The return of Stacey Abrams

Stacey Abrams resurfaced last week – not to deny another election she lost – but to declare that “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is in the DNA of the United States.” This is the bizarre and ahistorical premise on which her new non-profit, American Pride Rises, is founded.

Its website claims that DEI is “a centuries-old movement dedicated to upholding American values,” complete with a timeline that casts everything from America’s Founding in 1776 to the 19th-century abolition movement to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as part of the “History of DEI” in America. That is complete and utter nonsense – it would be comical if it weren’t an insidious lie that attempts to rewrite American history.

America was founded as a meritocracy – where skill and talent, not identity or privilege, determine how far you go. DEI flips that on its head. It is a caste system, a codification of entitlement, and it demands that one’s race or gender dictate what someone is owed. DEI is a rejection of the very values that have made America great.

As a refresher for Governor Abrams: in 1776, the Founders declared that all men are created equal, as opposed to DEI’s founding tenet that some are more equal than others. Nineteenth-century abolitionists fought to destroy a system that judged people by skin color. DEI revives the toxic thinking that gave rise to that system in the first place – just with new labels. An inconvenient truth for Abrams: DEI has more in common with 19th-century slave auctioneers than with abolitionists. It, like slavery, reduces people to their race and imposes unequal treatment accordingly. Frederick Douglass put it best: “all distinctions, founded on complexion, ought to be repealed, repudiated, and forever abolished.”

And the Fourteenth Amendment that Stacey claims is part of the “history of DEI”? Well, how exactly does its guarantee of “equal protection” square with DEI’s insistence that “white privilege” justifies denying white Americans equal opportunities?

DEI also has more in common with the philosophy of those who opposed suffrage than those who fought for it. DEI implies that women are less than – incapable of greatness without handouts. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton would be insulted by today’s DEI-enabled female-hiring targets at companies such as Nike and Intel. The motto of Anthony and Stanton’s was, “Men their rights and nothing more; women their rights and nothing less.” They didn’t fight for handouts – they fought for equal opportunity, because they knew that women are capable on their own merits.

To be clear, it’s not that DEI has had no place in American history. It has – but not as a mark of progress. DEI is what you see when we abandon our founding ideals, not when we uphold them.

In 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of a dream in which black and white Americans would join hands as “sisters and brothers.” Today, just blocks from where he gave that speech 62 years ago, students at George Washington University are segregated by race into separate dormitories as part of the university’s DEI programming. 

DEI should have had no place in American history. Next summer, America will celebrate 250 years since our Founders declared that all men are created equal. Today, one year out, we face a choice: surrender our founding principles to a revisionist history peddled by race grifters such as Stacey Abrams – or rediscover and revive the timeless truths that make America great: liberty, merit and the equal rights and dignity of every citizen. May we choose wisely.