When Freeman Hrabowski hears “diversity, equity and inclusion,” he sees Kizzmekia Corbett, an immunologist who played a key role in developing the Covid-19 vaccines. Corbett is an alum of a scholarship program Hrabowski built to mentor underrepresented minorities into STEM careers. “For me, DEI has always been about wanting all of us to be included in the American dream,” Hrabowski says, “not just to get a good job, but to participate as productive citizens who care about the health of our country.”
When Nan Zhong hears “diversity, equity and inclusion,” he sees his son, Stanley, whose 99th percentile SAT and stellar high school grades got him rejected by 16 of 18 universities. His story made national news when Google reached out to him and hired him out of high school as a software engineer. Nan Zhong feels that DEI-related quotas are excluding Asians from educational opportunities, thus making a mockery of the word “inclusion.”
Depending on your perspective, the acronym DEI may sound personal and inviting, bureaucratic and statistical, or ideological and accusatory. It may be primarily about race and ethnicity — or it may be about much more: gender, gender orientation, gender identity and sometimes even disabilities. It can give confidence or breed resentment.
When President Donald Trump began 2025 with a burst of anti-DEI executive orders, he stepped into an already hot conflict. In 2023, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that 21 anti-DEI bills had been introduced across 13 states. By 2025, 18 states had enacted such laws. And that list does not include the University of Michigan, which in March of this year shut down its sprawling DEI program overnight, without any change in state law. This is not a conflict that falls into the familiar fault lines. DEI skeptics now include many who had previously been prominent voices in the Democratic Party.
The pendulum will likely swing again, but the question will remain: In a diverse society where opportunity is unevenly distributed, is using race or other core identities as deciding variables in employment and university admissions a necessary corrective?
Or does the practice, and the rhetoric behind it, corrode the body politic and harm individuals?
“The stakeholders in what I’ve called the diversity industrial complex are not simply going to go quietly into the good night and learn to code.”
In a 2016 speech at Duke University, bestselling author and New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argued that universities can pursue truth or social justice but not both. “We need our universities to clearly declare which way they are going,” he said, “but you have to be explicit about it, advertise that, and then students can choose which kind of university to go to.”
Is it racism or not?
Hrabowski sees Haidt’s argument as a false choice. Recently retired after 30 years as president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Hrabowski sees enduring inequalities along racial lines as fissures in the body politic that we leave uncorrected at our peril. “Fairness and inclusion,” he told me, “are two things that must be at the center of any discussion involving the future of America — the future of human society, I would say.”
UMBC is a suburban campus where 30 percent of students are first-generation college students and 20 percent are Black. Hrabowski’s support for DEI stems from a career spent lifting disadvantaged students. But that passion can also be traced to his personal memories as a young boy playing a key role in a decisive point in American history.
When Hrabowski defends DEI and programs like affirmative action, there is a tone of warning in his voice. As history has shown us, divisions can derail democracies when higher aspirations seem unattainable to some classes of citizens. In fact, he is echoing Alexis de Tocqueville, who warned in 1840 that democracies have a desperate thirst for equal outcomes — a thirst they temper only if opportunity for upward mobility is seen as real. If not, Tocqueville feared, the French revolutionary pattern beckoned.
And if being stuck is bad enough, what do we do with downward mobility? In 2018, a team led by Raj Chetty, an economist now based at Harvard, found surprising downward mobility among Black people and Native Americans — in contrast to other races and ethnicities. Black people who grew up in the top income bracket were as likely to fall to the bottom quintile as to remain at the top. This generational slide was entirely driven by Black men. Once controlled for childhood status, wealth differences between Black women and white women entirely disappeared.
Whatever environmental factors are at play, they distinctively impact boys. The hopeful news was that the gap “is significantly smaller for boys who grow up in certain neighborhoods — those with low poverty rates, low levels of racial bias among white people, and high rates of father presence among low-income Black people. Black boys who move to such areas at younger ages have significantly better outcomes, demonstrating that racial disparities can be narrowed through changes in environment.”
