DEI Sanctuary

Category: Uncategorized

  • Dr. Shaun Harper’s Testimony

    Dr. Harper, a highly qualified professor at USC, delivered testimony at a May 21, 2025, hearing of the US House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development. A pdf of his written testimony is archived here.

    shaun_harper_testimony_finalDownload

    Below are the first two paragraphs:

    Culture centers and multicultural affairs offices, programs and activities, resources, and services that
    ensure access and opportunities for women, students of color, veterans, students with disabilities, lowincome Americans, Jewish and Muslim students, LGBTQ+ collegians, and other citizens who make
    campuses diverse have been defunded and eliminated at many postsecondary institutions across the
    United States. Highly qualified, extraordinarily dedicated, and law-abiding professionals who were
    hired to help colleges and universities enact espoused institutional commitments to diversity, equity,
    and inclusion (DEI) have lost their jobs. Presidents and governing board members have been placed in
    the tough position of choosing between federal funding on which their institutions rely for survival or
    protecting the diverse people, programs, and policies that enhance institutional excellence. Over the
    past five months, brilliant, law-abiding researchers who have dedicated their careers to eradicating
    inequities in education, health, housing, the economy, and other sectors of our society have had their
    grants abruptly canceled, which has led to massive layoffs in their labs, centers, and institutes. More
    alarming is that their important, in several instances lifesaving work has been paused, which will
    ultimately result in the exacerbation of existing inequities and the manufacturing of new racial, gender,
    and socioeconomic disparities among Americans.

    All of this destruction is the result of baseless lies, misinformation, disinformation, and exaggerations
    about DEI. Opponents are recklessly making generalizations and unsubstantiated claims about places
    they have never been. Their attacks are largely informed by anecdotes or small handfuls of reported
    wrongdoings on a relatively tiny number of campuses instead of on meticulously-derived confirmations
    about what is actually occurring at our nation’s nearly 4,000 degree-granting postsecondary
    institutions. As a citizen and scholar, I highly value and insist on evidence. As a matter of justice, the
    burden of proof must be on those who make erroneous, highly consequential cases against DEI. I
    therefore call for greater reliance on rigorous studies about the educational benefits of DEI, as well as a
    stronger corpus of evidence from attackers who claim that DEI is divisive, discriminatory, overfunded,
    and otherwise harmful to our democracy. Proof, not political assaults on values that are fundamental to
    our nation and its educational institutions, is what students, tax-paying families, and employees on
    college campuses deserve from our government.

  • Fractality in Affirmative Action: A Report from Atlanta, Jan. 1963

    Archives released by the Kennedy Presidential Library in 2024 suggest that affirmative action has a fractal history or self-similarity which invites us us to sum up 64 years of history by reading one 23-page document. The document that we will introduce after a brief background discussion provides an early survey of the earliest federal attempt to advance affirmative action in private employment. The language of the report is haunted by ghosts that today ride triumphant in their spirit of backlash.

    Background to the occasion comes in the form of an Oct. 2024 announcement by the Kennedy Library of the opening of the James Joseph Kruse Personal Papers. Kruse was an important figure in the earliest days of affirmative action as an implementer of a program called Plans for Progress, that is described in the following words by the Kennedy Library announcement:

    The Plans for Progress program was developed as part of the  President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, which was established in 1961. The same year, the Lockheed-Georgia Company received a number of complaints of discrimination that were processed through the Committee. This became the genesis of the Plans for Progress program, which was an approach to enlist the aid of industrial firms in attempting to find a solution to the problem of equal employment opportunity.

    The purpose of the program was to obtain voluntary agreements against pre- and post-employment discrimination entered into by private employers with the U.S. Government. On May 25, 1961 Lockheed Aircraft Corporation signed the first “Plan for Progress” at the White House and by July 12, 1961 an additional eight companies had signed on; the subcommittee was officially established in August 1961. A major portion of the program included statistical analysis and employment statistics by both industry and the federal government. By June of 1962 the program consisted of 85 participating firms which included an employment population of 4,400,000 persons, and by January of 1963 the program had grown to 104 participants. 

