Dismantling DEI
Submitted by Judy K. Ball, Morgantown, WV
[They are changing] the definition of the words we use to describe reality.
“Diversity” is now described as “illegal.”
“Equity” is to be shunned.
“Inclusion” is a dirty word.
– Scott Pelley, Wake Forest University Commencement Address, May 2025.
How can that be? How can anyone think DEI is simply not necessary, or not necessary any longer? How can DEI be so mischaracterized? Is it simple ignorance? Or, as Scott Pelley suggested, is it propaganda designed to shift our vision of reality?
Rather than considering the lingering impacts of past wrongs to be righted, many — even those in power — are simply waving off enduring racism and sexism. They dismiss any need for DEI with statements like “we don’t need it anymore” and banning DEI is “about ending discrimination.” (West Virginia Watch, 3/26/2025) Those particular statements came from male and female members of the West Virginia Senate during its 2025 session. That’s 2025, not 1825.
DEI might never have been necessary if the United States of America had not been born, grew, and matured with such reverence for uniformity, inequity, and exclusion (UIE). Our history is full of it.
The UIE was never just about individuals, however; it became systemic. As such, it burrowed into our institutions, often without our even recognizing it. Historical UIE may be in the past, but its remnants still affect us today. As does our denial.
With systemic disorders, a cure requires widespread, in depth recognition, re-education, and redress. Sepsis, a systemic infection, can’t be cured by suppressing the cough that was its first symptom. Similarly, a localized, short-lived approach to curing systemic racism and sexism isn’t enough. The infection runs too deeply in our society and institutions. We live with a myriad of examples, whether we want to admit it or not.
Yet, the speed with which corporations, universities, and numerous other institutions recently have fled from their DEI initiatives has been stunning. It’s enough to require hard questions to be asked.
When it became inconvenient, was DEI discarded so quickly and so easily simply because there was no real commitment to begin with?
Had DEI become a priority simply because it was fashionable?
Was it all window dressing?
All these motives appear to be plausible given how quickly DEI has been discarded.
The list of DEI-disappearing firms includes: Amazon, Brown-Forman (parent of Jack Daniels), Ford, Goldman Sachs, Google, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, Lowe’s, McDonald’s, Meta, Pepsi, Salesforce, Target, Tractor Supply, Uber, Walmart (AP News, Mar 7, 2025).
Notable exceptions include: Apple, Ben & Jerry's, Cisco, Cleveland Cavaliers (baseball), Coca-Cola, Costco, Delta Airlines, Disney, e.l.f. Beauty, Francesca’s (a clothing retailer), Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Kroger, Lush U.S. (cosmetics), Microsoft, NFL, Patagonia, Pinterest, Procter and Gamble, Sephora, Southwest Airlines, T.J. Maxx, Ulta, Verizon (Advocate.com, Apr 2, 2025, updated Apr 8, 2025, May 21, 2025; Time, Feb 26, 2025).
The lists are constantly shifting, depending on the standard applied. Some of the “notable exceptions” (listed above) also can be found in lists of firms retreating from DEI (Forbes, Apr 11, 2025)
From the outside, however, there appears to be no discernible difference between the two lists. Pepsi versus Coca-Cola? Google versus Microsoft? Is the difference just about commitment?
Harvard University made a huge splash when its President Alan Garber flatly rejected Trump Administration demands that it change hiring, admissions and other policies or lose billions in Federal funding. Garber wrote, "No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue." (NPR, Apr 14, 2025) As we all now know, Harvard has taken its arguments to the courts.
LWV stands for DEI
So far, the League of Women Voters (LWV) has not waivered. The League adopted an expansive DEI policy into its Bylaws in 2020. It was a long time coming. And while governments, corporations, universities, and numerous other institutions have been stepping away, under threat or voluntarily, DEI remains a priority for the League.
LWV is known to be, has always been, a nonpartisan organization. It is the bedrock for the LWV. The DEI principles in the LWV Bylaws have the same standing as nonpartisanship.
