Get Real: Today’s Higher Ed DEI = Dismantling Ethnic Identity

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The recent election demonstrates the enduring and pervasive anti-Blackness buried deeply in the American consciousness. Americans acted upon it recently within the nation’s most self-proclaimed bastions of democracy and freedom.

Recent exit polls revealed that a vast majority of white and white-aspiring voters want to live in a country that adheres to social mores and norms of the antebellum and Jim and Janice Crow eras.

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This desire reflects a troubling gap between the ideals America claims to hold and the reality many seek to preserve. The gap reveals the tension between who we say we are as a country and what we do at the level of lived everyday experience.

This contradiction is especially stark when examining affirmative action and the rise of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Intended initially to redress centuries of Black socio-economic disenfranchisement and subordination, affirmative action was ultimately stymied by what legal scholar Derrick Bell termed “interest convergence.”

Policies created to enact and guide the process of inclusion shifted the focus from genuine redress with emphasis on  “diversity and inclusion” — used as currency in higher education to operationalize and conceal the exploitative nature of racial capitalism.

How the targets of diversity, equity, and inclusion experience it at the level of lived experience reveals how employers, policymakers, and leaders use DEI concepts to redress and commodify ethnic identities and bodies as markers of institutional progress.

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In the 2023 book Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America, author Korey Garibaldi explains the cultural commodification of Blackness in this country.

As a Black woman university professor, I experienced firsthand Blackness, both commodified and castigated, during the recent planning of a ceremony celebrating my work. Though the celebration turned out to be amazing, making it reflect my cultural identity required orchestrated resistance.

While the ceremony was meant to honor my accomplishments on the surface, I experienced unspoken expectations to leave my identity at the door—I was to be honored and unseen.

As the first Black woman to be celebrated as an endowed chair in my institution’s history, the ceremony was a marketing campaign highlighting the institution’s commitment to diversity and progress. My Black body became a decoration that obscured the deeper work required to genuinely honor the complex realities of identities representative of the Black experience.

Black women earn little more than 11% of doctoral degrees awarded in the U.S. Two percent hold tenure and full professorship, and fewer hold distinguished positions. Higher education is a contested space for Black women devalued as academic mammies or pawns.

On the heels of the ceremony, while in conversation with a white colleague, I critiqued my experiences as a Black academic, and they responded, “DEI is more than just race.”

To that end, a recent Pew research report shows that 46% of survey respondents felt increased focus on racial inequity will “not lead to changes that will improve the lives of Black people.”

Power holders make policy, and DEI initiatives and policies have done little to alleviate the contention that surrounds Black women’s academic journeys. DEI articulated through the lens of whiteness carries an expectation that those holding marginalized identities must disembody to align with dominating white cultural mindsets and ways of knowing.

To survive—and perhaps even succeed—there are unspoken expectations that Black people suppress the fullness of identities to align with norms and standards that privilege whiteness as the default. Yet, according to recent research, dismantling affirmative action creates more potential for increased racial inequity.

Rather than addressing the specific experiences of Black people within intersecting systems of domination, DEI programs often dilute identity, treating race as one interchangeable part of a broader identity construct, ultimately using DEI to manage identities rather than truly value them.

Reflecting on these experiences, I am painfully aware that this discussion is taking place in the wake of the second Donald Trump administration’s commitment to dismantle equity programs in both the public and private sectors. Since 2023, 86 anti-DEI bills have been introduced, 54 tabled, failed, or vetoed, and 14 made law.

The legacy of commodifying Black bodies carried on in the institutional practice of racial capitalism leaves Black people more vulnerable than ever—placed at greater risk of colorblind violence, limiting life chances characteristic of the Jim and Janice Crow living standards actualized in 2025 and beyond.

DEI was not conceptualized to be transformative; rather, it is a performative endeavor that dismantles ethnic identities to invisibilize and normalize whiteness. Paradoxically, its dismantling creates an opportunity to reimagine- – from performative into a practice of genuine equity.

Those committed to justice, including faculty, leaders, students, policymakers, and advocates, must unite to challenge structured racial capitalism in higher education. Real change demands transparent accountability, reimagined funding priorities, and robust protections for ethnic and cultural identities.

The time is now to move beyond symbolic gestures and enact transformative, systemic change to ensure higher education, as the marketplace of ideas is a space where equity is not aspirational but foundational.

Pamela Twyman Hoff, Ph.D., is a Professor of Policy and Equity at the University of Illinois Springfield School of Education and a Public Voices Fellow at The OpEd Project.

SEE ALSO:

House Oversight Committee Meets To Discuss GOP’s ‘Dismantle DEI Act Of 2024’

Anti-Blackness And Why People React To DEI The Way They Do

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