The disparate outcomes of Black boys and girls in this study are startling. The implications are complex, but Hrabowski pointed to cultural influences that give Black boys a poor template for real success. “How often do those boys see great examples in social media or on TV of young Black males excelling in school?” he asked. Instead, models of success typically center on sports and entertainment. Hrabowski argues that some young people do need focused support and role models to help them grasp opportunities others take for granted. In his mind, that includes race-conscious policies like DEI as a counterweight to that built-in societal burden.
What he doesn’t want, Hrabowski told me, is talk about quotas. “As soon as you use the word quota,” he said, “people just stop talking. What I would rather say is, are we broadening participation in our society in a way that young people can see people looking like themselves in any segment of society?” This means mentoring and role modeling. While Hrabowski is emphatic that racism persists, he doesn’t make it the focus of his work. He focuses instead on finding individuals, helping them learn and connecting them to others who can pull them upward.
“Fairness and inclusion are two things that must be at the center of any discussion involving the future of America.”
Not all DEI supporters share Hrabowski’s tempered focus. “As an anti-racist, when I see racial disparities, I see racism,” said Ibram Kendi in 2018, commenting on Chetty’s research in The New York Times. In his 2019 bestseller “How to Be an Antiracist,” Kendi wrote: “There is no such thing as a ‘good’ white person. Every white person benefits from racism, and every white person is socialized into a racist system.”
Kendi’s signature phrases are “racism” and “anti-racism,” concepts that, along with “white privilege,” became part of the lexicon in elite circles, and quickly spread throughout the university system and corporate America.
It is easy to forget that, as recently as 2013, Kendi’s views were rejected by a majority of American Black people, with the trend line pointed the other way. In 1993, Gallup tracking surveys found that 44 percent of Black people viewed discrimination as mainly responsible for disparities in jobs, income and housing, while 48 percent saw the cause as “mostly something else.” By 2013, only 37 percent of Black people cited discrimination, with 60 percent pointing elsewhere. The trend was clear.
The same was true of race relations. Beginning in 2001, Gallup asked Black and white adults about relations between the two races. For 13 years, majorities of both groups rated relations “good” or “somewhat good.” White optimism hovered at around 70 percent, and Black attitudes about race relations improved when Barack Obama became president, rising from 55 percent in 2007 to 66 percent in 2013.
But then the bottom fell out. By 2015, Black optimism about race relations had fallen to 45 percent and in 2021 to 33 percent. That shift straddled two events in which a police officer killed an unarmed Black man: the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The details of these events quickly became secondary to their symbolic impact. Suddenly and decisively, the American zeitgeist shifted, as diversity, equity and inclusion rhetoric and policies sank deep roots in both hearts and minds and in institutions.
Google Trends shows anti-racism, microaggression and implicit bias emerging as popular search terms in 2016. That same year, a Yale lecturer resigned after protests broke out over Halloween costumes. In 2017, white people at Evergreen State College in Washington state were asked to stay off campus for a day, in solidarity with people of color. One biology professor resisted. This led to protests, calls for his firing and threats of violence, which temporarily shut down the campus.
In 2018, Smith College in Massachusetts erupted in protests after a janitor and a security guard questioned a Black student who had been in a dormitory that was closed for the summer. “All I did was be Black,” the student wrote in a Facebook post. “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of color.” The janitor was put on paid leave while the college hired a law firm to investigate. That investigation found no evidence of racial bias, but Smith College nevertheless launched an anti-bias training program for all staff and announced it would comply with a demand by the student to build dorms set aside for Black students and other students of color.
