Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
GOP rep. Tim Burchett posted on social media and has said in interviews that Kamala Harris is the “DEI candidate” for president? What does he mean by this? How does this statement reflect the ideology of “colorblindness”? And How does this language operate as an open code for contemporary American racism? Dan talks about these issues and more in this week’s episode.
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We have a sale on Swatch Premium for $50 for the entire year, going until Labor Day.
There's a lot of news.
There's a lot to understand.
There's a lot to break down.
Swatch Premium gives you access to our 600-episode archive, ad-free listening to the show, an invite to our Discord server, bonus content every Monday, and a bonus episode every month with me and Dan.
Check it out in the show notes.
It costs less than that latte you bought on the way to work today.
As always, welcome to It's in the Code, a series as part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am pleased to be with you listening to me, and my name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
As always, feel free to reach out.
I really value that.
Daniel Miller Swatch, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
I continue to close the gap on the emails.
I am slowly catching up.
I'm always gratified.
It takes me so long to respond to folks.
I do try to respond to everybody eventually, and I get so many nice follow-up emails from people who are like, oh, thank you so much for following up, even though it was like, you know, weeks later.
So thank you for that.
Thank you for supporting us.
Thank you for listening.
I'm going to dive in here because I don't know if today's episode could go a little bit longer than typical, but I'm jumping on an issue that came up this week.
Actually, it came to my attention just yesterday.
It bugged me all day, it bugged me all night.
I woke up this morning thinking about it, so I decided that that's the topic you get to hear about this week.
And so when I say this week, of course you could be listening to this any time, but I'm recording this, you know, In the week that Joe Biden has stepped out of the presidential race, VP Kamala Harris has effectively become the presumptive Democratic nominee.
She has enough verbal commitments from delegates that she would win the nomination.
And so anybody who knows anything about contemporary American politics and the rhetoric of the right, anybody who's listened to this show, who's listened to the weekly roundups, who's listened to the interviews that we do, any of that, or just, you know, follow the news, you know that the politics and rhetoric of the right are going to go after Harris's gender and her ethnicity.
She's a woman of color.
And she's also of mixed race background, a daughter of immigrants and so forth.
So all of that is going to be a prime opportunity for the right.
It hasn't taken long to happen and it's happened on numerous fronts.
But what I want to talk about is Tennessee Republican Representative Tim Burchette put out a social media post The media propped up this president, lied to the American people for three years, then dumped him for our DEI vice president.
And it wasn't a one-off.
This wasn't a case of saying something or putting something up that was ill-advised and later deleting it or backtracking it.
No.
In a CNN interview, he referred to Harris as a D.E.I.
hire.
And what I want to look at is his D.E.I.
language voices what has become, I think, the newest open code for racism on the American right.
And it's related in a lot of ways to the way the word or the concept of quote-unquote wokeness now features on the right.
And I've mentioned this idea of kind of an open or public code before in the sense, it's a code.
It's coded racist language.
I'm going to talk about why that is.
But everybody knows that it's coded racist language.
The people using it know that it's coded racist language.
Those of us hearing it know that it's coded racist language.
But when you call them out on it, They can say, oh, no, no, no, it's not coded at all.
It's good and it's principled.
In fact, it's the opposite of racism.
It's inclusive language.
And so I want to talk about what this language actually does and how it works because we are going to hear more of this.
I think that this is a line that lots of people on the right are going to pick up because they know it plays to the MAGA bass.
OK?
So I think Brichette presents a really pronounced example of this.
I want to dig into some of his rhetoric, but he's not alone.
And he's emblematic, and this language is emblematic, of sort of broader moves, and moves that have been afoot for decades at this point, but are really hitting, I think, an inflection point in the last couple years.
So let's start with this, just in case anybody's not familiar.
What do we mean by DEI when he says she's the DEI candidate?
That language, of course, just is shorthand or an abbreviation for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And what that is, is sort of, it refers to policies or programs or social practices adopted by universities or companies or school systems or whatever that are aimed at addressing disparities of under-representation, in particular, issues related to ethnicity, gender, and I think sexuality as well.
