Ricardo Chavira Chicano

DEI, I Won’t Miss You

Diversity, equality, and inclusion are being killed.  But wait, was it ever real?  I say no.

Like affirmative action before it, DEI has a beautiful, comforting ring for many of us.  Many non-Northern European Americans (best known as whites) would level the field and welcome us in private and public sectors.

But, like its predecessor, it did go much beyond talk.  An abundance of stats tells the story.

Let’s start with the federal workforce, where Trump and his acolytes are especially determined that DEI is eliminated.

We Latinos make up 19 to 20 percent of this country’s population, and just 10.5 percent of us are federal employees.  Latinos are drawn to the military, but a mere 9 percent hold the status of commissioned officers.  Seventy percent are white.

Congress is a doozy.  The House is 70 percent white, and the Senate is 83 percent Caucasian.

Turning to education, 78 percent of university and college presidents are white.  Of full professors, a mere 3 percent are at that privileged level.  And then there’s Harvard; just 3 percent are Latinos, like me.  Tenured professors are in their jobs for life.  A bit more than 4 percent are Latino.  

Fortune 500 companies are the big dogs of the business world.  Target is on the Fortune 500 list, for example.  A mere 4 percent of companies on the list have Hispanic CEOs.

Finally, we journalism, the field in which I spent 30 years.  Allegedly a hotbed of progressive ideas and policies, 17 percent of journalists are white.  Time and again, editors would tell me they wanted to hire Latino journalists.  Rarely did they even interview the reporters and editors I named.

In sum, the anti-DEI furor and campaign are about nothing.  DEI is just a notion with no action attached to it.  How do you fight something that does not exist?