That was also the year that Roland Fryer, a Black economist at Harvard, published data showing that, although police are more likely to tangle with Black people in minor ways, they are less likely to use lethal force against Black people compared to other races. Fryer was surprised by his own results, but he was shocked at the reaction. Later, in 2024, Fryer summed up the reaction to his research: “People lost their minds. I had colleagues take me to the side and say, ‘Don’t publish this. You’ll ruin your career.’ I lived under police protection for about 30 or 40 days. I had a seven-day-old daughter at the time. I remember going to the grocery store to get diapers with an armed guard. It was crazy. It was really, truly crazy.”
Anti-racist DEI training was by now de rigueur in corporate America. Disney in 2021 began requiring employees to attend training to introduce them to terms like “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” “white fragility” and “white saviors.” That same year, San Diego Unified School District brought in a Black guest speaker who had written in Education Week that public schools were “spirit murdering black and brown students.” And Coca-Cola, also in 2021, assigned optional corporate training materials urging employees to “try to be less white.”
As this fervor grew, some prominent mainstream critics came to see DEI as more than a movement. John McWhorter, a Black linguistics professor at Columbia University, wrote in his 2021 bestseller “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America” that DEI had become more like a religion, and a fanatical one at that, with original sin and heretics who must be purged.
It also offered an apocalyptic end game. In 2021, The New York Times reported that Dr. Aruna Khilanani, a Black psychiatrist in private practice, spoke at the Yale Medical School, describing gruesome fantasies of shooting white people. “There are no good apples out there,” she said. “White people make my blood boil.” The title of her address was “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.”
And there was catechism. In the summer of 2020, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, which receives half its funding from the federal government, published a tutorial on racism that included an infographic indicting “whiteness” in our culture. “Since whiteness works almost invisibly,” the document stated, “we may not always be aware of how it manifests in our daily lives.” Even many people of color, it said, have “internalized some aspects of white culture” — a list that includes “self-reliance,” “the nuclear family,” “time schedules,” “objective, rational linear thinking,” “delayed gratification” and “action orientation.”
‘The diversity industrial complex’
The anti-DEI push gained critical mass in 2023. That January, Ilya Shapiro, Matt Beienburg and Chris Rufo of the conservative Manhattan Institute published model anti-DEI legislation, with four lines of attack: abolish DEI bureaucracies, end mandatory diversity training, end diversity statements and end racial preferences in admissions and employment. DEI defenders saw this model, and others like it, as an orchestrated campaign with nefarious intent. “Gathering strength from a backlash against Black Lives Matter,” wrote Nicholas Confessore in The New York Times, “and fueled by criticism that doctrines such as critical race theory had made colleges engines of progressive indoctrination, the eradication of D.E.I. programs has become both a cause and a message suffusing the American right.”
In May 2024, the Iowa Legislature used a budget bill to pass the toughest anti-DEI legislation up to that point, which included banning the required use of pronouns. By the summer of 2025, 18 states had bans in place on DEI programs in higher education. The anti-DEI arena was so active that many higher education publications began maintaining “anti-DEI trackers” of state legislation.
A key turning point came after October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 Israelis and took hundreds more hostage. DEI offered a ready template for what followed: Israelis and Jews were white colonialists, the Palestinians Indigenous victims. On October 8, 34 student organizations at Harvard issued a joint statement holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Anti-Israel campus protests swept campuses, illegally occupying grounds, vandalizing buildings and intimidating Jewish faculty and students. Soon Republicans were, as Vox put it, “weaponizing antisemitism to take down DEI.”
On December 5, 2023, when New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., grilled the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT, none of the three seemed very anxious to ensure the safety of Jewish students. That hearing helped surface newly vocal critics like Harvard alumnus and billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman — the kind of donor even ultra-endowed institutions avoid alienating. Ackman blamed DEI for the post-October 7 campus chaos, concluding that it was “not about diversity in its purest form” but rather “a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.”
“We need our universities to clearly declare which way they are going, but you have to be explicit about it, advertise that, and then students can choose which kind of university to go to.”
Shortly after, Jonathan Haidt also dropped his previous qualifications in his long-standing DEI critique. “I now think that ‘identitarianism’ is completely incompatible with the mission of the university,” he said in February 2024. “There’s no future for DEI as long as it’s based on identity. … Get rid of the entire thing, get rid of all the departments.”
