How Trump And The L.A. Fires Broke The DEI Spell

President Donald Trump moved quickly to end “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) in federal government departments, putting DEI personnel on paid leave two days after his inauguration. His announcement comes on the heels of ongoing L.A. fires, made all the more catastrophic by hiring that prioritized DEI and standards that were lowered for women.

Seared into the nation’s imagination is a video that went viral in which Deputy Chief Kristine Larson claimed that if she had to carry a man out of a fire, he “got himself in the wrong place.” Anti-racism ideology has real-world consequences now too devastating to deny.

Are the pillars of DEI beginning to crumble before our eyes? As dramatic as these developments are, it will take the long, hard work of many people to restore equal opportunity and meritocracy in the rest of the American culture. In her extensively researched 2023 book, When Race Trumps Merit, Heather MacDonald explains why. Building on her previous book and her contributions to City Journal, she explores in-depth how the mindless pursuit of equity is sacrificing excellence and human safety in three major fields: medicine, music and the arts, and police protection.

Can You Be Confident In Your Doctor?

One particular false premise underlies DEI ideology and infects every institution it touches: The racial demographics of any field should match the population at large, so any disparity in those figures is, ipso facto, the result of racism and must be eradicated. But as MacDonald explains further in her book, “racial disparities in outcomes are overwhelmingly the result of measurable differences in achievement and behavior.”

When you show up, really sick, in a doctor’s office, you need to know this doctor has the well-developed skills and mental capacity to grasp the complexity of your disease so you can receive the best treatment protocol. If that doctor shares your skin color or gender, how nice. If not, who really cares?

Apparently the country’s major medical organizations, such as the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Associations of Pediatricians (APA), care a lot. Their strategic plans call for “just representation,” as MacDonald writes. The major medical exam after year one of medical school, the Step One, determines who gets in the most challenging residencies. So for the equity-minded, when Step One reveals that black students score a standard deviation below white or Asians, the solution is simple. They made the test pass/fail.

Efforts to equalize by racial representation appear at every turn. Professors must give credit for social activism activities as well as classwork. Scores required on the entrance exam (MCAT) are lowered. The criteria for membership in the medical honor society, Alpha Omega Alpha, which influences resident training and hiring, must now include “relationship skills” and “anti-racism activity.” Yet one sobering fact emerges. The actual academic skills gap in knowledge before and after medical school remains stubbornly in place, even with remedial instruction.

MacDonald explores the question few want to ask. How have DEI myths of disparate impact and systemic racism marched unchallenged through a medical system which, historically, has been the envy of the world? MacDonald interviews one cancer researcher who, requesting anonymity, provides some insight. Jobs will be lost, reputations ruined, he says, and while he admires “the bravery of those who speak out, [those who do] will be systematically exterminated until they are gone.”

Where Has Beauty Gone?

MacDonald explores how the same pernicious DEI virus infects music and the arts. Classical music has been under siege for being “too white” for some time. The Sphinx Organization elevates diversity among musicians. It now insists that orchestras must have 25 percent black and brown representation, though blacks make up 1.8 percent of all orchestral musicians, and the developmental channel of public school music education has been decimated.

Theatre has not escaped the winnowing influence of making group preferences determinative. Following the George Floyd riots, no straight white male was hired to direct a Broadway play for three years. The unspoken fear in theatre circles is that “they will put on quota-filling plays and no one will come.” Race has become a determinative factor in selecting content for the theatre, as well as actors and directors.

MacDonald explains that humanities subjects are being hollowed out. In the ethos of the current climate, any tradition that comes out of Europe — music, literature, architecture, art — is suspect, wide open to charges of racism because the contributors are overwhelmingly white. There is, as she says, “a hatred of beauty, a brittle intolerance of the past.” That will only change, claims the black conductor and violinist John McLaughlin Williams, when “an administration inured to being called ‘racist’ appears.”

How Have The Nation’s Cities Become Unsafe?

Perhaps nowhere has the notion that racial-disparity-equals-racism been more costly than in the safety and policing of our major cities. DEI efforts to defund police have left the nation’s streets more treacherous and let criminals off the hook.

MacDonald traces how this happened. The actual facts get buried because they don’t support the charge that police departments are systemically racist. But the truth is that police shoot white assailants twice as often as black ones. Blacks kill many more blacks than white cops do. A white police officer is 400 times more likely to be killed by a black suspect than an unarmed black is to be killed by a white police officer. The statistics do not support the prevailing DEI narrative.

Crime thrives in areas where the informal social controls of strong families — and the formal controls of police presence — are both lacking. But when behavioral or social factors cannot be acknowledged, then police “are bludgeoned into passivity because actual policing with disparate impact is [called] racist.” Police presence goes down, crime goes unchecked.

As MacDonald’s book, When Race Trumps Merit, exposes, the scandal of DEI influence on culture and institutions has largely escaped public view. When a city burns down, with estimates of damage and loss exceeding $250 billion, it is time to question where policies that undermine meritocracy are taking us.

Journalist Christopher Rufo claims that Trump’s election shows that “the American people are wise enough to realize their country might not have survived 4-8 more years of government by DEI.” When the smoke clears from Los Angeles, the scenes of devastation may produce enough resolve for change. Race and gender aside, we need competent medical help, the music of Bach, reservoirs with water, and firefighters who can carry a grown man out of a burning building.

Paula Rinehart, LCSW, is a therapist in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the author of the book “Sex and the Soul of a Woman.” She writes about family and culture.