In other words, if they recognize that, you know, some place has historically hired, you know, 60% of their employees have been men, It might be a DEI initiative to try to bring that number into balance, or if someplace knows that they, let's say, 15% of the population where they are is African-American, but only 7% of their students are African-American, they might want to try to create a more equitable context and sort of rectify that, okay?
And so we've probably all heard about this.
It's been in the news.
That's part of why Burchette can pick up the language that he's picking up.
But that brings up the, you know, what's the why of DEI?
In other words, why do people do this?
Again, it aims to address the ongoing effects of marginalization and exclusion of particular populations, okay?
It is not limited to ethnic minorities and to people of color, but this has been a big focus, and that's what I'm going to focus on here.
And in this regard, DEI initiatives are intended as a means of combating racism and its institutional and social legacies.
And if you want sort of, you know, the classic example of this, you know, DEI before the language of DEI was popular, programs like Affirmative Action are the most high profile of these, okay?
So for some time, those on the right have claimed the DEI initiatives are actually racist.
That not only do they not fix or address inequalities, not only are they not effectively anti-racist, but they are themselves actually racist.
And that those who appeal to them are the real racists.
So the right will say, oh, you liberals want to claim that, you know, the moral high ground on this.
You're actually racist because you support DEI initiatives.
And in opposing those, we're the ones who really oppose racism.
They try to flip the script.
OK?
And here's how they do this.
They do it by appealing to the ideology of so-called colorblindness.
OK?
Of having a colorblind society.
And if you're of a certain age, you know, I'm of enough of an age that I remember when the language of colorblindness was considered progressive, even radical.
Martin Luther King talked about envisioning a society in which people would no longer see race, and the idea was that such a society that no longer judged people in terms of race and so forth would be colorblind.
Or, and here I'm going to date myself, but a popular song of my youth was the en vogue song Free Your Mind, and the lyrics said, free your mind and the rest will follow, be colorblind, don't be so shallow, don't see things in terms of race.
So colorblindness was a term that appealed, or appeared rather, on the kind of progressive and liberal left.
That's where it started, but it has been co-opted by the right.
Okay?
And now, conservatives use it to argue that any awareness of, or any appeal to racial identity of any kind, is a failure of colorblindness.
Which means that any time we foreground race, any time we take race into account, any time we make decisions based on race, that is inherently racist.
Which means that DEI initiatives, such as Affirmative Action, don't combat racism, they actually promote it.
In other words, if you've got applicants for a job and you're looking at them, everything is kind of equal and the same, but one of them is an applicant of color and you say, we need to diversify our workforce.
We need to have more people in management, for example, who are people of color or minorities of different kinds.
And you use that as part of your decision-making process.
There's things up, up.
You just took race into account.
That's racist.
You just used race to make a decision about somebody.
You just made a decision about somebody based on their racial identity.
You're the real racist.
Okay?
And this is not a new argument.
But it was famously mainstreamed, I think, for a lot of folks by Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts.
I think this is one of the places where, at least in sort of legal terms, it really became a mainstream idea.
And this was in 2007.
He wrote for the Plurality in a lawsuit called Parents Involved in Community Schools or PICS versus the Seattle School District.
And what he said is, what the decision said, was that school districts could not use race as a deciding factor in assigning students to schools.
In other words, you had school districts, and they had multiple schools, and they were trying to determine what school students went to based on the demographics of the school, based on the demographics of the neighborhood in which the school was located, and so forth.
And the classic DEI aim, again, in 2007, the language of diversity, equity, inclusion was not common, but this is the aim.
And they ruled that they could not do that.
The school districts could not use race as a deciding factor.
And in writing the opinion, Roberts gave voice to this ideology of colorblindness.
What he said is, quote, the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
In other words, he said, if you use race in any way to supposedly combat racism, you're actually not combating racism, you are still discriminating on the basis of race.
So DEI initiatives or affirmative action are discriminatory.
So that was the claim, that such initiatives that aim to redress discrimination are actually discriminatory.
And as we will probably all remember, this is a more recent example, this was reaffirmed to give an even greater life last year.
When SCOTUS, that is the Supreme Court, ruled that colleges and universities can't take race into consideration when making admission decisions.
It was a widely anticipated decision.
It went the way I think most people thought that it was going to go.
And the reason they thought it was going to go that way is because of decisions like this 2007 decision.