Haidt was referring to the DEI bureaucracies that existed at many colleges and universities: the offices and officers tasked with organizing training, keeping track of DEI goals, and operating the programs designed to help vulnerable students feel at home.
Few universities had invested as deeply in DEI as the University of Michigan. Michigan’s DEI progress report in 2024 ran to 88 pages of goals and measurements. Then there were appendixes and spreadsheets, detailed data and plans from every campus department, with milestones marking degrees of progress. The report touted “an extensive reporting and evaluation process, performed meticulously each year. Self-reported data for each plan is carefully assessed to address each unit’s personalized approaches tailored specifically to their needs.”
Behind that data lay a costly bureaucracy. The campus-wide DEI bureaucracy oversaw scores of smaller ones in a network that could be visualized like synapses surrounding a central brain. Each of these entities was tasked with developing DEI goals on faculty hiring and promotion, as well as student enrollment and other measurables. Staffing and salary figures drawn from public records showed UM’s DEI salary payroll pegged at $18 million in 2022-23, suddenly jumping to $30 million for 2023-24.
But the zeitgeist was clearly shifting. In October, The New York Times ran a highly critical piece, arguing that Michigan had “built one of the most ambitious diversity programs in the country — only to see increased discord and division on campus.” In December 2024, Michigan ended its use of diversity statements, even as some Michigan regents toyed with shifting all DEI funding to scholarships benefiting needy students. The full DEI-shutdown hammer fell in the spring of 2025. I watched in real time as UM’s DEI websites winked out, link after link diverting to general departmental or campus web pages.
Over at the Manhattan Institute, Ilya Shapiro kept his guard up. “The stakeholders in what I’ve called the diversity industrial complex are not simply going to go quietly into the good night and learn to code,” Shapiro said. “There are so many nodes or choke points. Every department, every academic department, every program has their diversity officers. They’re embedded. It’s not going to be gotten rid of very easily or quickly.”
Affirmative action’s legacy
This was not the first time Michigan made headlines on race politics. In 2006, 58 percent of Michigan voters passed a measure that echoed California’s 1996 Proposition 209, both of which effectively banned, or attempted to ban, affirmative action. In more precise terms, they both barred the use of race, sex, ethnicity or national origin in admissions selections criteria or hiring or other personnel decisions in public education, government contracting and public employment. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Michigan law in 2014, after a lengthy court battle in which both sides invoked the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment in their favor.
In any DEI dispute, the muddled history of the equal protection clause plays a significant factor. In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson upheld racial segregation, birthing the misbegotten concept of “separate but equal.” Justice John Marshall Harlan famously dissented: “Our Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” Harlan’s dissent became a talisman for the Civil Rights Movement, and Thurgood Marshall, the legal hero in later anti-segregation battles, held Harlan’s words in marked reverence.
Over time, the Supreme Court applied “strict scrutiny” to any policy that divvied up benefits with reference to race while carving exceptions for using race to remedy enduring wrongs. In 1987, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued in a speech that racism remains “so pernicious, and so difficult to remove, that we must take advantage of all the remedial measures at our disposal.” For nearly 50 years, the court concurred with Marshall’s pragmatic argument for affirmative action and against premature insistence on race neutrality.
Writing for a 5-4 majority in 2003, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor suggested a 25-year expiration for affirmative action. Twenty years later, the court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that racial categories in college admissions violated the equal protection clause and Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, seemingly ending the use of race-conscious policies in college admissions.
“As soon as you use the word quota, people just stop talking. What I would rather say is, are we broadening participation in our society in a way that young people can see people looking like themselves in any segment of society?”
