DEI: A Brief and Definitive History

Some want to “save” America from DEI—but if DEI were saving America? History suggests that it has.

Timeline of DEI in the U.S. © 2025 forwardED LLC

Across the U.S., rallies and protests have ignited like lightning—on college campuses, at school board meetings, in corporate lobbies and at state legislatures. Students are staging sit-ins. Employees are walking out. Community members are organizing teach-ins and vigils. At stake is not just a policy or a buzzword, but the very soul of American democracy.

The protests are not about partisanship. They are about principle.

They are about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—the fundamental project of America—and the national reckoning with who gets to be seen, who gets to belong, and who gets left behind. In the face of sweeping rollbacks, with DEI offices being defunded, anti-DEI laws taking root in statehouses, and high-profile court decisions dismantling affirmative action, people are demanding answers. One question echoes loudest: How did we get here?

A few weeks ago, a reader asked how DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—began. Another urged me to write about it. I accepted that invitation not merely to clarify the lineage of this contested idea but to defend it. For today, DEI is under assault. And when ideas fall, lives often follow.

To understand DEI, we must begin not with buzzwords or boardroom policies, but with the paradox of the American project itself: a nation conceived in liberty, built on slavery; one that promised equality while systematizing exclusion. The preamble to the U.S. Constitution declares the aim to “form a more perfect Union”—a recognition not of a perfected democracy, but of democracy in process. This process, this striving, is the birthplace of DEI. Not a new invention, but a centuries-old effort to correct the moral deficit embedded in our founding.

Though the term “DEI” is modern, its spirit is constitutional. The Constitution’s original sin—enshrining slavery, counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a person (U.S. Const. art. I, § 2)—also gave rise to its first moral reckonings. DEI emerged in the struggle to resolve these contradictions. That struggle began in earnest after the Civil War.

Reconstruction was the first formal attempt at racial and social repair. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, the federal government codified birthright citizenship, equal protection under the law, and voting rights for Black men (Foner, 1988). Freedmen’s Bureaus were created to support formerly enslaved people’s education and welfare. These acts were early instruments of equity—designed to include those long excluded.

But progress met its predictable shadow. The Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction, ushering in the era of Jim Crow. DEI, in its nascent form, was violently reversed. White supremacist policies hardened. The dream deferred calcified into systemic exclusion.

In the early 20th century, America’s immigration policies also tell the story of evolving inclusion and resistance. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was especially pivotal—it abolished racist quotas and prioritized family reunification and skilled labor (Ngai, 2004). This was an equity policy. It addressed exclusion not by erasing difference but by valuing it. Before it, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 institutionalized xenophobia. After it, the country began to reflect its full diversity.

The women’s suffrage movement, culminating in the 19th Amendment in 1920, was another defining moment in DEI’s genealogy. Though often excluding women of color in practice (Terborg-Penn, 1998), the movement’s demands for political inclusion advanced equity’s moral logic: that no democracy is whole if half the population is made silent.

Later, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 extended this logic further, prohibiting sex-based discrimination in federally funded education programs (U.S. Department of Education, 2021). This expansion of access to educational and athletic opportunities was a deliberate redress of gender-based disparities.

The modern DEI framework emerged from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Landmark legislation—the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968—aimed to dismantle the legal architecture of racial segregation and disenfranchisement (Branch, 1988). These were not just civil rights laws; they were policies of inclusion and repair.

Affirmative action, introduced via Executive Order 11246 under President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, marked a shift from non-discrimination to proactive inclusion (Graham, 1992). This shift is essential to DEI: the acknowledgment that fairness requires more than neutrality. It requires a response to inequity. As Johnson declared at Howard University in 1965: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him . . . then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe you have been completely fair” (Johnson, 1965).

The 1970s and 1980s saw further expansion. The Bilingual Education Act (1968) and Lau v. Nichols (1974) required schools to provide language accommodations for multilingual learners (Ovando, 2003). These efforts were not luxuries—they were efforts to make opportunity real for multilingual students.

Similarly, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), passed in 1975, enshrined the right of students with disabilities to receive free, appropriate public education. Equity extended to ability, not just identity.