And that was the argument again, is that far from remedying racist discrimination, the conservative majority found that programs like Affirmative Action actively discriminate on the basis of race and are therefore unconstitutional.
Okay?
So that's the logic.
The logic is, and it's not just used by people like Burchette, the logic is Well-intentioned or not.
I think most people on the right think it's not well-intentioned.
It's a conspiracy to, you know, change America or whatever.
Well-intentioned or not.
You can't address racial discrimination by actually taking into account the race of people involved in hiring or admissions or what have you, okay?
That's the logic.
And it's not just used by people like Burchette.
I think there are legitimately well-meaning people who will fall for this line of reasoning.
I think there are people who will hear that and say, what John Roberts says, I mean, yeah, surely you can't fix discrimination through discrimination.
I mean, I guess that makes a lot of sense.
I think there are some people who are going to, you know, they're going to fall for that.
When I was an undergrad, again this is before the language of DEI, but the same idea, I remember it was the first time I encountered other evangelicals, I went to an evangelical college, who were really opposed to affirmative action because they said it was reverse racism or it was reverse discrimination.
I think that they really believed that.
I think that they weren't trying to do anything nefarious, they believed it because of the people in their lives who probably were doing nefarious things with that ideology.
Had told it to them.
So I think there are people who really believe it.
Okay?
So let's think about why it doesn't make sense.
And I want to talk about this.
And the way I want to talk about this is the way I talk about things in my book is I want to think about racism as a kind of social malady.
It's like a disease within the social body.
If we think of society as a body, racism is like a disease.
And if we believe that racism and its effects are not only in the past, But that they are present realities, as almost the vast majority of people of color will say that, you know, this is something they experience.
If we believe that racism isn't limited to just the intentions of individuals, but that it can be embodied in social institutions and practices, right?
Hiring practices, things like redlining, things like, you know, not giving mortgages to people of certain races or ethnicities and so forth.
If we believe those things, and I realize there are people who don't, there are people who want to believe the comfortable myth that racism used to be a thing and then we had the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement and now racism is gone and done.
If you're one of those people, you're probably not listening to this.
If you are one of those people, we have other things to talk about and nothing I say is going to be very compelling to you, so you can, you know, turn it off now, I guess, or you can email me or whatever.
But if you believe those things, that racism is a real thing that still happens and its legacies are still ongoing, Then what I want to say is that racial discrimination is like a cancer within the social body.
It's a malady.
It's an illness.
And I think that this is an apt metaphor, and I think it fits the way that I understand racism and racial discrimination.
And it's apt because of this.
On that model, it makes no sense to think that we could remedy that malady without naming and focusing on the issue behind it.
Addressing racism, that is discrimination on the basis of race, without taking race into account would literally be like trying to treat cancer without focusing on the cancer.
It would be like going to the doctor and then saying, well, you know, yeah, there's cancer, so we'd better talk, we just can't focus too much on the cancer.
We need you to get well some other way.
It would make treating the cancer virtually impossible, and it's the idea that we'll just hope that maybe the body can magically fight it off, just like we'll hope that the national body will magically do away with racism.
And that's what Clarence Thomas said in that decision last year.
Just wave the magic wand.
You can't take race into account, but magically, somehow, American society will live out its ideals and racism will disappear and so forth.
Okay?
So I think that that's a good analogy for this.
I think it literally makes no more sense to say we could fix racism, we could address it, combat it, take it on, without focusing on the concept or category of race any more than we could address cancer without focusing on the cancer.
Okay?
Some people may fall for this, as I say.
I think there are well-intentioned people who fall for this, but the brichettes of the world and most on the right, they know this is a complete fallacy.
They know that racism is something that pervades society.
They know it's there.
And here's the issue.
Their colorblind ideology and their opposition to DEI, it's not about ending or combating racism.
It's about maintaining the dominant racial order in America, in which white people, especially white men, have the greatest power.
That is what the rhetoric and the language aims to protect.
And it's not limited to politicians.
Just recently in the news, companies like Tractor Supply Company and John Deere have both announced that they're done doing DEI things because they were lobbied by conservative activists and so forth and threatened with boycotts and so on.
The real aim in that kind of boycott threat, the real aim in Burchette's statement, is to maintain white power.