SFA v. Harvard was brought on behalf of a group of anonymous Asian students who were denied admission at Harvard despite their stellar academic records. The plaintiffs argued that Harvard was engaging in conscious race balancing, deliberately capping Asian numbers. The problem is that enrollment at elite schools is zero sum. If racial balancing is an objective — and if academic records are not randomly distributed — then some kids are going to get pushed out because of their race or ethnicity in order to allow space for other kids because of theirs, the plaintiffs argued.
Going beyond test scores and grades, the plaintiffs called out Harvard’s pattern of disparaging Asian applicants on a “personal ratings” score used by admissions officials that included factors like likability and courage. Asian applicants often scored low on these ratings, according to the suit. To be Asian, critics noted, seemed to oddly correlate with being unlikable. In December 2023, The New York Times put human faces on the lawsuit, telling stories of Asian teenagers who had obscured their identities, found ways to hide geeky hobbies, like the violin, and left race boxes unchecked to try to slide below the radar at elite universities.
Nan Zhong’s son, Stanley, who grew up in Palo Alto, was applying to colleges during the very months that the Supreme Court heard arguments and began writing its decision on the Harvard case. Zhong says he had been pretty naive to that point, but as he began digging, he realized that Stanley’s experience in applying for colleges was fairly routine for Asian kids. “I think it’s just a repeat of what they did to the Jews in the early part of the 20th century,” he said. “They decided to suppress a particular group and find ways to manifest that in a facially neutral fashion, even though there’s clear racial motivation.”
“The Chinese Exclusion Acts in the 1880s,” he added, “was the only law in U.S. history that banned entry of a particular ethnic group.” Chinese exclusion, he notes, was not repealed until 1943, and even then strict quotas kept Chinese visas to about 105 per year until 1965.
To illustrate his hunch that his son was being discriminated against covertly, Nan Zhong pointed me to unguarded statements by Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. “What colleges and universities will need to do after affirmative action is eliminated is find ways to achieve diversity that can’t be documented as violating the Constitution,” Chemerinsky told The New Yorker. “So they can’t have any explicit use of race. They have to make sure that their admissions statistics don’t reveal any use of race. But they can use proxies for race.”
You can hire based on diversity, “just don’t say it. You can think it. You can vote it. But don’t ever articulate that that is what you are doing,” Chemerinsky later told UC Berkeley faculty. “If I’m ever deposed, I’m going to deny I said this to you.”
Despite recent court rulings, enrollment numbers for Asian American students are still being systematically suppressed, according to the Asian American Coalition for Education, noting that after the Supreme Court decision, Yale lowered its Asian enrollment from 30 percent in 2023 to 24 percent in 2024, while Duke dropped Asian admittances from 29 percent to 23 percent. As Chemerinsky observed, less data means more latitude. This fall, over 80 percent of American colleges and universities are not requiring test scores. Removing test scores shifts weight to high school grades, extracurriculars and personal essays, and, according to Zhong, can suppress Asian enrollment.
Defenders of the shift, meanwhile, said eliminating test scores from admissions decisions will likely increase diversity of incoming classes. “Test-optional policies continue to dominate at national universities, state flagships, and selective liberal arts colleges because they typically result in more applicants, academically stronger applicants and more diversity,” FairTest, an organization that opposes standardized testing, said in a statement.
A moving target
Nan Zhong is sure the University of California is also quietly using race quotas in student admissions, and he thinks he can prove it. He says that UC campuses held Asian numbers precisely flat, for example, even as the Asian population in California grew from 13.8 percent in 2010 to 15.5 percent in 2020. That, he argues, would not occur by chance. In fact, Zhong believes that little is left to chance with UC demographics. He notes that the UC is striving to raise Hispanic student populations to 25 percent, with five of nine campuses currently qualifying. These are called “Hispanic Serving Institutions” by the U.S. Department of Education, a status that, in theory, comes with access to preferential federal grants. The UC is also monitoring Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions, or AANAPISIs, also a federal designation. AANAPISI campuses must have a more modest 10 percent AANAPI students, a target that eight of the nine UC campuses currently meet. That is no surprise, since Asians already make up roughly 32 percent of UC admissions.