In the 1980s and 1990s, attention to gender disparities in science and math education—through policies such as the Women’s Educational Equity Act (WEEA)—reflected DEI’s growing focus on systemic barriers in opportunity structures (AAUW, 1992).

By the 2000s, DEI had become a feature of educational, corporate, and civic life. It included training, compliance policies, campus initiatives, and inclusive hiring practices. Its goals were threefold: diversity, equity, and inclusion. That is, ensuring representation, ensuring fairness in access and outcomes, and creating environments of belonging.

But none of this work ever existed without resistance. The backlash to affirmative action began almost as soon as it was introduced. Proposition 209 in California (1996), the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case (2023), and the ongoing spate of state-level legislation banning DEI offices in public universities are the most recent waves in a long and predictable pattern (Crenshaw, 2023).

Let us be clear: DEI has never historically been about favoring some at the expense of others. It has always been an attempt to recognize that merit does not float above history. It is shaped by it. The playing field is not level. Never has been. DEI does not oppose merit—it reveals the myth of meritocracy in a society structured by inherited advantage.

To reject DEI is not to choose neutrality; it is to choose inequity. As Frederick Douglass reminded us: “Where justice is denied . . . where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress . . . neither persons nor property will be safe” (Douglass, 1886/2009).

So, what happens if we lose DEI?

We lose our compass. And if our history has given us clues, refusing DEI will only push us back toward the darkness of exclusion. History shows us this. After Reconstruction fell, the nation entered a century of sanctioned segregation and racial terrorism. After the brief gains of the Civil Rights Movement, we saw mass incarceration and education disinvestment devastate Black and Brown communities (Alexander, 2012). Progress, as W.E.B. Du Bois put it, has always been “a wounded snail on a leaf” (Du Bois, 1903/1994, p. 88).

To walk away from DEI is to repeat this cycle. And the casualties will be real: students who are denied access, workers who are passed over, identities erased, voices silenced.

We are in a peculiar dance—one step forward, one step back. But if democracy means anything, it is that the steps forward must eventually outweigh the resistance. DEI is not a detour from democracy; it is a journey toward its realization. The alternative is not merit. It is erasure.

If we are to continue perfecting this union, then we must commit to seeing the unseen, hearing the unheard, and uplifting those whose humanity has too often been denied. That is not politics. That is the promise.

References

Alexander, M. (2012). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press.

American Association of University Women. (1992). How schools shortchange girls: A study of major findings on girls and education. AAUW Educational Foundation.

Branch, T. (1988). Parting the waters: America in the King years, 1954–1963. Simon & Schuster.

Crenshaw, K. (2023). We still need affirmative action: And DEI isn’t what you think. Columbia Law Review, 123(5), 1011–1044.

Douglass, F. (2009). Frederick Douglass: Selected speeches and writings (P. S. Foner, Ed.). Chicago Review Press. (Original work published 1886)

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1994). The souls of Black folk. Dover Publications. (Original work published 1903)

Foner, E. (1988). Reconstruction: America's unfinished revolution, 1863–1877. Harper & Row.

Graham, H. D. (1992). The civil rights era: Origins and development of national policy, 1960–1972. Oxford University Press.

Johnson, L. B. (1965, June 4). To fulfill these rights [Commencement address, Howard University]. Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library. https://www.lbjlibrary.org

Ngai, M. M. (2004). Impossible subjects: Illegal aliens and the making of modern America. Princeton University Press.

Ovando, C. J. (2003). Bilingual education in the United States: Historical development and current issues. Bilingual Research Journal, 27(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/15235882.2003.10162589

Terborg-Penn, R. (1998). African American women in the struggle for the vote, 1850–1920. Indiana University Press.

U.S. Const. art. I, § 2.

U.S. Department of Education. (2021). Title IX and sex discrimination. https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/tix_dis.html

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Suggested citation: Kirkland, D.E. (2025). DEI: A Brief and Definitive History. In forwardED Perspectives, https://www.forward-ed.com/post/dei-a-brief-and-definitive-history.

David E. Kirkland, PhD, is the founder and CEO of forwardED. He is a nationally renowned scholar and leading expert on education equity. He can be reached via email at: david@forward-ed.com.