simply because I'm a busybody or my feelings got hurt, right?

So, you're fine with regard to that, you know, happy hour where you take your LGBT colleagues out for drinks afterwards.

That's just not going to be palpable enough to be harmful, right, to your cisgender or straight individuals in the workplace.

So the takeaway is I want everyone to like engage in that risk assessment to say in any other context of human endeavor, we would never say, oh, because there's some colorable risk here, we're not going to engage in this practice at all.

Imagine if we were launching a product and I I said to you, oh, as your attorney, you know, Stacey, I have to tell you that there's some IP risk or there's some product liability risk.

You would never say, oh, horrors, like we can never go forward with that product.

You would instead say, okay, so let's engage in a kind of balance of those risks against the benefits and try and mitigate the risk, but not let it be, you know, completely a bar to going forward with something that we really care about, right?

something that's really important to this organization or to this community.

So, you know, my plea is to engage in that risk analysis.

And we have a resource that's available for free called Advancing DEI at the Meltzer Center, where we've analyzed all of the federal cases that have been brought against DEI in plain English.

So, the whole point is: you do not need to be a lawyer in order to read these cases or to understand the issues.

And so, if you want to do a double-click on the risk assessment that I've just described, please go there.

Excellent.

Can you give us the website?

Absolutely.

So, actually, the easiest way to get there is Advancing DEI and Meltzer, M-E-L-T-Z-E-R.

If you just Google that, it will come up.

Awesome.

So let's turn to the most

pernicious threat to DEI, which is Donald Trump and Project 2025 taking abject power in about a week.

We know that there have been coordinated attacks on DEI.

You listed Robbie Starbuck, there's Ed Blum, there's Stephen Miller, there's this entire consortium of anti-DEI organizations that were, I think, very effectively covered by, I think, Nick Confessori in his article in 2024 about the interplay of organizations attacking DEI.

And now we will have a president who has been avowed in his distaste for DEI and has made it one of his central premises.

And then we know Project 2025 mentions DEI on every, you know, looks like every other page.

It's not quite that much, but it's it's pretty close.

Let's go through some of what you expect the incoming Trump administration to do to oppose DEI and to roll back this progress that we've made since the Revolutionary War,

both lifting and leveling for folks in this country.

I think that one of the first things that we'll see, maybe even on day one, is a revival of the executive order that existed before in the first Trump administration that bars DEI

when done by any sort of government, federal governmental entity.

And so I think that we could easily see that.

And then I think there will be various moves.

Probably they would need to be legislative, but given that there's a trifecta of Republican control, it's not beyond kind of imagination that something like the Dismantling DEI bill would actually be enacted.

And that says essentially private private forms of DEI are going to be contested or challenged.

I think in all of that, one of the things that we have to remember is that the first executive order that Trump enacted was challenged on First Amendment, free expression, free speech grounds.

And so I do think that we should really be careful about misdirection.

I think that the Trump administration will give a lot of ballast and energy behind the anti-DEI movement.

So we'll expect, we can expect more lawsuits to be filed.

But short of just repealing these civil rights statutes altogether, which

this hopefully will not prove to be hopelessly naive, but I don't think they're going to do that.

But short of doing that, if they don't do that, then the final word is going to be still with the Supreme Court because they could do real damage in saying there's no such thing as disparate impact analysis.

And we can talk more about what that means.

It basically means that there doesn't need to be intentional discrimination, which is a current law, so long as a policy has has a disproportionate impact on a protected group.

So even if I didn't intend to hurt

black individuals with a particular policy, if the vast disproportion of the injury sort of lands on black individuals, then I have to have a business justification.

So they may go after that, and that would be deeply consequential.

But I don't think that they're going to say the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a bad idea, and we're going to repeal it entirely.

And to the extent that they don't do that, Stacey, I still think that it's ultimately going to be judicial interpretations of the Civil Rights Act that are going to be the most consequential.

So I don't want to underplay the new administration coming in.

I think they'll try to do a lot of things, and I think that they will use their bully pulpit in order to accomplish a lot of stuff.

And there needs to be counter-mobilization.

I too read the compassorio piece with great interest.

And one of the things that struck me, and I don't know if you felt this way, is that they're all talking to each other, right?

They are really networks.

So my sense is that Robbie Starbuck is talking to Christopher Ruffo, is talking to

Tom Cotton, Senator Cotton is talking to whomever, Stephen Manners.

Vice President Vance?

Yeah, and I don't think we're doing the same degree of mobilization on our pro-DEI side of the ledger.

And that's not like a...

criticism, right?

I mean, it is a criticism, but it's not like, I'm not wagging my finger because I understand why that happened.

It's because we held the status quo for so long that we could just stay in our lanes and do the work that was in front of us.

