Perry Bacon: This is Right Now on The New Republic. I’m Perry Bacon, I’m the host. I’m joined by Natasha Warikoo. She’s a professor of sociology at Tufts University. She wrote a great book a few years ago called The Diversity Bargain, and now that we’re so focused these days on issues of diversity and inclusion and so on, I wanted to talk to her about kind of where we are.
Natasha Warikoo: Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
Warikoo: Sure. Yeah. So I did these interviews with students on the Harvard and Brown campuses, and then also in the UK at Oxford, thinking—I wanted to understand people who are at the most elite places, and how they think about issues of fairness, inclusion, knowing that these places are very exclusive and elite, and certain groups are underrepresented. And the diversity bargain is this, that I found that white students in the United States really did support provisions for equity, particularly affirmative action, which was legal at the time. And they did it, but there was a bargain involved, right?
But this meant a few things, that they expected underrepresented minority students to integrate at all times. So if they saw a table of Black students sitting together, then they thought that they were not upholding the diversity bargain. Of course, they didn’t notice all the tables of white students on the other side of the cafeteria, but that was OK. They didn’t want it to, quote-unquote, “go too far,” right? That there was this idea of reverse discrimination kind of lurking in the back of their heads.
So there were these kinds of expectations that were rolled into the support for affirmative action, in part, and I argue, because there was less attention to kind of racial justice, and that the origins of affirmative action were related to racial equity for underrepresented minorities, frankly, African Americans, in the very beginning. And so that was underplayed in this discourse.
Warikoo: It was 2016.
And the reason I thought about the book more recently was, in 2020, I felt, oh, now we’re seeing a movement not just for diversity, but for real racial justice, and I wonder what this looks like. Natasha was hinting that when the demand is not just for Black people or minorities get in the room, but minorities get to shape things, and there’s a call for justice, then the white college students get mad.
Warikoo: Yeah, it’s been fascinating to watch this unfold. And so, 2020, for many people who care about racial justice and equity, was really an inspiring moment where we thought, “OK, this is what I was calling for,” right? I was calling for greater attention to racial justice, to equity. Systemic racism became, like, a household, an everyday phrase, that left the academy and went into corporate America.
Bacon: And let’s—I want to talk about the backlash in a couple different ways. The first was, you saw all these, like, red states, I’ll say, right after 2021, passing all these sort of bans on books and ideas about race. You can’t study sociology in this way, or Black studies in this way. So you saw that pretty much 2020, 2021, 2022, that was in red states, that was happening.
Warikoo: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a kind of back and forth, I think, between the local and the federal, right? So President Trump issues this executive order in September 2020. Biden takes office, rescinds that order, but states and local areas take it up, right? So you have Governor DeSantis in Florida using very similar language. They take on this phrase critical race theory, right?
Again, you see this legislation and these movements in local areas with very similar language, because it’s a kind of systematic movement supported by organizations like Heritage Foundation. And so this is a very organized effort to attack any kind of policy related to diversity, justice, race, and to build a kind of narrative about this kind of reverse racism, right? To build this false narrative that somehow people of color, trans people, LGBTQ people are getting ahead, right?
Bacon: And in corporate America, something happens too, where, like, 2014 to 2023, I’ll call this period, where a lot of companies feel like they have to—they put out diversity guidelines. We’re going to hire more women, we’re going to hire more people of color. We’re going to have more trainings. We’re going to have more implicit bias training. Some of these things are evidence-based. Some of them, candidly, are not particularly useful.
Warikoo: Yeah. I don’t know what’s going in their heads, but I can tell you what I see. There’s this great book that came out around the time that my book came out, called The Enigma of Diversity by Ellen Berrey, who’s another sociologist, where she compares the language around diversity in higher education, but also in the corporate world and in real estate as well, and this idea that diversity is being sold as a commodity in these different spheres, right?
And I do think that there has been this, again, this shift back, in part because of fear, right? Fear of the Trump administration. Maybe lack of being totally on board, or worry about the bottom line, or that having been maybe more performative. I think all of those things can happen at once, right? But, when push comes to shove, we’re not going to put ourselves on the line, and I think that’s what we have seen.
Bacon: The higher education story feels to me like a couple different things. Which is, one, you had the red states opposed to all kinds of things because they’re very conservative. You have this Supreme Court decision about affirmative action, which says you can’t consider race in a variety of ways in admissions, particularly in higher education. So you have the Supreme Court acting.
