Texas’ DEI debate centers on a disagreement about whether programs perpetuate or prevent discrimination

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Over the past year, University of Texas at Austin senior Kam McQueen has had a first-hand look at what happens when the state bans diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at public colleges.

The school’s multicultural center, which hosted six groups that supported students of color, formally closed in January 2024. University funding quickly evaporated for several student groups the center sponsored — like the Queer Trans Black Indigenous People of Color and Allies and Afrikan American Affairs organizations — leaving them to find financial support elsewhere.

For McQueen, a Black and queer student, it was a blow on a campus where just 4.5% of students are Black.

“It’s hard to find spaces where you feel like you belong and there’s people with you,” McQueen said. “Whenever they got rid of the Multicultural Engagement Center at UT, it was detrimental to my well-being, having to fight every single day for your place.”

Many Texans who support DEI programs say such initiatives simply support and connect people from historically marginalized and underrepresented groups. They see the efforts as a natural outgrowth of bedrock American principles and landmark laws — like the constitutional right to equal protection and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — meant to protect people from discrimination.

But a growing Republican-led movement in state and federal government sees such efforts as exclusionary, prejudiced and ineffective. Texas officials and conservatives say that because many DEI programs center around race and ethnicity, they actually violate the same constitutional and legal principles they’re meant to uphold.

Often lost in the political rhetoric swirling around those clashing viewpoints are detailed discussions about what particular student clubs, DEI statements or multicultural centers actually do.

In 2023, Texas banned DEI offices, programs and training at public colleges and universities. That prompted UT-Austin to pull support for cultural graduation ceremonies for Black, Hispanic and LGBTQ+ students. The flagship university and other schools closed or replaced multicultural and diversity offices, laying off or reassigning employees. This year, lawmakers are considering extending similar prohibitions to K-12 schools and the Texas Senate has already passed such a bill. Gov. Greg Abbott has directed state agencies to end all DEI efforts.

In a January executive order, Abbott said, “such blatant efforts to divide people are just new forms of racism, often weaponized in reverse and rooted in the idea that a person may be inherently good or bad, the oppressed or the oppressor, based on racial identity.”

And in Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump’s administration has threatened to withhold federal funds from U.S. schools and universities that do not eliminate diversity initiatives. Some schools nationwide, including private institutions, have reacted by scrubbing websites and canceling diversity-related events to comply with Trump’s executive orders. Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education also announced it was investigating the University of North Texas and Rice University for “race-exclusionary practices” in their graduate programs.

As federal and state officials look to further restrict and ban such initiatives from government agencies and publicly funded institutions, DEI supporters fear that vague orders and government directives will stifle progress made since the Civil Rights Movement by claiming the programs give certain groups preferential treatment over others. The federal and state attempts to dismantle DEI programs offer few proposed alternatives to close persistent gaps in educational attainment, earnings and wealth.

Efforts to crack down on DEI come as a nationwide racial wealth gap not only endures but is widening. White households have $240,000 more wealth than Black households on average, according to 2022 Federal Reserve data. A similar, yet slightly smaller gap of $223,000 exists between white and Hispanic households.

“They used laws and policies and social norms to exclude us. It was never a meritocracy. It was never survival of the fittest,” Antonio Ingram, a lawyer for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, said during an early March event in Austin on DEI. “They’re trying to force amnesia.”

Abbott and other Republicans point to a 2023 Supreme Court ruling that limited how race could be considered in college admissions to argue DEI initiatives are unconstitutional, even though that case focused on affirmative action in higher education and not DEI programs in public and private institutions.

Still, some conservatives are confident they’ve already won in the court of public opinion.

“The left has lost the culture war,” said Sherry Sylvester, a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation. “The only people who support these programs are people who work for them.”

Why do DEI efforts exist?

DEI efforts are largely an outgrowth of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. That movement pushed back against discriminatory laws and practices that persisted since the founding of the United States and after the Civil War.

It culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed race- or gender-based discrimination, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which banned racial discrimination at the ballot box. Both of those were landmark pieces of legislation signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texan. But they didn’t completely end discrimination or prejudice in practice.

Wide racial disparities in employment and educational attainment continued after the Civil Rights Movement. In 1968, one-third of Black people in the U.S. were living in poverty — three times the rate among white people. And while redlining, the practice of denying financial services to people often based on their race and ethnicity, would be outlawed in the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the decades-long practice had a lasting impact.

DEI programs sprouted to combat those outcomes and comply with anti-discrimination laws. What DEI looks like in practice can vary by organization. It generally refers to efforts and practices meant to promote fairness in workplaces, government offices and college campuses.

DEI is based on three pillars — one for each of the words the acronym represents. Organizations can implement those pillars to ensure everyone is represented and given equal opportunities, said Jihye Kwon, associate director of survey research at the University of Southern California’s Race and Equity Center, which provides DEI consulting.