    With this overview of Plans for Progress in mind, we turn attention to a document archived as part of the John G. Feild Personal Papers which was released in digitized form in May 2024. This is the 23 page star of the show today.

    In January 1963 the Southern Regional Council (SRC) issued a Special Report that surveyed the impact that Plans for Progress were having on Black employment in the Atlanta area.

    Under the title “Plans for Progress: Atlanta Survey,” the SRC report began by recalling the history that brought the program into existence, beginning with President Kennedy signing Executive Order 10925 on March 6, 1961 that established the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (PCEEO).

    As Kennesaw State University professor Randall Patton reports in his book Lockheed, Atlanta, and the Struggle for Racial Integration, there was a resistance movement brewing among Black employees of the Lockheed corporation’s operations in Georgia. The NAACP was supporting the worker’s complaints. And on March 28, 1961, “current and former black Lockheed employees formed the Observatory Council on Discrimination to launch “‘an all-out campaign to eliminate . . . unfair, discriminatory, and segregated practices’ at the Marietta location” (Patton 81).

    When the President’s Committee met for the first time on April 11, 1961, they immediately took up the Lockheed matter, with the chairman of the committee, LBJ, vowing to bring Lockheed into compliance with Executive Order 10925 (Patton 82).

    (To be continued)

  • John G. Feild

    He is listed as Executive Director of The President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (PCEEO) in the first annual report that covered the committee’s actions through Jan. 15, 1962.

    In an oral interview conducted for the Kennedy presidential library, John G. Feild discusses the role that he played in drafting Executive Order 10925:

    There were two areas that I was very much involved in, one was the requirement for reporting. One of the great lacks that the previous experience had demonstrated was they had no factual information to know how many Negroes were working where, and I felt strongly that we had to have that, we had to have bench marks, and that was ultimately bled into it.

    Secondly, the concept of affirmative action, that we ought to be in a position to require, in the public interest, more performance of a government contractor than we would of a private employer, and that concept was built into it. I still regard those as two of the most important; the decision to do it, the decision upon its main lines was pretty much agreed to by Johnson, by Fortas. Fortas‟ great contribution, as I remember it, was they were going to give merit awards to all good guys. I‟m sure he made more than that.

    Johnson, of course, was Lyndon Baines Johnson, Kennedy’s Vice President and the chairman of the PCEEO. Fortas was Abraham “Abe” Fortas, a Rhodes Scholar lawyer from Memphis, TN, who helped Johnson with legal issues in the 1948 Democratic primary, and was later appointed by Johnson to the US Supreme Court.

    Feild describes himself as part of the civil rights unit of the Kennedy team.

    After returning from World War II to his hometown of Detroit, Michigan, John G. Feild worked as a secretary for the American Veterans Committee and served on the Mayor’s Interracial Committee, working to pass city and state anti-discrimination laws. He soon went to work as the first director of the Michigan Fair Employment Practices Commission, and in 1960, helped with Senator John F. Kennedy’s Presidential campaign. (Kennedy Library Blog)

  • 2024 Report: Federal Contracting Disparities Not Improving

    In our inaugural posts, we located the advent of DEI history with the 1961 Executive Order 10925, issued during the early months of the Kennedy administration, that called for affirmative action, affirmative steps, and affirmative cooperation in order to achieve nondiscrimination on the basis of “race, creed, color, or national origin” in matters of federal employment and contracting.

    Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson was appointed chair of the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (PCEEO), and he would continue to call for affirmative action by contractors and affirmative cooperation by labor unions in his own 1965 Executive Order 11246.

    In this post we take a snap shot of how things looked on Dec. 20, 2024, when the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) documented “racial gaps in contracting dollars,” and provided “new evidence that discrimination likely plays a role.” Here are the key findings of that CEA research:

    1. Racial disparities in contracting dollars exist with minority-owned firms receiving a smaller share of contracting dollars than their representation among available firms.
    2. Representation gaps are not restricted to any one ethnic group, as significant gaps exist between white-owned firms and Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American owned firms.
    3. Disparities have not improved significantly since the 1990s and were larger in the years leading up until 2019 than any period covered in the data.
    4. Disparities are much more pronounced in terms of contracting dollars as opposed to being a contractor at all. This is due to minority firms being much less likely to be the prime contractor and generally receiving smaller contracts than non-minority owned firms.
    5. Disparities by race are larger in geographic locations with more measured racial bias (based on accepted measures of racial bias used in social science) – suggesting that racial discrimination may play a role.
    6. The relationship between racial bias and racial gaps in contracting persists even when accounting for observable measures of available minority businesses (such as the minority share of the population, the educational level of the minority population in the area, and the number of available minority-owned firms).
    7. Disparities only exist (in a statistically significant way) in areas with moderate and high levels of bias, and statistical models show that if all places were like those with the least racial bias, the overall racial disparities in contracting could largely be eliminated.
    8. Disparities are much smaller when disadvantaged business enterprise (DBE) goals are in place regarding the participation of small business owned and controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals.
    9. Racial bias is largely unrelated to racial disparities in contracting disparities when DBE goals are in place, and the presence of DBE goals mitigates minority underrepresentation associated with bias. Further evidence that racial discrimination plays a role in existing gaps, and that these can be mitigated with DBE goals.

    To sum up: (a) racial disparities in federal contracting were not improving and had even suffered a recent period of setback, (b) evidence points to the cultural influence of background racism, and yet, (c) outcomes do improve where clear goals are set.

    Our conclusion: setting (Disadvantaged Business Enterprise) DBE goals is an activity that would satisfy the meaning of affirmative action, affirmative steps, or affirmative cooperation.

    Meanwhile the US Department of Transportation has recently asked a federal court to hold that its DBE program is unconstitutional.

  • The Kennedy Committee, Look Again

    The Kennedy Committee, Look Again

    In a previous post we looked at President Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925, which established the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, and we shared a photo of some committee members gathered with President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson that we harvested from a government history web page.

    Two quick points about the picture. First, there are sixteen people in the picture, and it looks like they are all white men (see our followup inquiry below). The image helps to crystallize why Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion became key words for civil rights ethos. The keyword Diversity would ask us to notice whether an equal opportunity committee has diversity.

    The keyword Equity invites us to ask if there were no qualified men or women of color who could have been invited to serve on the committee. As a general logic of inquiry, DEI tends to hypothesize that where we find such lack of Diversity, the reason is not lack of merit, as DEI opponents would allege. Equity speaks to the process of reaching out, breaking usual habits, and yes, going out of our way to look at places and people that are not in our usual methods.

    The keyword Inclusion asks us to ensure that anyone invited to the table is actually welcome to fully participate in the conversation.

    So the photo of Kennedy’s Committee on Equal Opportunity offers us a quick start guide to why DEI became the keywords of civil rights ethos.

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    In order to to double-check our impression of the photo, we located the first year-end report from the committee that represented its work from Apr. 7, 1961 to Jan. 15, 1962 (an auspicious reporting date, MLK’s 33rd birthday). The first page of the report lists fourteen public members, eleven government representatives, a chairman (LBJ), a vice chairman, an executive vice chairman, an executive director, and a special counsel, graduate of Houston’s Yates High School, Hobart Taylor, Jr.

    Among the public members of the Kennedy Committee on Equal Opportunity, we find two women listed, one of whom was a legendary Black attorney and judge, Marjorie McKenzie Lawson. Also listed under public members was the name John H. Wheeler of Durham, NC, who was born on the campus of HBCU Kittrell College* and graduated summa cum laude from Morehouse College in 1929, the year King was born. Is that Wheeler who is pictured in the upper left edge of the photo?

    Our followup inquiry turns up evidence that there was more Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the committee than first meets the eye. In addition to those mentioned above, public member Howard B. Woods was an influential Black journalist, editor, and publisher in St. Louis. Religious diversity was exemplified in the appointment of Monsignor George O. HIggins, referred to here as “The Labor Priest.”

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    A delightful surprise greeted the eyes of Texas, however, when we noticed that the first name listed under public members was Howard E. Butt Jr. of Corpus Christi, TX. This is a hint of what sometimes goes by the name of “smart money,” the effects of which have been severely degraded in recent years.

    Followup question: We identified Kennedy committee members who became wealthy through insurance, banking, and groceries. Is there a correlation between recent trends toward high tech capitalism and anti-civil rights?