But now I think that there's a real need for people like us to have conversations like these, to mobilize together, because there are a lot of people who defend our values.

It's just that we're not as networked.

The other thing that was really interesting about that article was that you kind of scratch the surface of what they believe and what they say that they're for.

and what they're actually for seem to be two really different things.

You know, this isn't really about you know, freedom of speech or expression.

This is really about keeping historically dominant groups dominant.

And I think that the American people, particularly for all the demographic reasons I've just described, are going to have a limited appetite for that.

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I want to go back to something you said,

your second P, which is protect a class, and then what a Trump administration can do.

Because I think one of the groups that

face incredible damage in the attacks on DEI are the disabled.

And yet, that that community of folks are often left out of the conversation.

Part of what I wonder is, is, are there legal or

communal opportunities for us to push the envelope and make certain that more people understand that DEI isn't just about not liking black and brown people.

It's not just about women, too many women going to college.

That this is an attack on so many other parts of who we are that If we can highlight who else is under threat, we can raise the consciousness and therefore raise the intention of fighting back.

Can you talk a little bit about how that plays out in your conception of pro-DEI, of this, not just leveling, but leveling up?

Yes, I would love to talk about that.

And I think that this sort of broadening the coalition is kind of don't let a crisis go to waste kind of moves that we can make here.

So we are, DEI is being challenged.

And one of the ways in which we can show the value of the work is to, you know, advert to the universal as I was trying to do at the top with Maslow's hierarchy of needs of diversity is or belonging is something that we all crave you know as human beings but one of the things that you know I think we need to be really careful about is like jumping too quickly to the universal right of if I move from you know oh I'm not going to stop talking about sort of LGBTQ plus rights and I'm going to start talking about our universal humanity and kumbaya and so forth that has a little bit of the tinge of, I don't want to talk about Black Lives Matter, so I'm going to talk about all lives matter, right?

And so that can't be right, right?

And so I think that the pathway to finding the universal is going to other cohorts, right, and to include other cohorts within the tent of who's included under DEI.

So historically, I agree that DEI discourse has itself marginalized, you know, individuals with disabilities.

This is a huge cohort.

You know, at last, you know, estimate,

I always do this through through the case law, so forgive me if this is slightly out of date because it's an older case.

But one of the reasons why the court was reluctant to give people with disabilities too much protection is that they thought the judiciary can't do this on its own.

It has to be Congress, because we're talking about 43 million people within the country.

So it's a huge group of people distributed entirely throughout the population in a very even way.

So everybody knows somebody who has a mental or physical disability, whether they knowingly know somebody or not might be a different issue, but we all touch somebody with a mental or physical disability or illness.

You're allowed to engage in specific accommodations only for people with disabilities.

And in fact, this is one of the ways in which I communicate about the value of equity of like it would be ridiculous to give a sighted person and a visually impaired person the same book and text.

It would be equally ridiculous to give them the same book and braille, right?

We would say like we need to actually accommodate both the sighted and the visually impaired person in order to give them equality of opportunity.

And that's what we're talking about when we're talking about equity.

I think most Americans understand the fundamental principle of fairness that's being underscored there when we say dissimilarly situated people can be treated differently, right, in order to be treated equally or fairly.

Well, another one I want to add to the mix is the military.

We know that the military was the first formal part of the federal government to desegregate.

It has long been the tip of the spear, no pun intended, of DEI.

And today,

when we are taping, Pete Hekseth is sitting before the Senate committee to determine his appointment as the Secretary of Defense.

And this is someone who has very openly

disparaged women in combat.

He has unfortunately been part of the Me Too movement.

But I want to talk for a second about the real-world implications of someone like P.

Pexeth becoming the Secretary of Defense in a Trump administration that is anti-DEI, in a Project 2025 world that has made, you know, restoring the

patriarchy of the military to its, you know, I guess, Revolutionary War era construction.

Can you talk a bit about what worries you, but also what opportunities you see for DEI and the military going forward?

First, I think you're underscoring something that I was inattentive to in my earlier comment about the change that this new administration could wreak, because it's not just about policies, it's about people.

So I don't want to at all undersell

the impact that this new administration is going to have on the vector of who is actually going to be sitting in these chairs and what kind of signal are they going to be sending and how are they going to be using their positions of power and their bully pulpits in order to advance or not particular norms or policies?

Like that's going to be a huge impact.

I guess, you know, against all of that, like a couple of things.

I mean, I thought the segue into this was going to be we're going to talk about the military because I left out veterans as another cohort.

And I want to go back and pick that up because veterans are a huge cohort.

They're individuals who have served our country honorably and deserve to be included and to belong.

And oftentimes we have fallen short of that promise.

And so that too is something that we need to really lean into because once again, there is no, you can engage in formal affirmative action for veterans, right?

And that is completely legal.

So that's thought number one.

