An old script with a new name
Scapegoating an outgroup to consolidate power is one of the oldest moves in politics, and dressing the scapegoating in pseudo-science is nearly as old. The line runs from Blumenbach’s eighteenth-century skull measurements—the source of the durable myth that “white” people are Caucasian—through American eugenics, which the Nazis studied and admired, to today’s “great replacement” theory, which casts nonwhite immigration as an engineered demographic attack on the rightful majority. A 2018 YouGov–Cambridge poll found that roughly 30% of Americans believe a version of it.
Race-based divide-and-conquer tactics are older still. In seventeenth-century Virginia, colonial legislators elevated Irish indentured servants to overseers of enslaved Africans—not out of any affection for the Irish, but because a lower class divided against itself cannot organize against the class above it. The 2024 election ran a version of the same play, and DEI was cast as part of the replacement plot.
But blaming the backlash entirely on demagogues and propaganda lets the movement off too easily. Some of the resentment is manufactured. Some of it is earned.
Where DEI went wrong
The DEI movement understood racism as systemic but often treated it as a problem of individual and organizational change. The focus was training, hiring practices, promotions and other policies. As the field professionalized, it narrowed: prescribed frameworks, mandatory workshops and a vocabulary that signaled who was inside the tent and who wasn’t. The broad coalition that lasting change requires is hard to build from inside a tent.
More damaging, some of the practices reproduced the divisions it set out to dissolve. When programming sorted adults by racial category and framed participation as a reckoning with guilt and bias, it landed as an indictment rather than an invitation. Decades of research on learning say the same thing: people don’t change when they are being talked down to. They change through mutual respect, interaction and collaboration toward shared goals.
The result fed a culture war already underway—two camps, each certain of its own moral authority, and most people caught in between.
A better model
Kurt Lewin, a Jewish social psychologist who fled Nazi Germany in 1933, was passionate about the question of how prejudice can be decreased. One of his many insights was that group dialogue and action change values and beliefs in ways that classroom lecture cannot.
Lewin saw something else the DEI movement has tended to ignore: every relationship carries ambiguity, and inequality amplifies it. When an interaction goes badly between people of different groups, both parties face a problem of interpretation. Is this tension simply interpersonal? Is bias operating? Am I seeing it where it is not? If my progress is being impeded, is it systemic or is it me? Two errors are possible—overlooking prejudice that is real, or seeing it where it isn’t—and both are costly.
Treating racial difference as sufficient evidence of racial bias ignores that ambiguity. It isn’t analysis; it’s a different bias, ironically based on the same socially constructed racial categorizations (white, black, etc.) which hold no validity in actual science and have been used to divide us. It has fed into the resentment fueling the current backlash.
The road ahead
Progress doesn’t move in a straight line, and the interests invested in keeping Americans divided are not passive. But the answer to a movement that scapegoats cannot be a movement that scapegoats back.
A movement for equality that embodies democratic values—rather than simply demanding them only from others—has genuine prospects. That means inviting in anyone willing to engage, being honest about structural imbalances without using them as weapons, and focusing on shared interests while acknowledging legitimate grievances. The difference between collaboration and confrontation is not a rhetorical nicety. It is the difference between a movement that grows and one that contracts.
