In his first months in office, President Donald Trump has begun to defang the diversity, equity, and inclusion industry. You know, the harmful grift that discriminates against people who happen to be white on the pretext of remedying the effects of past discrimination against people who mostly died generations ago.
Under former President Joe Biden, spending by the Education Department on DEI programs topped $1 billion, another $100 million at the Justice Department, $80 million at the Defense Department, and $14 million at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Federal agencies are still tallying the savings from firing employees, curbing grants and contracts, and canceling DEI indoctrination sessions for their employees.
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Slashing federal spending on the DEI sham is a strong start, but the war on woke isn’t over. Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s scandal-plagued Center for Anti-Racist Research has shut down, but Kendi now has a new sinecure at Howard University. Corporations from Walmart and Target to BlackRock seem to be swearing off DEI, but some so-called corporate conversions, such as Disney’s, look more semantic than substantial. As the applause for woke speakers at this year’s Grammy Awards showed, the entertainment industry and cultural institutions will be the last redoubts of DEI.
Take the publishing industry, for example. Penguin Random House, America’s biggest seller of children’s books, went all-in on DEI themes in 2022 under former CEO Madeline McIntosh and continues on this path under current CEO Nihar Malaviya. This wasn’t DEI-prompted altruism. It was big business. Public school libraries spend approximately $500 million a year on print books. Factor in e-books and other media, and the total climbs to nearly $750 million. Public libraries, the majority of which embrace the DEI ideology, spend another $65 million annually on print materials.
Some children’s book experts, such as Wall Street Journal reviewer Meghan Cox Gurdon, are optimistic that the tide has begun to turn, but there are three reasons why it won’t be easy for publishers to kick their DEI addiction.
Publishing has a long pipeline between acquiring a manuscript and getting a book on the shelves. It takes a year or more for publishers to recoup sunk costs for an author’s advance, printing, marketing, and shipping. To avoid losses, publishers such as PRH were locked into decisions made long before Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump, when many fervently believed Biden would win a second term and the DEI bandwagon would roll on. As Puff Daddy put it, it’s all about the Benjamins, baby!
The second is a workforce problem. Remember when agitated junior employees walked out in protest until publishers canceled books by conservative or controversial authors? Many of those employees have advanced in seniority and risen in the ranks. These true believers are committed to the DEI stamp of approval on the books they’ve been bringing out and the authors they’ve been promoting.
The third problem is the industry ecosystem, especially writers’ organizations and professional publications. The Authors Guild, for example, passed an “Anti-Racism Resolution” in 2020 declaiming the “history and practice of racism in the publishing industry.”
The Authors Guild is the country’s oldest association for writers. Traditionally, it advocates copyright matters, industry practices, freelancers’ rights, and other professional concerns. Its 15,000 active members weren’t consulted when it formed a DEI committee and hired a consultant to “promote voices of Black authors and other authors of color” and promulgate antiracism policies. That’s because the New York-based guild isn’t a democracy. A small coterie of insiders committed the guild to DEI preferential treatment for some races over others.
The guild’s president is W. Ralph Eubanks, a talented writer and professor whose focus is race. In an essay first published in Southern Review in 2016 and republished in November 2024 in Literary Hub, Eubanks described the “conspicuous psychic damage I saw on my students’ faces” after Trump’s election. He says “teaching literature is my tool of activism.”
Under his leadership, the Authors Guild is now teaming up with Penguin Random House and the NAACP in lawsuits to overturn school policies and state laws that give parents a veto over the educational materials their children are exposed to in the classroom.
Poets & Writers is the largest nonprofit literary organization in the country. Its magazine, Poets & Writers, is a valuable resource for writers’ workshops, master’s programs, conferences, and finding literary agents. As recently as 2009, giants of the canon, including Ernest Hemingway, graced the magazine’s covers.
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Don’t expect it to feature “old white guys” such as Hemingway today. Poets & Writers is now “committed to becoming an antiracist organization.” Its board president is none other than McIntosh, the former CEO of Penguin Random House.
So, forget the triumphalism. Woke won’t die, to borrow Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R-FL) phrase, until people demonstrate that we can’t be forced to conform to a racist ideology that seeks to divide the country instead of uniting it.
John B. Roberts II is the author of several books and a former political strategist and executive producer of the McLaughlin Group. He is a member of Mystery Writers of America and the Authors Guild. His website is www.jbrobertsauthor.com.