    *Note: Apparently the Wheeler family moved away from Kittrell College soon after John was born. See this bio of John Leonidas Wheeler.

  • Let There Be Civil Rights

    Let There Be Civil Rights

    In the beginning, way back before Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion became a thing called DEI, there was a struggle for Civil Rights in the United States.

    As a preliminary account of how things got to the point where we find them today, we could begin a modern history of DEI with Executive Order 10925, signed by US President John F. Kennedy on March 6, 1961.

    Kennedy’s order was intended to improve the effectiveness of his predecessor’s order on nondiscrimination in federal contracting. Executive Order 10479, signed by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower on Aug. 13, 1953, established a Government Contract Committee because “practices and procedures relating to compliance with the nondiscrimination provisions must be revised and strengthened to eliminate discrimination in all aspects of employment.”

    Discrimination was not supposed to be happening, but it was happening, and Eisenhower was establishing a committee to revise and strengthen “compliance with nondiscrimination provisions.”

    In 1954, the Supreme Court would strike down school segregation.

    In 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott initiated the classic Civil Rights Movement, also known as the King Years. While the boycott was most famous for its effort to abolish racist seating practices, a key demand of the movement included hiring Black drivers, at least to serve predominantly Black routes.

    On Sept. 9, 1957, President Eisenhower signed the first Civil Rights act of the 20th Century* and soon followed it up with an Executive Order on Sept. 23 that federalized the Arkansas National Guard to protect the Little Rock Nine.

    Kennedy’s Executive Order of 1961 was an effort to improve on Eisenhower’s attempt to diversify federal contracting. The term “affirmative” appears three times in the Kennedy order. First, the order established a presidential committee that would “consider and recommend additional affirmative steps which should be taken by executive departments and agencies to realize more fully the national policy of nondiscrimination within the executive branch of the Government.”

    Second, on the matter of federal contracting, the order said:

    The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin. Such action shall include, but not be limited to, the following: employment, upgrading, demotion or transfer; recruitment or recruitment advertising; layoff or termination; rates of pay or other forms of compensation; and selection for training, including apprenticeship. The contractor agrees to post in conspicuous places, available to employees and applicants for employment, notices to be provided by the contracting officer setting forth the provisions of this nondiscrimination clause.

    Third, the order empowered the president’s committee to:

    direct that any bidder or prospective contractor or subcontractor shall submit, as part of his Compliance Report, a statement in writing, signed by an authorized officer or agent of any labor union or other workers’ representative with which the bidder or prospective contractor deals, together with supporting information, to the effect that the said labor union’s or representative’s practices and policies do not discriminate on the grounds of race, color, creed, or national origin, and that the labor union or representative either will affirmatively cooperate, within the limits of his legal and contractual authority, in the implementation of the policy and provisions of this order or that it consents and agrees that recruitment, employment, and the terms and conditions of employment under the proposed contract shall be in accordance with the purposes and provisions of the order. In the event that the union or representative shall refuse to execute such a statement, the Compliance Report shall so certify and set forth what efforts have been made to secure such a statement.

    The thrice-used term “affirmative” conveys the sense that nondiscrimination requires something beyond “not doing.” And right there is the heart of the issue that divides opinions today.

    Does the practice of nondiscrimination require something more than “not doing”?

    To sum up our findings, the debate over DEI today reflects a divided opinion over the question of whether affirmative action, affirmative steps, or affirmative cooperation are necessary to any successful program of nondiscrimination. We can see that multiple uses of “affirmative” in President Kennedy’s 1961 order reflect a judgment that effective nondiscrimination requires something more than “not doing.”

    Meanwhile, it appears that re-establishing the primacy of “not doing” is the strategic goal of today’s anti-DEI campaigns.

    *Note: The Civil Rights acts of the 19th Century deserve another post. Meanwhile, here’s a Wikipedia on the 1875 act.

  • Why DEI Needs a Sanctuary Site

    Why DEI Needs a Sanctuary Site

    As this website is being founded in the summer of 2025, activities and ideas associated with the acronym DEI, which stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, have been subject to escalating campaigns of systematic repression.

    This website is founded as a safe space to explore the legacies and aspirations of DEI.