What is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion?

This piece was made possible by the Center for Educator Wellness and Learning (CEWL). You can read the full version for free by clicking here. You can also learn more about this issue from ProTruth South Carolina by clicking here.

Image from the official South Carolina Freedom Caucus blog page. Members of the all-white, all-Republican Freedom Caucus are among the sponsors of South Carolina’s anti-diversity bill, H. 3927.

DEI is the latest three-letter acronym anti-public education and anti-diversity efforts have used to define, essentially, everything vaguely bad (whether real or imagined) about efforts to make education, the workplace, and other facets of public life accessible to everyone.

In 2021, one of the current architects of federal anti-DEI efforts, Chris Rufo, famously wrote, “We have successfully frozen their brand—’critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”

Rufo was a leader in efforts to turn Critical Race Theory-- a complex academic and legal study, into a simplistic for-it-or-against-it bogeyman-- into “CRT,” a “brand” instead of a complex set of discussions, allowed by an intellectually free and open society. Many prominent anti-“CRT” activists were of course describing something very different from what Critical Race Theory proponents were actually saying or doing, and often couldn’t define “CRT” at all. (And when anti-”CRT” morphed into anti- “woke,” some couldn’t define what “woke” meant to them, either.)

You can read the full version of this piece for free by clicking here.