The Federal government, in response to a presidential executive order, has asked its employees to report anyone in a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) focused position. The directive states that some of the DEI jobs have vague titles, so in order to root out the DEI professionals, they need people to effectively snitch on their colleagues. What I know from my own time working in state government is that most DEI professionals have job functions that go beyond the enforcement of Titles VII-X of the Civil Rights Act. (These titles are the ones that prevent discrimination based on sex, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.) In fact, most government organizations have separate offices devoted to Title IX, specifically. But I digress.

I can’t help but think about how this DEI witch hunt is a contemporary version of what has been done in this country in the past. When witches were burned at the stake in Salem, Massachusetts, the church and state relied on people reporting those women in order to punish them. When a girl or woman was impregnated out of wedlock, if she wasn’t killed, she had to stand at the front of the church and apologize after being reported by neighbors. During chattel slavery, bounty hunters recaptured enslaved Africans and returnedf them to the plantation owners. After Emancipation, poor whites were pitted against Black Americans and received money for reporting them for not working as a way to enforce Black Codes and Jim Crow laws.

In the 1950s, when communism was on the rise, Red Scare “McCarthyism” asked for Americans to report their fellow citizens, many of them artists, who were raising people’s consciousness around inequity and injustice. The tactics of the McCarthy era witch hunt continued into the 1960s, leading to the assassination of civil rights leaders, including Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fred Hampton. In 1969, when the Stonewall Inn, a LGBTQ+ bar in NYC, was raided, it was because police received tips from snitches. It was the same when the UpStairs Lounge was set ablaze in New Orleans in 1973. As thousands of gay men were dying of HIV and AIDS in the 1980s, the government asked people to report people they suspected of being sick so that they could quarantine them in hospitals.

There’s law, then there’s policy and practice. You don’t have to change laws if you change policy or practice and get people to enforce that policy on your behalf. So, when I see a government directing its citizens to turn each other in, all of these historical incidents come to mind. To be clear, I am not painting DEI programs and initiatives as the end all be all for justice. It is true that too many of these programs were mere window dressing that businesses used to positively impact their bottomline while not actually helping people. However, some people were helped by these programs.

Further, it is not a hyperbolic overreach to say that what is happening in the public sector will trickle down to the private sector. Major corporations are already being asked to fold their DEI departments and they’re removing DEI from their annual reports. After the overturn of affirmative action, several colleges and universities immediately started snatching funding from student organizations that are geared toward historically marginalized communities. Nonprofit organizations that emphasize DEI are already seeing a decrease in government funding.

What is most disheartening about all of this is that there are still too many people, of all races, who believe that a person who is not white could not possibly be qualified to lead. The idea that DEI is the boogey man is a dog whistle. The purpose of most DEI is to open up job opportunities, create a more welcoming culture in the workplace and in schools, diversify suppliers/vendors, and extend growth opportunities to qualified people from historically marginalized communities. Doing away with DEI programs is re-erecting a roadblock to equality of opportunity, even for people who are qualified.

We’ve all heard the saying that when it comes to getting a job it’s all about who you know. Studies have shown that most people know people of the same race, culture, ethnicity, and/or background as them. This has created a situation in many professions where women and people of color are gate-kept out of positions, assuming they can gain entry at all. I can say from my own experience I’ve only ever gotten one job from not knowing someone on the inside. (And, I’ve never been fired because I was overqualified for each of those jobs.) I remember working at a place where almost everyone graduated from the same undergraduate institution– a predominantly white school. This is too many people’s lived experience.

To suggest that DEI has no value is just false– the business case for diversity has been made time and again. The Department of Defense even published a report about the advantages of a diverse workforce for national security, which has since been deleted from the now defunct diversity.defense.gov website, though it still comes up in Google search results. The idea that people should be rooted out, reported, and fired for simply being is absurd at best. Now is not the time to cower to injustice. This is the moment where history is being written, and I intend to be on the right side of it.