But thought number two is,

I want to be,

I always get sort of chastened by my executive director on this.

I'm going to be really honest and transparent here where I say, you know, demography is destiny, right?

So the optimistic note is how far can somebody go?

If I really believe that, you know, the people that I want to promote or associate with or have working for me need to be white, cisgender, straight men who are able-bodied, I mean, increasingly that's going to be like a smaller and smaller tranche of the population.

How on earth can I expect to get the best talent or the best, you know, colleagues, right, if I'm not willing to be inclusive as a leader, as an employer, or just as an ordinary member of the community, right?

And if the idea is, oh, the law prevents us from doing that, the law absolutely doesn't prevent us from de-biasing our environments.

And if anything, what I expect, and I hate to call this a hopeful note, because I don't think people suing each other is so hopeful, but

the organizations that run away from DEI are going to be in for a world of hurt from the other direction.

Because traditional Title VII plaintiffs, like women or people of color, are going to sue these organizations that say, you know, we want to go back to a 1950s America and say, you've discriminated against me on the basis of race or gender.

And I was just talking to a former commissioner of the EOC, and I was asking her,

I want you to be totally fair about this.

So after SFFA,

how many of the lawsuits are coming from traditional plaintiffs and how many are reverse discrimination claims?

So,

I wanted her to count beginning with SFFA because that clearly would lead to an uptick.

And she said, still, the vast, vast, vast supermajority of claims that are made against employers or against governmental entities are from what we'll call the left rather than from the right, from traditional plaintiffs, like women or people of color who have been sued.

If you've gotten rid of all your DEI policies, then you've lost your line of defense against those lawsuits as an employer or as a governmental entity, because usually what happens is if I get sued as an employer and someone says you discriminated against me on the basis of race and gender, I sort of cough up my track record and say, look at all the DEI policies that I've had to make sure that there wasn't bias in this workplace.

Well, if I retired all those policies, good luck to me, right?

You know, if you get rid of all your DEI policies, people are going to sue the pants off of you, right?

And that if you talk to the EOC, the vast super majority of claims are still coming from traditional plaintiffs rather than from the so-called reverse discrimination plaintiffs.

I believe the framing I use is that demography is destiny, but it's also opportunity.

And given that in this moment, 17 years from now, the racial, ethnic, and gender composition of this country will not be what it was.

I want you to help us get to 17 years from now.

So one thing we try to do here at Assembly Required is give people practical, actionable things to do.

So I'm going to ask you two questions.

One, what language, and I think you've given us a lot of rich opportunities here, what language should people use when they talk to their own families and friends about the importance of DEI?

Give us a quick elevator pitch for DEI.

My elevator pitch is one sentence, and I think it shouldn't be longer than that, which is, talent is everywhere.

Opportunity is not everywhere.

Diversity, equity, inclusion closes the gap so that everyone can have a shot.

Period.

Full stop.

So like if someone says, well, I don't think talent is everywhere, then we're having a totally different conversation.

I take this to be, you know, the point of the confessorier piece, right?

To say like, you're saying merit, merit, merit.

Okay, like merit.

Like, let's let merit shine, right?

Let's find merit.

Let's give merit an opportunity.

But I think most Americans would agree that talent is everywhere.

So So if you believe that talent is everywhere, if you believe that the opportunity is not everywhere, which I think are both incontrovertible, then isn't there a need to close the gap just in the name of fundamental human decency and fairness, right?

And then in a more self-interested way, right, for our loved ones and people in our families and our communities to give them a fair shot, right, so that we can all benefit from the talents that we know that they have.

Like all of us have someone we care about, we know is unbelievably talented, but we worry that they're not going to get a fair shake to express that talent simply because of non-merit-based aspects of their identity.

So that's my elevator pitch.

Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not, and DEI is what closes the gap.

Excellent.

And then we're going to close with this.

What are one or two actions that individuals can take to support DEI in their communities and their workplace?

But these are things that you think are either underrated or underestimated as actions they can take.

Yes, so

I will begin with something that's

you got me with the underappreciated point.

So I do a lot of work on allyship, and so being an ally was going to be my initial answer.

And speaking up, you know, so when someone says, oh, the bridge fell down, it was because there was a DEI mayor.

And the mayor in question said, I think DEI stands for duly elected incumbent.

So he won my heart when he said that.

So that's beautiful.

But making sure that you speak up and you sort of clap back, right?

If it's, you know, if someone says DEI stands for didn't earn it, I think we need to have the, well, that's interesting, so I think DEI means doubly earned it.

Being an ally to me means being an ally to the person that you regard to be the source of non-inclusive behavior.

So I love Loretta Ross's work about calling people in rather than calling people out.

