ABC Airs Maybe the WORST Ever Seg­ment on DEI, Insists ‘Equi­ty’ Equals ‘Mer­it-Based’

ABC Airs Maybe the WORST Ever Segment on DEI, Insists ‘Equity’ Equals ‘Merit-Based’

ABC’s Good Morn­ing Amer­i­ca aired Mon­day pos­si­bly the most deceit­ful and glossy depic­tion of diver­si­ty, equi­ty, and inclu­sion (DEI) pro­grams as “mer­it-based,” a con­tin­u­a­tion of the civ­il rights move­ment “lev­el­ling the play­ing field,” and cre­at­ing “equi­table out­comes.” DEI does not, they insist­ed, have any­thing to do with hurt­ing one group of peo­ple or giv­ing promi­nence to those unde­serv­ing.

As the great Christo­pher Rufo post­ed Jan­u­ary 12 on X, the real­i­ty is “[m]eritocracy and DEI are fun­da­men­tal­ly incom­pat­i­ble” with the for­mer “judg[ing] indi­vid­u­als based on their accom­plish­ments, while a DEI-based sys­tem judges indi­vid­u­als based on their ances­try.”

Nonethe­less, co-host Robin Roberts — who report­ed­ly makes in the ball­park of $20 mil­lion — huffed that “fed­er­al agen­cies are ban­ning any cel­e­bra­tions of” Black His­to­ry Month and used that as a jump­ing off point to decry Pres­i­dent Trump “cur­tail­ing” DEI.

This gave way to 20/20 co-host Deb­o­rah Roberts — wife of NBC’s Today co-host Al Roker and no rela­tion to Robin — who start­ed with this lament in a report that offered zero sound­bites who oppose DEI:

Hard to believe a small acronym has sparked such a fierce debate. DEI began dur­ing the civ­il rights move­ment, a way of lev­el­ling the play­ing field, cre­at­ing equal­i­ty in pow­er struc­tures. But some­how, the mes­sage has been lost, with some now see­ing DEI as a sym­bol for unfair prac­tices. Now, with the gov­ern­ment tak­ing that same stand, there’s some big efforts now to push back.

Ah, so DEI — cul­tur­al com­mu­nism — is actu­al­ly about fur­ther­ing equal­i­ty. But notice how ABC and woke­sters writ large often use equi­ty and equal­i­ty syn­ony­mous­ly when it’s like­ly even many of them know the for­mer is flat­ten­ing out­comes while the lat­ter offers — pun intend­ed — a lad­der to climb toward end­less pos­si­bil­i­ties.

Deb­o­rah Roberts had the gall to trum­pet lib­er­al boy­cotts, say­ing “[t]he sweep­ing roll­back of DEI poli­cies strik­ing a nerve with con­sumers online” with “[s]ome express­ing out­rage that major retail­ers” like Tar­get “are retreat­ing from” DEI when its goals are just “help­ing high­light and strength­en minor­i­ty groups by address­ing long stand­ing issues like the gen­der pay gap and expand­ing recruit­ment of can­di­dates his­tor­i­cal­ly over­looked.”

DEI expert Daniel Oppong lament­ed in a sound­bite that it’s viewed as “polar­iz­ing,” but it was still true “that dif­fer­ent peo­ple expe­ri­ence the world in dif­fer­ent ways depend­ing on the iden­ti­ties they hold” and thus DEI is nec­es­sary “to dri­ve equi­table out­comes.”

She fol­lowed with this disin­gen­u­ous swat­ting away of DEI’s pit­falls in which race is put at the cen­ter, not mer­it: “The impact of DEI stretch­ing wide, from enroll­ment in high­er edu­ca­tion to hir­ing prac­tices and while crit­ics claim DEI includes a racial bias, pit­ting less qual­i­fied can­di­dates against those more deserv­ing, some busi­ness experts insist that’s not the case.”

Oppong fol­lowed with the kick­er about DEI being “mer­it-based” and then an old­er, white, female lib­er­al who actu­al­ly com­pared DEI oppo­nents to those against deseg­re­gat­ing the Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion sys­tem:

OPPONG: In my mind, the idea that DE&I isn’t mer­it based or is anti-mer­i­toc­ra­cy, is fun­da­men­tal­ly flawed.

VALLOTKARP CONSULTING’s ANGELA VALLOT: Amer­i­ca has been on a very, very long jour­ney of try­ing to ful­fill, you know, its ideals and it’s been a rocky road. We see the land­mark Brown v. Board of edu­ca­tion which end­ed legal seg­re­ga­tion at pub­lic schools. So, this isn’t new. We’ve seen this through­out his­to­ry, we make progress then there’s back­lash.

Deb­o­rah Roberts tried to end on a hope­ful note for fel­low cor­po­rate lib­er­als, not­ing “big cor­po­ra­tions like Delta Air­lines, Apple, Cost­co, and Gold­man Sachs…say they will con­tin­ue to pur­sue [DEI] poli­cies.”

Prompt­ed by Robin Roberts, Deb­o­rah said she saw “a woman wear­ing a shirt that said ‘earned not giv­en’ which once again plays into that argu­ment that these are giv­en to peo­ple. It’s real­ly about oppor­tu­ni­ties, not about giv­ing.”

Robin replied that view­ers “have to remem­ber” a world built with DEI is “still..merit-based” and thanked Deb­o­rah for “hav­ing peo­ple have a bet­ter under­stand­ing” as though this were a brain­wash­ing.