Labored acronyms come with the territory when grouping races. In 2024, the Federal Office of Management and Budget proposed multiple changes to its race categories. Race and ethnicity are now combined into one question, and you can now select more than one race, so totals will exceed 100 percent. If you check two boxes, you get counted twice, and they don’t ask for details or percentages. There are also new options to choose from. People from the Middle East and North Africa, whom the federal government had previously labeled “white,” can now choose Middle East and North African, or MENA, a map that reaches from Iran to Morocco.
The University of Michigan’s 2022 DEI report sounded almost exasperated in explaining its new categories. Race and ethnicity are “social constructs,” “historically fraught” and “quite complicated,” the report stated. Michigan’s new DEI categories “provide a more nuanced treatment to the existing demographic data including adding new categorization schemes.” The new categories “are themselves also likely to be fraught, but we hope are a closer representation of individuals’ lived experiences around race and ethnicity.”
In today’s America, race often seems like a moving target. In 2014, Vox reported that “over a million Hispanics turned white between the 2000 and 2010 Census.” And in 2022, Brookings asked, “Are Asian Americans people of color or the next in line to become white?” Richard Alba, a former professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Albany, argued in 2021 that multiracial identity is now a central feature of American life, with nearly 3 in 10 Asians, 1 in 4 Latinos, and 1 in 5 Black newlyweds now married to partners of different racial or ethnic backgrounds.
“There’s no future for DEI as long as it’s based on identity. Get rid of the entire thing, get rid of all the departments.”
Two prominent young Black critics of DEI are cases in point. In “The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America,” Coleman Hughes writes that after his mother’s death he was shocked that many friends and family had seen her as Black. Her father was Puerto Rican, her mother Black. “My mother emerged a perfect blend of the two: a light-brown hue that suggested neither blackness nor whiteness — at least not to my mind.” He had always thought of her as mainly Puerto Rican, when he thought of it at all.
Another challenge comes from Thomas Chatterton Williams, whose mother is white and father is Black. In “Unlearning Race: Self Portrait in Black and White,” Williams recalls that as a teenager he identified intensely with Blackness. But living in France as a young man, his racial certainties came unmoored. He would enter a random kebob shop, be spoken to in Arabic, and encounter incredulity and even indignation at his silence. “One night, the young Algerian behind the counter simply demanded of me, ‘Parle arabe! Parle arabe!’ and all I could do was stare at him blankly.”
Those at most risk
“Stop talking about it,” snapped Morgan Freeman in a 2005 “60 Minutes” segment when asked how we can overcome racism without talking about race. An iconic film actor born in 1937 and raised in bitterly segregated Mississippi, Freeman surprised host Mike Wallace with his derision of Black History Month. “Black history is American history,” Freeman said curtly. Freeman returned to the theme in 2024 interviews: “This whole idea makes my teeth itch. It’s not right.”
Hrabowski has little patience for Black people who erase race from civic dialogue. “People like Morgan Freeman who are so confident that they’re right about race,” Hrabowski said. “There is nothing I could say to them because their lived experience is so different from mine.” Hrabowski also calls out writers like Hughes and Williams. “It’s very easy for some kids from multiracial backgrounds to want to forget the race part. They just have had a very different experience. Their experiences have been so different from those of children from disadvantage.”
Hrabowski speaks from his own experience. He was a 12-year-old math geek in the spring of 1963 when he sat on a church pew in Birmingham, Alabama, munching M&M’s and doing his algebra while half listening to a man he later learned was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Two days later, Hrabowski joined thousands of other young Black kids, skipping school, braving police dogs and water cannons, and marching on city hall. There he was confronted by Bull Connor, the city’s infamous commissioner of public safety, who spat in the boy’s face and tossed him in a police wagon.