So I think oftentimes in these very polarized times, the instinct is to say, oh, if you say something against DEI, like it's not just that I'm going to defend the affected person or the program, it's also that I'm going to come down on you like a ton of bricks and I'm going to make you feel like a terrible person.

And that to me is not either tactically or morally right.

Because I think all of us will be the source of non-inclusive behavior at some point in our lives.

I know I have been.

I'm just sort of waiting with, you know, not particularly eager anticipation for the next time I

mess up and I say something that is non-inclusive.

I misgender a colleague.

I confuse two students with each other simply because they share the same ethnicity.

We've all done these things, right, that put us in the kind of bad books, right, of DEI.

So if we're all going to be, you know, sources of non-inclusive behavior, we have to ask, how do we want the people around us to behave?

And one of the things that I hope is happening is that we've seen a waning of cancel culture, where people say, you made one mistake, and so therefore we're going to ostracize or punish you.

And this is where I think I get a little bit controversial because I think a lot of people say, well, just cancel culture is just consequence culture.

So why are you against that?

And of course, if it's something egregious, like illegal harassment or discrimination, you don't need to be an ally to the source.

But if it's like a run-of-the-mill error where somebody is making a statement and they've just messed up, then I think it's really important to extend grace to that individual and to surprise them by saying, I'm really interested in what you just said.

Could you say more on that?

I want to understand that,

rather than saying you're persona non-grata.

Because what I worry about, Stacey, is that when we come down on sources of non-inclusive behavior, like a ton of bricks, that that becomes its own villain origin story.

So many people I know who are adamantly opposed to DEI today,

yesterday were kind of on the fence, but then, you know, they just got burned too badly, or they felt that they themselves got treated unfairly with regard to DEI issue.

And I think like particularly in this moment when it just feels like, I don't want to empathize, I want to smite, right?

And this is Melissa Harris-Perry talking about like the kind of constant dilemma of the good progressive, like deciding whether to fight or to empathize and be kind, right?

I think we need to choose, but I think we need to keep that kind of space of empathizing, of being generous, of calling in rather than calling out open.

Well, Kenji, you have made the wait well worth it.

Thank you so much for calling us in, for giving me three P's I can now repeat, for correcting my mispronunciation of your center.

And most importantly, thank you for sharing, I think, necessary insights as we head into this new administration on how we can all be a part of belonging.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me.

Assembly Required is a show about learning more and taking action, realizing that we can't solve everything at once, but if we stick together, we can get a lot of good done.

How we do it is the focus of this segment, which we like to call our toolkit.

At Assembly Required, we encourage the audience to be curious, solve problems, and do good.

Let's start with being curious.

Sign up for emails at americanpride rises at aprnetwork.org.

At American Pride Rises, we're working to provide accurate information about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and to defend DEI at the state level.

You can also read our team's takes on the latest DEI-related news and colleges and companies.

Number two, solving the problem of attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion begin with us embracing the term DEI or its counterparts.

Don't get distracted by arguments like, let's just change the name.

Opponents don't care what we call it.

They care that it exists.

As we've learned from the incoming president, mockery is a tactic to get us focused on the wrong thing, like a magician trying to distract the audience.

The name isn't the problem.

More people making progress is.

So let's solve this problem by responding to attacks on DEI by turning the tables.

Ask which groups should be discriminated against or who shouldn't have access to the American Dream.

Next, how can you do good?

First, look carefully at any proposals at your workplace or school that involve the words DEI.

Ask questions questions about who will be impacted and how the harms will be addressed.

For example, do you want to advocate for your company or workplace to primarily focus on inclusivity or diversity internally?

Do they have the capacity to be more externally vocal about inclusion?

And then three,

find out if there are employee resource groups or workplace leadership opportunities where you can become a stronger advocate.

Now, change often begins at home.

So number four, use some of the examples we shared in today's episode to have tough conversations with the people around you.

Learn more about why they feel the way they feel and figure out how you can meet them where they are with stories that they'll find uniquely compelling.

Talk about veterans or someone with a disability, but expand the conversation and find a way to bring other people in.

As always, we want you to share your actions and your questions.

So I'd love to hear examples of ways you've taken action or questions and topics you'd like to see us talk about here on Assembly Required.

So, send us an email at assemblyrequired at crooked.com or leave us a voicemail.

Your questions and comments might be featured on the pod.

Our number is 213-293-9509.

That wraps up this episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams, and I'll meet you here next week.

Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams is a crooked media production.

Our lead show producer is Alona Minkowski, and our associate producer is Paulina Velasco.

Kirill Polaviev is our video producer.

This episode was recorded and mixed by Evan Sutton.

Our theme song is by Basilius Vatopoulos.

Thank you to Matt DeGroote, Kyle Seglund, Tyler Boozer, and Samantha Slossberg for production support.

Our executive producers are Katie Long, Madeline Herringer, and me, Stacey Abrams.

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