(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Commentary: Eliminating DEI Hurts Everyone, Rural People Too [1]
['Lane Wendell Fischer', 'The Daily Yonder', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar']
Date: 2025-02-03
President Donald Trump is waging a war against the American working class, and the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programming is one of the first major battles.
In his first day in office, Trump ordered all federal departments to terminate their DEI offices and positions and cease all DEI programming. Corporations like Meta, Ford, and Walmart, along with a growing list of universities across the nation, have joined in dismantling their own DEI initiatives.
Trump’s executive order declared that DEI programs are a “discriminatory” practice.
Discriminatory against who?
Trump believes that DEI “unfairly” helps certain groups of people. Supposedly, this happens at the expense of the average working white guy — a group he claims to represent, despite only ever being a boss to working class people.
In reality, DEI programs are designed with a simple purpose: to ensure that every qualified person in an organization, company, school, or office is treated fairly and has the opportunity to fully participate, regardless of their background or identity.
In practice, some say that DEI gives indiscriminate preferential treatment to people of color, women, queer people, or poor people, and that a system of so-called “merit” would more fairly reward qualified people.
But meritocracy hardly just rewards merit. It also rewards the already rich and powerful. It rewards people who have grown up surrounded by a wealth of resources and opportunities, people who can often easily access or pay for credentials and qualifications without ever really having to work that hard for them. This is the truly unfair system our country has operated under since its birth.It can help the people who don’t need it.
Who isn’t given assistance from DEI programming? People who are wealthy and powerful to begin with. People like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerburg, who each had a front row seat to this year’s Presidential inauguration.
Are these the individuals Trump fears are hurt by DEI? No.
He says it’s the cisgender, white men who are being denied opportunities because of DEI. The average white guy from middle America. The working class white dude off the street.
Well, I’m a cisgender white man from Kansas, raised on a humble little family farm, and I’ve benefited greatly from DEI.
DEI Gives Rural People a Seat at the Table
When I was a senior in high school, I was staring down the barrel of tens of thousands of dollars of future student loans to attend public in-state college. I was preparing myself for the likelihood of carrying that debt for decades.
One of my teachers, and my parents, convinced me to apply to an Ivy League school. I worked hard and did well in school, but my hopes of getting in were close to zero. My test scores were well below the Ivy League average. My rural school didn’t offer any AP or advanced courses. Most of my elective credits were agriculture and shop classes. Where I come from, these courses had value, but I wasn’t sure colleges would think so.
But then I got the letter: accepted into Yale University. I later learned that Yale had a DEI initiative that aimed to recruit more rural students. It was truly the only reason I was accepted, and the reason I benefited from a near full-ride scholarship.
The initiative took a holistic approach to looking at my application. Sure, there were other applicants who were seemingly more qualified than I was when it came to the traditional markers. They went to schools with more resources. Their parents were able to afford private tutors. From the traditional Yale perspective, they had better experiences, better stats, and were more prepared than I was to be a student at a college like Yale.
But DEI leveled the playing field. DEI took the economic and opportunity gaps that separated me from other traditional applicants into consideration. DEI took my working class background and rural identity into consideration.
I was no longer viewed as a second-class citizen, behind the families like the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers who’ve attended schools like Yale for generations — at least not by the admissions office. In some ways, my background and my identity were even more valuable than my elite peers’.
I offered diversity to Yale’s social and academic spaces, making it a richer environment for all the other students who attended — especially ones who had never stepped foot in the countryside. I can only hope that some of them now understand a little better what life in a rural place actually looks like, or the important distinction between a cow and a bull.
And, for the most part, I was given an equal voice in important conversations. When discussing issues like school vouchers in an education course, I was able to share how detrimental vouchers programs would be for rural public schools and how private schools would be unprofitable and doomed to fail in a small community.
With a seat at the table, every student was forced to face a more inclusive reality. No longer could they overlook the public policy’s impact on small towns or forget about rural contributions to the nation’s food and energy systems.
DEI not only benefited me personally, but it benefited the entire university community, as well as rural communities across the country who were now represented in this space. This is the essential function of DEI programming that is currently being attacked in all spheres of American society.
A World Without DEI
Imagine little to no rural students attending universities that contribute important research and prepare the next generation of the country’s leaders.
Imagine little to no rural folks with leadership roles in companies that provide essential healthcare or insurance services to rural communities.
Imagine little to no rural representatives in congress making decisions about how to allocate federal money, or rural people working in government offices who are tasked with distributing those funds.
For many folks from small towns, this is probably an easy reality to imagine. Because for most, if not all, of the country’s history, the primary voices in government, corporations, and universities have been the wealthy and the elite. DEI was a relatively new practice, one that has been attacked by men like Donald Trump since it began, and one that today’s Democratic Party has consistently failed to defend.
In many ways, we have yet to reap any real benefits from such programming.
A defense of diversity, equity, and inclusion is not exclusive to rural folks and communities. In fact, the benefits that I and other rural folks have received from DEI are owed, in large part, to other marginalized groups — the women, the Black and brown people, the queer people, and people with disabilities who have developed and advocated for these programs from the outset, and who are hurt most by its elimination.
The idea of a society that doesn’t have to consider class, race, gender, sexuality, or disabilities may seem appealing. But that isn’t the society we were born into. Whether we like to admit it or not, we are still living in an America where these identities and backgrounds are used like a tool by an elite ruling class to keep us separated from each other and our own humanity.
The politicization of DEI, and the continued exercise of identity politics, is just the latest example of the ruling class reinforcing this imposed hierarchy that relegates rural and other marginalized communities to a lower social status.
DEI wasn’t created to baselessly help a select group of people in the country. It was meant to help us all.
Lane Wendell Fischer grew up on his family’s cattle ranch in rural Western Kansas. He’s a first-generation college graduate, with a degree in political science from Yale University. He currently writes about education and culture for The Daily Yonder.
Related
Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://dailyyonder.com/commentary-eliminating-dei-hurts-everyone-rural-people-included/2025/02/03/
Published and (C) by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailyyonder/