Why does DEI continue to matter so much to the League? As usual, history points the way.
In 2019, Virginia Case Solomon, then CEO of LWVUS, said (Facing Hard Truths):
The path to women’s suffrage was complicated and sometimes ugly. History books tend mostly to credit the courage and tenacity of white women.
It is past time for [us] to acknowledge that when the 19th Amendment was ratified, many women still [couldn’t] cast a ballot.
This statement came after the NY Times published an opinion piece, “How the Suffrage Movement Betrayed Black Women” from a member of its Editorial Board (2018). It didn’t name the League, but it should have.
It is worthwhile here to enumerate some specific limitations of the 19th Amendment because they often go unrecognized. The League has a tendency to romanticize the 19th Amendment, because it is the suffrage amendment. That reverence continues today. However, upon ratification in 1920 and continuing for years thereafter, the 19th Amendment excluded many women:
Black women, in practical terms, because they faced the same laws and barriers to voting as Black men. Those laws and practices remained until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Native-American women (and men), because they were excluded from birthright citizenship in the 14th Amendment. Officially, Native Americans became U.S. citizens in 1924, and even then, legal barriers to voting continued for them in some states and on reservations.
Asian and Asian-American women, who finally gained citizenship with the Immigration and Nationality Acts of 1952 and 1965.
Latina women. Voting rights were extended to women in Puerto Rico in 1935, and a 1975 extension to the Voting Rights Act finally prohibited voting discrimination by language.
More recently, state voter suppression efforts gained new momentum for Black citizens and other people of color after provisions of the Voting Rights Act were overruled by the Supreme Court in 2013 in Shelby County v Holder. Then, by 2025, voter suppression laws were becoming a Federal priority.
Faces of suffrage
African American women and men, who actually played an enormous role in achieving the vote for women, have largely been written out of the history of the suffrage movement. Typically, that is how history is written. Unfortunately, even today, that is how the history is celebrated.
Let’s take a look at a few of the folks who worked for decades to realize the 19th Amendment. Some you’ll recognize; many you will not.
Among the names you might know are Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
Stanton is known as a principal organizer of the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls in 1848. Much, much later (beginning in 1979), Anthony’s role in the suffrage movement led to her face being emblazoned on a dollar coin, but public acceptance of the coin was so spectacularly poor that it was minted for only a few years.
What you may not know is that many (most?) of the white leaders of the suffrage movement held the racist views common for their time. And they never came around to believing that their interests and the interests of their African American sisters and brothers overlapped significantly.
Both Stanton and Anthony have been criticized for prioritizing the needs of white women over Black ones. Both Stanton and Anthony argued that white women were more prepared intellectually than African American men for the franchise. Many white female suffragists were willing to oppose the 15th Amendment, the post-Civil War Amendment to grant voting rights to previously enslaved Black men, because they believed white women were more deserving.
Most of us know Frederick Douglass as a famous abolitionist. His name has largely been erased from the history of women’s suffrage. At the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls in 1848, it took the persuasion of Frederick Douglass, a Black man, to make the vote for women a priority in the Declaration of Sentiments adopted there. Later though, when white, female suffragist leaders found his race inconvenient, he was disinvited from participation with the cause.
Similarly, Sojourner Truth, who is remembered primarily as an abolitionist, also was an activist for women’s rights. Remember her 1851 speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?” Among other critical topics in that speech, she called out the hypocrisy of those who worked for suffrage and for property ownership for white women, but not for Black women.
Then we have Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul, two leaders of the white suffrage movement who differed greatly in their strategies to achieve the vote for women. Yet, they were both racist or, as it is now called, “accommodationist.”
Catt sought suffrage by making political institutions work, even though suffrage for women was patently anti-institutional. She favored pursuing a state-by-state strategy to achieve suffrage, rather than a Federal amendment. Catt founded the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which later became the League of Women Voters.
