The 400 Year Push

A recent article by Charles Finch in The Atlantic performs a post-mortem on a movement distilled in the '90s and early 2000s, but that in fact reaches much further back in time.* We can track aspects of the DEI push in the race, class, gender, and sexuality rights efforts of the '60s; the push of the suffragettes; the break of the Civil War; the founding of the US; and back even further to the religious dissenters who fled to these shores from the UK in order to worship without prejudice or penalty. In many ways the entire American experiment has been a drive for diversity, equity, and inclusion avant la lettre; albeit an unfulfilled one. 

The effort all along has been to be seen, validated, and included in the fold; to have a voice and enjoy the same legal rights. The problem from the start has been, as we all know, that penning lofty ideas on parchment is easier than realizing them in people's lives. Bigotry dies slowly. Such that it was possible, say, for the pilgrims to strive to get out from under the royal yoke while imposing a much more oppressive and deadly burden on those who were here before they arrived. The newly liberated colonists, once a nation, simply carried on their exceptionalist and, let's face it, racist and sexist tradition. It continues to this day. 

DEI is nothing more than a modern, intersectional iteration of all those past efforts in one. My own academic career tracked its course closely, from beginning to "end." After a rigorous but conventional training at NYU I landed an adjunct position at the City University of New York; in the effort to convert a temporary to a permanent position it became clear that the atmosphere in public education was shifting rapidly, such that I was told I'd have a better chance of getting a full-time gig were I to present myself not as a garden-variety but a queer scholar. For much of my education it had been a liability to be out of the closet; now all of a sudden it was a liability to be in. 

So out I waltzed, though not without serious pushback from older professors. From many I encountered open bigotry, while from others it was an open-armed embrace. Queer scholarship was in its infancy then, shifting from old-school gay studies to the more radical queer theory, akin to the shift from women's studies to feminist theory. Luckily I'd dabbled in queer themes in both my thesis and dissertation, so I'd been heading in that direction. With little effort I transformed into a queer theorist outright––and with pleasure. What a heady time it was. Stonewall was a revolution for sure; the queer slice of the modern DEI movement was in many ways an even bigger revolution, because we finally claimed a space––a voice that couldn't be ignored––in academia and the country both. It was the end of apologizing; the beginning of turning heteronormativity on its head.

A lot of commentators these days, many too young to have experienced the era first-hand, try to frame it in part by quoting lines from the great theorists of the time, those who inspired the movement, including Butler, Derrida, Foucault, and many others––although they do so with the facility and depth of a student in an intro class. Finch, the author of the Atlantic article, was ten years old in 1990, a year by which most of the great postmodernist oeuvre was already several years old.** Butler's groundbreaking tome, Gender Trouble, came out that year, when Finch would have been in fifth grade. Congrats, and bully!, to all of the young writers finding their voices in major publications today; I'm all for it. My only reservation is that not having breathed that air they tend to be untouched by its raw nerve; the force of it. Too often they get caught up in a kind of both-sidesism, as though DEI and anti-DEI were akin to discoursing about chocolate and vanilla. 

For those of us lucky enough to come of age then professionally, the movement was life changing, something to fight for still, never mind the naysayers on the right and left. We understood it was a watershed moment not just for the country but the world. To think, as Dolly Parton put it, that every life matters! (Yes, she was a partisan.) That was the gist of the movement inspired by the postmodernists; a movement that like every movement was not without its flaws and excesses. If gazing open-eyed at American history meant outing difficult truths––about whiteness, masculinity, heteronormativity, christianity, and power in its many forms––the conversations were long overdue. I sat in dozens of conferences in which power was tracked in granular ways about every type of social, political, religious, and economic injustice. 

A friend from abroad asked me once if I felt guilty about the slave trade in this country. My response was that, though getting up there in years, I wasn't alive then, so how could I feel responsible? That isn't to say however that I haven't benefited from the lopsided dynamics that flowed from that system, which is to say from white privilege. I will always be open to exploring my own version of that, queerness aside; the effects of a sexist and racist history. For that reason I have little sympathy for, say, Florida politicians who would rather eliminate Black history from public schools than face their own unexamined privilege.

Do the work, people. 

Having said that, a life of constant self-examination for attitudes that were bred in every American from the moment they were born can become exhausting, tedious as a monk's life. At a certain point it becomes clear that the oppressive history of this country and the bigotry it birthed can't be altered by a single person––or overnight. It will take all of us and many years; decades for sure, and no doubt longer. We need first to maneuver the nation, or at least a big chunk of it, into a place in which it views examination of the national psyche for what it is, a liberation and freedom from old ghosts; an exorcism; not to mention a much closer alignment with the lofty goals of the Constitution. 

I've been clocked for my cluelessness more times than I can count, and though not always easy to hear I've welcomed it all the same, even when I felt the criticism was either unjustified or overly harsh. I always learned something, the same way one does in a row with a dear friend or spouse, if one is really listening––who wants to be self-deceived? For that reason I can only view the anti-DEI partisans in the current administration––the ones wrecking the career ambitions of women, people of color, Muslims, trans and other queer people––as lazy, cowardly, or worse. I take comfort in knowing they won't prevail ultimately; that the movements that coalesced in Reconstruction, the post-war era, and the '90s, were the best things to happen to this country.

That something momentous occurred in the the pre-Trump years can be gauged by the vigor of the reactionaries' efforts to undo it. They've recently stacked the voting deck, and the courts; eliminated a system of checks and balances that took centuries to erect; pressured members of their own party to get in lock step lest they be primaried out, rendering majorities in both chambers feckless, useless, and pitiful. A national embarrassment. 

The good news is they will all pass from the political stage someday. At that time we can get back to the hard work of looking at our collective past and imagining what it might be to live in a real, what Foucault would call a radical, democracy––radical because the world has still never really seen true equality, a world in which difference makes no difference (sorry, lovers of Europe and Scandinavia, it doesn't exist there either). Pessimists like to say true equality's a pipe dream, but that's self-defeating. We've already come so far, and we're not talking rocket science. If Dolly lived it, a country girl from aTennessee holler, why can't everyone? It only requires a commitment to try. 

AOC can cast shade on what she calls Woke 1.0, labeling it "crazy," but she was one of its champions.*** She would do well to cast aspersions less and think more about how the movement can be reënvisioned, reënergized, and reënlightened. In the best of all possible worlds, in a mature democracy, equity would imply equal rights for everyone, including white people and men, like me; though not only them. 

It's a delicate balance; a finessing and negotiation; making sure that every person receives their slice of the opportunity pie. History and its thousands of injustices ought to teach us to be forgiving if the pendulum swings wide the other way for a time, toward the rights of the excluded and disenfranchised. Sooner or later it will find its center. 

*Finch, Charles. "The Progress That Can't Be Erased," Atlantic Monthly, 8/28/26

**Derrida published his three greatest works in a single year, 1966, including Of Grammatology; Writing and Difference; and Speech and Phenomena. Foucault published The Order of Things the same year. But they're just two among dozens of writers querying and historieizing--problematizing--how power has operated in the contemporary post-colonial and industrial world. There are to many to list here, though maybe I'll do it someday. 

***Malone Kirchner, Madison. New York Times, "What is Woke 1.0?" 8/12/26; 8/20/26