And we can see this with the logic.
We just follow through the logic of what he says.
So he says, he says falsely that, excuse me, that Biden announced when he was running for president that, quote, he was going to hire a black female for vice president.
First of all, you don't hire vice presidents.
You select a running mate and then they're nominated as part of a joint ticket.
I think that there's plenty of racism and misogyny lodged in this notion that Biden, the white guy, was choosing to hire a black woman for vice president, but whatever.
Let's just set that aside, okay?
So he says it's false, but he says Biden said he was going to hire a black female for vice president, and then he goes on to ask, what about white females?
And there it is.
That's what gives away the game.
The logic of these kinds of criticisms of DEI, or sometimes wokeness, or these appeals to colorblindness, is that if Biden had chosen anyone who wasn't white, it was a DEI decision and therefore racist.
What that means is anytime somebody who's not white is chosen for anything, it raises suspicion that they were chosen just because they're not white.
It's anti-white animus.
It's anti-white racism.
The only way to be sure on this logic, this twisted backwards Orwellian logic, the only way to be sure that it's not racist is to keep hiring white people.
Or, depending on the context, keep hiring men or keep hiring straight people.
Whatever the marginalized group is, the only way you can be sure that you're not just caving to their pressure is to maintain the power of those who are already in power.
And this comes up not just there, it comes up every time, you know, you get the online trolling of any TV show that like casts a black person in the lead or what have you.
Any hire or appointment of someone who isn't white and typically male is castigated as discriminatory.
It's a way of maintaining white hegemony within society.
It's also what's at work every time somebody rejects DEI and says they want to just hire the best person for the position.
I don't know how many times I've heard this.
Elon Musk came out with some statement about this just like this week or last week, really recently.
That, you know, I don't think we should hire on the basis of race.
We should just hire the best person for the position.
You put these together, it's always the logic that if somebody's hired and they're not white, and especially a white guy, we don't know that they were the best person for the position.
Folks, that's racism.
If your default assumption is that every time the best person is going to be white, or we view it with suspicion, that every time a hire happens and it isn't a white person who's hired, that we have to look askance at that and there's hidden racism there, That's racism.
That's how it works, okay?
This is racism against people of color aimed at perpetuating white supremacy in the U.S.
It is mainstream.
It is a member of the House of Representatives in the United States who is on social media saying this about the sitting vice president and presumptive nominee for the Democratic nomination.
So don't fall for this.
When Uncle Ron trots out this line at the Labor Day cookout and starts calling Kamala Harris the DEI candidate or something like that, don't fall for it.
When you meet somebody who is well-intentioned, my suggestion would be to gently try to explain to them why, despite their intentions, what they're supporting is in fact a racist ideology.
Another way to think about it is this, and I play with this a lot.
Opposition.
Think about it.
If you're opposed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, what does that mean?
I think it means you support discrimination, you support inequity, and you support exclusion.
Pure and simple.
It's not hard to figure out.
It's the same way that if you're opposed to anti-racism, I guess that means you support racism.
That's how the language works.
Okay?
We would never listen to a doctor who suggests that we could treat our cancer by pretending it isn't there.
That in treating our cancer, we have to do everything but talk about the actual issue?
It's the same way with this.
We cannot fix the legacies of racist discrimination in the United States without having to talk about race.
Can't happen.
The people who refuse to talk about it, who put policies in place to prevent us from talking about it, and I'm looking at you, John Roberts and Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and the conservatives of SCOTUS who have now made it a matter of law.
You are acting to preserve racism in America, pure and simple.
I've got to wind this up.
Again, thank you for listening.
This is a topic I could go on about forever.
I think we will be talking about it more, I think, between now and the election and in the long past.
Questions, comments, thoughts, other topics I should bring up, responses to this topic, please let me know.
Daniel Miller Swaj, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
In the meantime, again, thank you for listening.
Thank you for supporting us in so many different ways.
If you are a subscriber, thank you for that.
You are empowering us to keep doing the things that we do.
If you are not a subscriber, and that's something you might consider doing, I would ask you to do so.
Again, we put out a lot of content, and we're just a couple people doing this, and so it's a huge help.
In the meantime, please, be well until we get to talk again, and I'll be with you all again soon.