While fighting for the 19th Amendment and lobbying Southern senators, Catt famously claimed, “White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women’s suffrage.”
Paul was more militant than Catt, but equally racist. Paul favored a strategy for women’s suffrage that focused not on states but on achieving a Federal amendment.
Paul had learned about activism in Britain, and she was good at making headlines (well before modern social media). She was the principal organizer of the 1913 suffrage march in Washington, DC. Yet, when locals advised her that a march in DC (a “Southern city”) would be problematic if Black and white women marched together, Paul caved. She decided to ask Black suffragists to walk at the back of the massive parade.
After Wilson was re-elected President, it was Paul who organized daily pickets outside the White House until the protestors were jailed. The actions and reactions made for good optics, more headlines, and leveraged the “social media” of the time to gain support for the movement.
Ironically, Catt and Paul did not get along even though they agreed on so much: Both thought they could achieve their aims separately. Both thought their aims could succeed by focusing on white women alone.
Their contemporaries included Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells, two Black suffrage leaders you may not know about.
Terrell was founder of the National Association of Colored Women. These associations for Black women became necessary because they weren’t accepted by white women in their organizations. Terrell also was a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
If you know about Wells at all, it is likely from her work as an investigative reporter. She dedicated her journalism to highlighting lynching and torture during Reconstruction and the post-Reconstruction South.
Wells, however, was also a member of the delegation representing Illinois at the 1913 march in DC. When Paul’s edict came for Black women to march at the back, Wells simply refused. She would march with her Illinois delegation or not at all.
Both Terrell and Wells had different perspectives than their white sisters. These Black suffragists clearly saw the link between voting and racial justice, between voting and social justice:
Without the vote, no jury service (hence, no justice for Black defendants).
Without the vote, no access to judicial offices (hence, no justice in the courts).
Without the vote, no equal rights for men or women.
None of the leaders of the white suffragists managed to understand this link between voting rights and justice for all. Even without the vote, they appeared to be blinded by their privilege.
Men in the League
For its first 54 years, the League of Women Voters excluded men, or permitted them to become members only with less than full membership rights. It’s not that the League hadn’t considered the position of men in their midst. Instead, they had actively relegated men to non-voting, second-class status. The women were not above continuing to treat others as they did not want to be treated.
Then, in 1972, Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment, and sent it to the states for ratification. The League supported the ERA, but its passage made the status of men in the League’s membership to be, let’s say, inconvenient. In fact, the optics were really bad.
Finally, at its next convention in 1974, the League voted to permit men to be full voting members. Notably, the name of the organization did not change, which even today leads people to mistakenly believe that men cannot be and are not members.
Some female League members today continue to justify the name and deny the exclusionary message it sends.
Where we stand today
In politics, priorities matter. Unclear priorities and divided efforts can be impediments to achieving common goals.
History clearly shows us how white suffragist leaders failed to see the link between their rights and justice for all. In fact, they preferred the former without the latter. We cannot know how much more quickly suffrage could have been achieved had the movement been more unified within and across the races. We can see how a movement divided between state and federal strategies dragged on for decades.
Today, those who argue against DEI appear to be affected by a similar blindness.
Nowhere is the whittling away of rights more apparent than in court decisions and laws directed at removing individual rights from women and voting rights from minorities. For women, it may have begun with abortion, but none of us can be sure it will end there. Current legislation to limit the rights of women to vote appears to be gaining ground. In addition to women’s rights, we see rights being withheld, removed, or ignored for LGBTQIA+ individuals, immigrants, anyone labeled as not “belonging.” Voter suppression laws have been all the rage in state legislatures beginning immediately after the Supreme Court cleared the way in 2013. Those efforts show no sign of abating, fueled by misinformation about election fraud since 2016.
One undeniable lesson from history is this: Division has never been a productive approach. It is past time we end it and recognize the absolute necessity to fight for our rights together as one.
It’s all on the line.