Our friends at The Fed­er­al­ist took a 20,000-foot view of DEI in Feb­ru­ary 2023, lam­bast­ing the left’s insid­i­ous strat­e­gy of being “inten­tion­al­ly vague” when their real goal is “sanc­tioned favoritism in the name of social jus­tice” (click “expand’):

Seem­ing­ly in uni­son, and with almost no debate, near­ly every major Amer­i­can insti­tu­tion — includ­ing fed­er­al, state, and local gov­ern­ments, uni­ver­si­ties and pub­lic schools, hos­pi­tals, insur­ance, media and tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies, and major retail brands — has agreed that the DEI infra­struc­ture is essen­tial to the nation’s prop­er func­tion­ing.

(.…)

Diver­si­ty, equi­ty, and inclu­sion is an inten­tion­al­ly vague term used to describe sanc­tioned favoritism in the name of social jus­tice. Its Wikipedia entry indi­cates a lack of agree­ment on the def­i­n­i­tion, while Merriam-Webster.com and the Asso­ci­at­ed Press online style guide have no entry (the AP offers guid­ance on relat­ed terms). 

Yet how­ev­er defined, it’s clear DEI is now much more than an aca­d­e­m­ic craze or cor­po­rate affec­ta­tion.

“It’s an indus­try in every sense of the word,” says Peter Schuck, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of law at Yale. “My sus­pi­cion is that many of the offices don’t do what they say. But they’re hir­ing peo­ple, giv­ing them titles and pret­ty good mon­ey. I don’t think they do noth­ing.” 

(.…)

More recent­ly, a spate of wide­ly pub­li­cized police killings of unarmed African Amer­i­cans has gal­va­nized a grow­ing belief, espe­cial­ly among pro­gres­sives and espe­cial­ly since Don­ald Trump’s elec­tion, that Amer­i­ca is an irre­deemably racist nation. In 2020, in the wake of the Floyd mur­der and in advance of a fraught elec­tion, a moral pan­ic set in. Hav­ing increased their ranks, social jus­tice entre­pre­neurs and bureau­crats were poised to imple­ment an ide­o­log­i­cal agen­da and com­pound their insti­tu­tion­al pow­er. 

Although no hard num­bers exist on the exact size of the indus­try, the “DEIfi­ca­tion” of Amer­i­ca is clear. From Rochester, New York, to San Diego, Cal­i­for­nia, cash-strapped munic­i­pal­i­ties have found the funds to staff DEI offices. Star­tups and small com­pa­nies that once relied on their own employ­ees to pro­mote an inclu­sive cul­ture now feel com­pelled to hire diver­si­ty con­sul­tants and sen­si­tiv­i­ty train­ers to set them straight.

At Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty, for exam­ple, the aver­age DEI staff salary is $78,000, accord­ing to pub­lic infor­ma­tion gath­ered by econ­o­mist Mark J. Per­ry of the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute — about $103,000 with fringe ben­e­fits. Not to be out­done by its Big Ten con­fer­ence rival, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan pays its diver­si­ty offi­cers $94,000 on aver­age — about $124,000 with ben­e­fits. Until he retired from the posi­tion last sum­mer, Michigan’s chief diver­si­ty offi­cer, Robert Sell­ers, was paid over $431,000 a year. His wife, Tab­bye Chavous, now has the job, at the vice provost rank and a salary of $380,000.  

For small­er orga­ni­za­tions that can­not afford a full-time equi­ty offi­cer, there are oth­er options for shoring up social jus­tice bona fides — name­ly, work­ing with any of the hun­dreds of DEI con­sult­ing agen­cies that have risen like mush­rooms after a night’s rain, most of them led by “BIPOC” mil­len­ni­als. With some firms, the social jus­tice goals are unmis­tak­able. The Racial Equi­ty Insti­tute is “com­mit­ted to the work of anti-racist trans­for­ma­tion” and chal­leng­ing “pat­terns of pow­er” on behalf of big-name clients like the Har­vard Busi­ness School, Ben & Jerry’s, and the Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union. With oth­ers, the appeal has less to do with social change than explor­ing mar­ket­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties and cre­at­ing a “with-it” com­pa­ny cul­ture, where pro­gres­sive pol­i­tics com­ple­ment the office foos­ball tables and kom­bucha on tap.

If it were all about endors­ing “mer­it” as ABC claimed, then why have inci­dents like these popped up on a steady basis for years in which one’s First Amend­ment rights are tram­pled in the name of com­fort for a few?

Rufo’s life work has been in part expos­ing the DEI rot in Amer­i­can cul­ture. In Novem­ber 2021, he sum­ma­rized a “ten-part inves­tiga­tive series on woke cap­i­tal, expos­ing crit­i­cal race the­o­ry train­ing pro­grams in Amer­i­ca’s For­tune 100 com­pa­nies” with a few exam­ples.

They includ­ed AT&T teach­ing its employ­ees that “racism is a unique­ly white trait” and Wal­mart hold­ing train­ings for white employ­ees to be told about their sins of “white suprema­cy think­ing.”

Thank­ful­ly, Wal­mart end­ed its DEI poli­cies in Novem­ber 2024.

To see the rel­e­vant ABC tran­script from Feb­ru­ary 3, click here.