Attempts to increase diversity can include redacting identifying information in job applications to avoid bias. Equity initiatives focus on providing fair treatment, like paying and promoting employees based on their skills and performance. Efforts to foster inclusion include anti-discrimination training.

Eric McDaniel, a government professor and co-director of the Politics of Race and Ethnicity Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, said a common misconception about DEI programs is that they are just meant to apply to people of color, which is not the case. DEI programs also involve women, people in the LGBTQ+ community and people with disabilities, among others.

“One of the things about diversity, equity and inclusion is that it’s attempting to expand the number of people that can be seen as experts in a field or seen as knowledgeable and also provide an environment where they can find success,” McDaniel said.

After a white Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, a Black man, nationwide calls for equality surged. Companies and institutions around the U.S. increased efforts to foster diversity and inclusion.

In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that race-conscious affirmative action policies — which had previously been upheld in the legal system — were unconstitutional in almost all public and private college admissions. The court ruled that such efforts violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, which has historically been used by the Court to strike down discriminatory segregation policies. The court also ruled that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

The Trump administration, Abbott and some lawmakers have pointed to that ruling as a legal rationale to accelerate prohibitions on DEI. But experts say affirmative action and DEI are not synonymous.

“Most of the public discourse, it's not drawing a distinction between affirmative action and DEI policies, which is something that ought to be done,” said Grant Hayden, a law professor at Southern Methodist University. “But most of the time, people aren't drawing that distinction in order to advance a different agenda.”

The anti-DEI push: “It divides us”

Some DEI critics say the framework’s intentions are well-meaning. But they also say DEI programs disguise discriminatory and divisive policies that single out individuals based on their race, ethnicity or identity. Programs to elevate historically underrepresented groups amount to giving some people preferential treatment over others, they add.

In short, critics say DEI promotes identity over merit.

The way Sylvester, the senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, sees it, equality is about letting everyone start the race. Equity, she argues, aims for everyone to win the race. She said that is a bridge too far for many Texans.

She also opposed what she said was DEI’s push, at its core, to reinterpret American history through the lens of white supremacy and critical race theory — an academic discipline that looks at why racial inequality persists through institutions and legal systems — and divide people into two categories: oppressors and the oppressed.

“DEI is an attempt to undermine what America is and how we see ourselves,” Sylvester said. “It divides us. It defines us by part of our history, not all of our history.”

Sylvester said DEI programs in higher education institutions have not resulted in a student body that is more reflective of the state’s diversity. Instead, she said, these programs have compartmentalized students and divided them on the basis of their race or ethnicity.

Sylvester pointed to Texas A&M University as an example. At that school, the largest university in the state, white people make up about 49% of the current student body, compared to 40% of the overall state population. Meanwhile, Black students represent under 4% of the student population at Texas A&M, despite representing close to 14% of all Texans, according to the United States Census Bureau.

Though some groups are still underrepresented at Texas’ public universities when compared to the state’s population, student bodies overall have become more diverse in the past decade. From 2015 to 2023, the percentage of public university students in the state who are Latino increased from about 31% to 37%, according to data from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, a state government organization. That figure still stands about three points below the percentage of Texans who are Latino — at 40%.

Black students were also slightly underrepresented in the state’s universities, according to the same data. Black students made up 12% of all Texas public university students, slightly below the nearly 14% of Black Texans who make up the state population.

Timothy Minella, a fellow from the Goldwater Institute, said DEI programs support a false narrative that America is a “rigged society that systematically oppresses certain groups.” To respond, he said, DEI proponents push for policies that end up discriminating others in a bid to increase representation for a “so-called marginalized group.”

He understands why Americans can get behind goals like inclusion and fairness. But he believes a focus on DEI programs draws schools away from academic outcomes, hurting all students — especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. He said better ways to even the playing field and promote diversity could include taking funds from DEI programs and putting them toward scholarships for low-income students.

“These classes indoctrinate students in concepts like microaggressions, like preferred pronouns,” Minella said. “What our policy says is that should not be part of the requirements for students to graduate from public university.”

State Rep. Brian Harrison, a Midlothian Republican who has crusaded against DEI programs, said in an interview with The Texas Tribune that the state should “be leading the fight against taxpayer-funded DEI.” Harrison believes DEI efforts are discriminatory, illegal, and represent the opposite of the Civil Rights Movement and waste taxpayer dollars.

Harrison added that creating education savings accounts — a type of school voucher program that would channel taxpayer dollars to help families pay for their children’s private schooling — could help close achievement gaps for economically disadvantaged students in Texas. The Texas Legislature appears poised to create such accounts.

“I think school choice and education freedom is the real civil rights issue of our day, not this reverse discrimination of these facially discriminatory DEI policies,” Harrison said. “They are going to exacerbate the problem they’re trying to solve.”

