DEI is not an inevitability; it is a choice that can be undone.

Corporate America is following suit. Firms including Google, Meta, and Zoom have quietly cut back DEI departments and laid off employees. I have recently spoken with a number of Fortune 500 executives, who explained that, following the summer of George Floyd, companies felt immense pressure to “do something” about racial disparities. But four years later, they have realized that DEI programs undermine productivity, destroy merit-based systems, and poison corporate culture. Because of our successful campaign to expose the true nature of DEI, they now have the political space—in essence, the social permission—to wind down these programs.

But we need to do much more. The best way to conceptualize DEI is as the marriage of ideology and bureaucracy, or, more specifically, as the marriage between critical race theory and affirmative action. On their path to power, DEI activists hijacked the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which, in spirit, enshrines policies of colorblind nondiscrimination—to justify active discrimination against supposed “oppressor” groups. In doing this, they have gained significant leverage. While the recent firings of DEI employees are a salutary development, the movement to restore colorblind equality can succeed only if we reform civil rights law to reinstate its original focus on individual rights under the law, without regard to race—and dramatically reduce the footprint of critical race ideologies in public universities.