In the aftermath of the resignation of the first Black president of Harvard University, celebrity businessmen Bill Ackman, Elon Musk and Mark Cuban are clashing over the virtue of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at organizations. It’s a depressing scene. The unspoken premise for Ackman’s diatribe last week on the issue is a bigoted one. And it’s a signpost of how the right-wing backlash against DEI is taking aim at even the most incremental societal attempts to try to mitigate the effects of social inequality.
This specific round of debate was kicked off by Ackman’s essay-length criticism of DEI programs on X after Claudine Gay stepped down. If you haven’t been keeping up with the news, the backstory is important: Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager and major Harvard donor, was one of the activists in a successful campaign to oust Gay from her job. That effort was about punishing her for failing to meet the rhetorical standards of pro-Israel and right-wing activists when she testified alongside other university presidents before Congress in December about antisemitism on campuses. (As legal commentator Ken White has pointed out, Republicans sought to use the hearing as a trap, and the questions underlying speech on campus are in fact far more complicated than the viral soundbites suggested.) When a pressure campaign characterizing her as indifferent to antisemitism didn’t seem to work, right-wing activists scrambled for other ways to hit Gay, dug through her work, and alleged that she plagiarized in her scholarship. According to The Harvard Crimson, the Harvard Corporation “announced that though instances of improper citations had been identified in Gay’s scholarship, they did not violate Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.” But after the storm of controversy didn’t abate, Gay resigned.
What Ackman and Musk fail to recognize is the way that institutional racism systematically makes people from more privileged…
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