But critics of the voucher proposals that Texas lawmakers are considering worry that low-income students won’t be prioritized. And they worry the neediest children won’t be able to benefit from education savings accounts because under current proposals, private schools won’t be required to accept certain students.

State Sen. Carol Alvarado, a Houston Democrat who has criticized the Texas Senate’s priority school voucher bill, said in a statement to the Tribune that the current voucher proposals are “nothing more than a coupon for the wealthy.”

DEI bans as a backlash to changing demographics

DEI proponents see the mounting opposition as part of a backlash to demographic changes in the state and perceived increases in power among people of color.

McDaniel, the University of Texas at Austin professor, said those seeking to ban DEI believe helping out marginalized groups costs others.

“There’s an underlying belief that the people who are benefiting from this are unskilled and it’s taking things away from the people who actually deserve this,” McDaniel said.

Republicans’ views on DEI — and their questions about prioritizing identity over merit — spurred a tense and emotional public exchange last month during a legislative hearing about the agency overseeing the state’s water supply.

Harrison, the Midlothian Republican, questioned Texas Water Development Board officials about the entity’s strategic plan calling for staff to mirror the state’s diversity. Harrison, citing Abbott’s executive order opposing DEI, called the strategy unconstitutional, race-based hiring.

The exchange led Rep. Nicole Collier, D-Fort-Worth, and Rep. Armando Walle, D-Houston, to criticize what they saw as an aggressive line of questioning toward two witnesses who are Black women. One of them, TWD Board Chair L’Oreal Stepney, found herself defending her work and qualifications. She pointed to her two degrees from UT-Austin in civil and aerospace engineering and her decades of experience managing the state’s most “precious resource.”

At one point later in the hearing, Stepney, who was appointed by Abbott, was brought to tears. Collier and Walle brought her tissues.

Though Harrison didn't accuse Stepney of being a DEI hire, the intensity of the exchange crystallized the ongoing political fight around DEI. The state’s top three Republicans — Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows — later publicly came to Stepney’s defense, albeit sidestepping the topic of race or DEI.

In a later interview with the Tribune, Harrison defended his line of questioning as “perfect.” He said he had directed similar questions to other agencies as well to understand how taxpayer dollars were going toward “discriminatory DEI practices.”

Gary Bledsoe, president of Texas’ chapter of the NAACP, said the rhetoric, executive orders and bans have created an intimidating environment. His comments echo Texas university students who believe their schools are over-complying with the state ban on DEI at their campuses because they fear lawmakers who control state schools’ budgets.

“It is almost illegal to speak it in Texas now,” Bledsoe said of the term DEI. “It’s a chaotic situation and it’s not the way you run government.”

“The DEI that I know”

On the Texas Senate floor last week, Sen. Borris Miles, a Houston Democrat, asked Sen. Brandon Creighton, the Conroe Republican who authored the state’s DEI ban on higher education, if he knew what the acronym actually meant. The question came as senators debated Senate Bill 12, which would expand the ban to K-12 public schools.

Miles read aloud the American Civil Liberties Union’s definition of DEI:

“DEI is the framework for building institutions where everyone belongs and is able to thrive while addressing systematic barriers that have historically excluded marginalized communities,” Miles read on the floor.

Creighton responded that while he understood the ACLU’s definition, he didn’t agree that DEI efforts are accomplishing their intended goals.

In a later comment on the floor, before the Senate eventually passed the bill, Miles said further banning DEI would cause achievement gaps to widen between white students and students of color in the state.

Pat Heintzelman, president of the Texas Faculty Association and an English instructor at Lamar University, said lawmakers who are pushing to ban DEI are not providing alternative ways to promote diversity and inclusion. The reasons for the bans are “all political,” she said, and have nothing to do with the efficacy of existing DEI programs.

Earlier in March, a group of hundreds of people gathered at Austin Community College’s Center for Government and Civic Service to organize opposition to DEI bans in the state.

During an exercise, they added pieces of white paper with phrases like “extreme legislation,” “white supremacy” and “anti-black” next to a large image of an iceberg. The exercise was meant to illustrate the root causes and impacts of DEI bans so people can better speak against the prohibitions.

Christian Mira, a UT-Austin student, attended the event organized by Black Brown Dialogues on Policy. He sees a disconnect between how people in both camps view diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. To him, DEI is about supporting people from groups that have historically faced discrimination in education and the workforce.

“I don’t think that we’re talking about the same DEI because the DEI that I know is about what’s in the name,” Mira said. “What they see is themselves not being in the center of a conversation that doesn’t pertain to them.”

María Méndez contributed to this story.

Disclosure: ]Lamar University, Rice University, Southern Methodist University, Texas A&M University, Texas Public Policy Foundation, University of Texas at Austin and University of North Texas have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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