Dear Management, Are You Racist For Ditching DEI?

To: Management
CC: HR
Subject: Questions About New DEI Directives

Date: January, 31, 2025

Hello Management,

Thank you for the email alerting our workforce to the new federal guidance on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) initiatives. I had a few questions, however, given the dramatic reversal from previous guidance I had received only a few months ago.

Before this new directive eliminating DEI from all aspects of our work, DEI was consistently communicated to the workforce as “relevant to everything we do.” Adherence to DEI was formally included as essential criteria when evaluating for hiring, promotion, and special awards. 

Annual performance reviews required us to explain what we had done in furtherance of DEI. HR (with management encouragement) regularly sponsored and advertised DEI events to the workforce on such topics as unconscious bias, microaggressions, intersectionality, respecting pronouns, being an ally to LGBT coworkers, antiracism, BIPOC identity, neurodiversity, white privilege, and cisgender norms. Our organization maintained a website devoted to DEI and a “DEI certification program,” and a monthly DEI newsletter was circulated to all employees.

Official guidance from management and HR frequently encouraged the workforce to embrace DEI, such as including pronouns in email signatures. We were told failure to honor DEI initiatives was potentially a violation of federal regulations such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Failure to respect fellow employees’ preferred pronouns, it was explained, would be viewed as discriminatory, prejudicial, and a potential violation of the No Fear Act. 

Now with just a few emails sent to the workforce in late January, management and HR are seemingly repudiating most if not all of this. We are told DEI will no longer be used to consider applicants for positions or promotions. We are told there will be no more annual awards given for those furthering DEI. All DEI events have been postponed indefinitely, and funding for DEI programming has been allocated elsewhere. The DEI certification program and DEI monthly newsletter have been canceled. The link for the internal DEI website no longer even works. 

How does management explain this remarkable about-face? A few months ago, senior leaders across our organization, including not only appointees but many career employees, were consistently emphasizing the centrality of DEI to our organization’s mission and the necessity of implementing DEI to our organization’s future success. Our leadership routinely told us DEI was about human rights, social justice, and our organization’s “core values.” Now those same leaders declare that, per the White House’s Jan. 20 executive order “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing,” DEI has no place in the government. 

Has senior leadership undergone a dramatic change in its opinions regarding DEI that just so happened to coincide with the new presidential administration? Or was leadership not actually serious in its years-long advocacy of DEI? Or, God forbid, is leadership, despite their personal convictions that DEI represents an extension of the civil rights movement, afraid to speak up? 

I certainly hope it is not the last option. For, in addition to taking DEI training, as an aspiring future manager I have also attended a few leadership courses as well. These seminars articulated the need for supervisors to maintain a strong code of ethics that serves as an exemplar for the workforce. As neutral, dispassionate federal employees who persist from one presidential administration to the next, I have always been told we are to maintain the highest degree of professionalism and moral conduct, standing by our principles regardless of the cost to our career, federal retirement plan, or lucrative post-retirement contract work. 

Far be it from me to imply that our senior leaders — public servants who have devoted their careers to the service of the American people — could be so fickle or, dare I say, spineless when it comes to the defense of what they call a “human rights issue” and a matter of social justice. But I confess a deep confusion over how those who so recently extolled the virtues of DEI now immediately distance themselves from it because of an executive order. 

It seems to me that compliance with the new directives jettisoning DEI will be interpreted as capricious, perfidious, or cowardly. Sure, to resist this executive order would give ammunition to those who presume only the worst about the federal workforce, that the government is filled with woke, activist ideologues. But does not unilaterally caving to the executive order paint leadership and HR as craven hypocrites, given their all-too-recent statements asserting that opposition to DEI made a person no different than a bigot, misogynist, or white supremacist?

I look forward to your response to this query and hope it will illuminate how the federal workforce is to interpret what I can only presume based on your previous guidance is a gross violation of human rights.

Respectfully,

A Confused Federal Employee

Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.