Warikoo: Yeah. I think there’s this sort of convergence, right? And to me, that was a moment, right? When—again, people have different perspectives in different universities, even within universities. But there was a—after those Gaza protests is where you see a lack of alignment, right? When Black Lives Matter happened, not all Americans were on board with down with systemic racism.
And so this created this kind of moment where I think the right saw an opening and swooped in. So you see this shift where, up to that point, a lot of the focus of the anti-DEI work on the right was in K-12 education, right? Book bans, right? Anti-DEI teaching, all those critical race theory, all that legislation was K-12 schools. 90 percent of those bans were at the K-12 level. But then there’s this shift, like, Oh, wait. OK, here’s an opening for us in higher education. And then they shift to higher ed, right? And then we see the systematic attacks in the second Trump administration in higher education. And of course, bolstered by the 2023 US Supreme Court decision, right?
And of course, that is not settled law, but they use that in that Dear Colleague letter that came out in February 2025, to say, Stop everything. And if you don’t, we’re going to withhold federal funding. Now, again, there’s a lot of throwing things at the wall and seeing what will stick in the Trump administration, but it creates, like, fear. And universities are like, “Wait, we don’t want to get sued. We don’t want to be the ones in a lawsuit.” So that starts, and then the Gaza war really creates a wide opening to say, OK, the withholding of federal grants, and it just continues on and on over the last year and a half.
Warikoo: Yeah. I’m in a very liberal state. I’m on a liberal campus, so I’ll start with that caveat. I think the biggest things that we worry about are our international—
Warikoo: Yes. Oh, sorry. Yes, that’s what I mean. That’s really important. It’s a private college. But we have a lot of federal grants, and so we are beholden to the federal government. I think we worry a lot about our international students, increasingly draconian policies related to, like, first getting a visa, and then the four-year new policy for graduation. Are they going to be targeted? We had our student, was kidnapped by ICE, right? She thought she was being kidnapped off the street. She didn’t even know what was happening. And so I think we worry a lot about that.
And so I think a lot of those things are happening. I think that’s now getting, again, taken up and attributed to, it’s the supposedly ideological bent of the faculty. I think that’s totally wrong. So I think there is that, but I think it’s not a result of these political things. I think it’s a result of broader social trends. And so, I think, on a day-to-day level, students are just, like, doing their thing.
People are now putting on statements like, You can’t record in your class, in my classroom. I understand that, and, a few years ago, it never would’ve occurred to me to have a statement like that on my syllabus. So I think these are the kinds of things that are happening right now. And I think our students are also just worried about, am I going to get a job after I graduate, with all of this debt, or with this degree? And I think those are the big concerns, I think.
Warikoo: Yeah. In some ways it makes it feel more important than ever, right? So Florida, two years ago, and now it’s been formalized, first started saying, You know what, you can’t take sociology for your distribution requirements, and sociology can no longer be part of gen ed requirements. And part of me was like, Oh, they understand the value of sociology, right? What do we do as sociologists? We look at society. We look at data on society. We reveal the things that are hard to see, right?
I’m actually going back to those young—they’re not young anymore—the people I interviewed for The Diversity Bargain. They’re now in their 30s, and I’ve been re-interviewing them to say, “Hey, how’s it turned out? And do you still believe in meritocracy? Do you think that this is a fair system?” And you know what? A lot of them are saying, like, no, it’s not a meritocracy. Like, hiring, it’s not a meritocracy. I got my job because I knew somebody. And the way I hire, or the way my firm hires, I try to give, like, a sample activity, or I’ve suggested we take the names of universities.
The other thing that I feel really passionate about right now is just defending higher education, right? This attack on higher education, to me—any authoritarian regime attacks the institutions of knowledge, which is what we’re seeing, and it’s so disturbing. But how do we have a just as organized a response, to showing the value of what happens in higher education? Higher education is—I’m not saying it’s perfect. We’re not perfect. We got a lot of work to do. But a lot of good things happen in higher education.
Bacon: Let me give one suggestion that no one in academia has listened to so far, but I will try it again. I’m in a Black family. We have Thanksgiving dinner. I go to a Black church sometimes. Everyone does not agree on everything. We have disagreements about lots of things.
Bacon: None of us voted for Donald Trump, though, so you might want to stop conceding that you all don’t have any thought diversity because people voted for Democrats. This concession, when there are Republican voters in the room, that people all think the same, is not actually true. And if you expand out to the rest of society, I don’t think everyone in the Black church all is of, like—we have fierce debates about private schools and charter schools and public schools, but no, we do not debate if Donald Trump is a good president or not.
