If Rice laments the extent to which the public came to recognize that DEI was less an anti-discrimination initiative and more an extortion racket, she should look in a mirror.
At the outset of the Biden administration, the director of the former president’s Domestic Policy Council, Susan Rice, was said by the New York Times to have been “charged with ensuring that the new administration embeds issues of racial equity into everything it does.” When all you have is a DEI hammer, “everything” looks like it’s ripe for bludgeoning.
That maximalist outlook helps explain why Rice retreats to the language of Affirmative Action to describe her surroundings, both the things of which she approves and disapproves. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth finds himself squarely in the latter category, and Rice cannot seem to see any explanation for his elevation except his accidents of birth.
“Well, if you’re a white male Christian cisgender macho MAGA man, you can be as dumb as a rock and be deemed qualified to serve as Secretary of Defense,” Rice sneered in an interview with No Lie podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen. “But let’s also be clear, there’s a serious point here,” she continued, as though she was kidding when she accused the defense secretary of benefiting from his gender, race, and sexual orientation. What followed was an entirely unsolicited defense of DEI:
DEI has been used as a slur to suggest that anybody who might be a woman, might be a person of color, might be a religious minority, might have a disability, might be a religious minority, might be a veteran of Native descent, anybody who has benefited in any way, shape, or form from the notion that we all should be treated equally and that we should be viewed on the basis of our merits and not discounted because we happen to be a woman or happen to be a person of color. Anybody who fits the mold of somebody who is not a white Christian cisgender male, is by definition in this administration deemed inferior. That is the vast majority of the people in this country.
That’s quite the accusation. It isn’t just that Trump officials and their political allies are imprecise when accusing their political opponents of securing stations that would otherwise have been out of reach absent DEI policy prescriptions — an amply supportable claim. Rather, Rice insists that the administration sees “the vast majority” of Americans as “inferior.” That sounds like the sort of discrimination that only properly educated and empowered bureaucrats can police — bureaucrats, no doubt, like Susan Rice.
If Rice laments the extent to which the public came to recognize that DEI was less an anti-discrimination initiative and more an extortion racket, she should look in a mirror. Her contributions to that revelation were invaluable.
“In the last 20 years,” Rice told a gathering of activists assembled by Al Sharpton’s National Action Network in 2023, “the U.S. had a GDP shortfall of $16 trillion due to discrimination against black Americans. If we closed our racial gaps, we could add another $5 trillion to GDP over just the next five years.” If you are curious where those staggering figures came from, don’t look to Rice. “That’s not my math,” she said. “That’s according to Citibank.”
Indeed, the claim can be traced back to former Citigroup global economist Dana Peterson’s research, whose 2020 estimates received a receptive hearing from an uncritical press at a time when every institution in the country felt compelled to audit American race relations. It rests on dozens of imponderably complex economic interactions, assumptions about behaviors over the course of decades, and suppositions about “pyramidal” obstacles to capital acquisition among black Americans, which, if removed long ago, would have yielded 6 million more jobs in this country.
These are highly speculative assumptions, but they nonetheless produced very specific estimates of the costs associated with them. That should have raised more eyebrows than it did. But Peterson was in good company. Other firms that attempted to quantify the economic activity lost to racism, like McKinsey & Company, produced less eye-popping estimates, but even its conclusions were buttressed by a variety of unverifiable suppositions. Indeed, many of those suppositions were produced by the DEI consulting industry for the DEI consulting industry. And they invariably resulted in the ultimate conclusion that what America needs is more DEI. “No matter how you measure it,” a 2022 Bank of America report determined, “lack of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) limits national economies and reduces GDP.”
As I wrote at the time, these reports were not sufficient to satisfy the activists who demanded them. They helped induce a transfer of private wealth from the institutions producing them to the DEI industry:
In lieu of a constitutionally fraught, racially discriminatory redistribution of income in this country, the DEI industry will have to suffice. Upon the release of the blockbuster report that Susan Rice cited, Citigroup also announced a plan to direct $1 billion toward closing the racial wealth gap. In 2021, the firm reluctantly assented to a “racial audit” of its policies — a measure that Citi executives attempted to block, arguing that the audit was unnecessary in part because of that well-intended $1 billion investment in black entrepreneurs and homeowners.
Citigroup is not alone. JPMorgan Chase & Co. made a $30 billion contribution to advancing racial equity in 2020 only to submit later to an audit of their efforts by PricewaterhouseCoopers — an audit that was deemed woefully inadequate by more-explicitly equity-focused auditors. Amazon appeared to have learned the rules of the road when it retained Obama-era attorney general Loretta Lynch to perform its review of the online retailer’s commitment to “address racial justice and equity.” Good intentions don’t speak for themselves, unless the relevant DEI stakeholders are given a taste.
In her work with the Biden administration, Rice most certainly did embed “equity” into the executive branch’s outlook — so much so that the administration frequently violated the Constitution’s guarantees of mere equality. She succeeded, however, in creating a demand for DEI services, bringing into existence an industry devoted to self-reverence. It fast became a racket in which DEI activists highlighted problems that only DEI activists could solve. What’s more, they could only solve them from lavishly funded sinecures in the highest echelons of politics, business, and finance. And woe betide the deep-pocketed outfits that failed to contribute to the cause. Al Sharpton’s activists were waiting in the wings, and they don’t ask nicely.
It’s hard to blame Americans for noticing this shakedown operation and objecting to it. Rice contributed as much as anyone to that revelation. If she now mourns the backlash that she helped create, she only has herself and her allies to blame.