It’d be nice if the David Brookses and the president of Yale and people who are not Trumpists would actually defend higher ed first. That’d be helpful. Like the Yale report—there are a lot of reports that, I don’t agree with a lot of what they said in there, and you might want to start there before we worry about JD Vance.
Bacon: Like, diversity is not—political diversity, viewpoint diversity, is not Republican versus Democrat. You and I differ on issues, I’m sure, but we might vote for the same person, is my guess. I’m not going to ask you that, being—
But I think the viewpoint diversity thing is also disingenuous, because it starts with an end point, right? You are diverse because you think this thing. You support President Trump, or you support whoever it is—it doesn’t have to be President Trump—you are anti-abortion, or whatever. But the diversity stuff said, “No, you might think something,” but diversity challenges you to consider a different way, and then whatever you conclude, right? But this viewpoint diversity thing is, “Here’s my stake in the ground. You need to listen to this.” And I think that’s so deeply problematic.
But then also, I think particularly in a field like sociology, when you’re looking at the data, and you’re drawing conclusions based on that, that might lead you to a broad range of politics that are over here. Like you said, there’s a lot of differences over here, but less over here. And so I think—and even if you have that conclusion, our job is not to bring that into the classroom.
Bacon: So the reason I thought about you was with this whole Woke 1.0 discussion, because we’re going to finish there. Which is that I’m concerned that—I know there’s been defenses of what she said, but I was concerned that the thing that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a leading sort of progressive figure in America, said was Woke 1.0 was crazy. I don’t quite know what Woke 1.0 is.
So I’m wondering what to do about that, in a certain way. So, I get the fact that there was a political backlash to that. So if you’re running for office, I can see—like, you, Natasha, are not wrong. If you’re planning to run for office in Wisconsin, do not say the things you said. I agree. But what do the rest of us do who are not running? That’s what I want to talk to you about, is, like, how do we defend—if you’re not running for office, how do we defend the ideas of 2020? Because I think that’s important. I think those ideas were not wrong, and I think we need to stop conceding them.
Warikoo: Yeah. Look, I think this idea that we want American society to be broadly inclusive, that people of all racial identities, of all backgrounds, should feel that they can be part of the American dream, and that we want to take steps in schools, in higher education, to make that happen—I have a hard time believing that most Americans will not be on board with that. And that’s fundamentally what the Diversity Project has tried to do, right?
And again, I think we have to counter this narrative, right? I think what the right has been really successful at doing is creating this narrative that, a lot of people are hurting in American society right now, of all races, right? And so, to say, You know why you’re hurting? It’s because of those people. It’s because of the trans people. It’s because of African Americans. It’s because of immigrants. And they’ve been, like, remarkably successful at that. And I think we have to shift that narrative, and to say that, No, you know what it is? It’s housing policy. We need to figure out housing. It’s economic policy. It’s—
And so I think just laying that out to ordinary Americans in a way that’s clear and consistent and not defensive, I think, is going to go a long way. I think people who are critical of the way that we’re going need to build—when I look at that Project 2025, the foundations and how systematic and organized that movement has been, like, can we build that? And that’s what I want to be a part of.
Warikoo: I want to build that in the other direction, I should say. Sorry, just to be fair.
Warikoo: Yeah, 100 percent. Who would disagree with that, right?
Warikoo: Yeah, people have been talking about that in different ways for many years. And there’s this balance between—we’re not saying that we have to be colorblind. I don’t think being colorblind would get us there. But we do have to show how these different groups have similar interests, and that we have to be aligned and build these coalitions across lines of difference, in ways, and think about issues that we are all facing. I think there is a balance there. I think we still have to recognize there are issues specific to race, to sexuality or whatever, and that there is a common interest, economic interest, economic issues as well.
Warikoo: You can go to my website. Oh—I signed up for Substack. I need to—
Warikoo: But don’t go to my Substack. Go to my website, natashawarikoo.com. That has a lot of my work, and you can look at my recent books, Race at the Top and Is Affirmative Action Fair?
Warikoo: Thanks so much for having me.
Bacon: Bye-bye.
Hence then, the article about transcript trump s hasn t killed dei in america was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Transcript: Trump’s Hasn’t Killed DEI in America )
Also on site :