The young Hrabowski then spent five nights in Birmingham Jail, just two weeks after King’s famous stay in the same place. Hrabowski became the leader of a group of boys, all of them frightened at the squalid conditions and intimidated by the inmates who, he says, “were not there for the marching.” During the long, scary nights, he would read from the Bible with his charges. “The Lord is my shepherd,” they read aloud. “I shall not want.”
You can hire based on diversity, ”just don’t say it. You can think it. You can vote it. But don’t ever articulate that that is what you are doing.”
Hrabowski never lost his passion for math, nor did he ever stop looking out for those boys. Throughout his academic career, he focused on pulling vulnerable kids in, keeping them in, and finding them mentors on their way out.
As ever, Hrabowski’s eye is on at-risk Black kids from American families and neighborhoods.
As vice provost at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in the late 1990s, Hrabowski built a scholarship program that mentored aspiring Black male scientists and stuck with them until they reached their goals. Hrabowski would later serve 30 years as UMBC’s president, where he dedicated particular attention to the Meyerhoff program, which initially focused on mentorship of young men. The program soon opened to women and non-minorities after its launch, but it remains focused on helping minority students earn STEM doctorates. Meyerhoff graduates have earned 448 doctorates from top graduate programs, with over 70 alumni in faculty positions. One study found that Meyerhoff students were 4.3 times more likely to enter a STEM Ph.D. than their African American counterparts who were accepted but went elsewhere instead. Thus, graduate by graduate, the program quietly continues to build the edifice of role models needed to prime the pump — rising aspirations and dogged mentoring leading to greater equity and fairness.
One notable Meyerhoff alum is Dr. Damon Tweedy, who grew up in Washington, D.C., where his father worked cutting meat in a grocery store. During one of his Meyerhoff summer job placements, he met a Black cardiologist. “That was one of the first times I’d met a young male African American physician,” Tweedy would later say. “The idea of becoming a doctor was really foreign to me. … I had no frame of reference at all.” Tweedy graduated from UMBC with a 4.0 grade point average, earned an M.D. from Duke University Medical School, and is now a professor of psychiatry at Duke. Meyerhoff could be seen as a “pay it forward” model of building diversity on campus and in the workplace. Tweedy meets a Black cardiologist, goes to medical school, becomes a professor, and now a new generation of Meyerhoff students can meet him in their summer program.
Speaking of Black cardiologists, Tweedy’s Meyerhoff classmate, Andrew Atiemo, went on from UMBC to Harvard Medical School and is now a practicing cardiologist. Atiemo was born in Ghana. Ghanaian Americans are not a struggling group, with education and income levels well over the national average. It might be argued that Atiemo’s roots mean he did not need Meyerhoff, but that would miss the point. Hrabowski’s vision is less about distributing outcomes than about seeding hope. Young people need role models. When you are dealing with kids who don’t know anyone who went to college, who are not encouraged to read at home, whose aspirations are formed by popular culture, it takes hard work and lots of little successes to build an alternate world. One more Black cardiologist, even one born in Ghana, could be a lodestar for a Black kid who needed that boost of hope and confidence.
Respect for the resistance
Hrabowski’s race-conscious mentoring is closely akin to that of Robert Young, a prominent Black attorney in Michigan. A DEI skeptic and a Republican, Young became chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court in 2011. He is passionate about mentoring qualified young Black professionals. In the early 1990s, he was the general counsel at Michigan’s American Automobile Association, which he says outsourced thousands of legal cases. None of the law firms selected for those cases, he noted, had Black partners. Pressed for answers, his colleagues said they didn’t know any Black attorneys. “That’s true,” Young told me. “The only people they knew were the people they went to church with and played golf with and socialized with, none of whom were Black. So I solved that problem because I knew a lot of talented Black attorneys.”
Young sees no contradiction between his passion for mentoring young Black professionals and his opposition to what he sees as the rhetorical excess and statistical pressure of formal DEI policies. He mentored Black attorneys not because of a mandate, but because he saw a problem and felt he could help fix it.
Hrabowski, meanwhile, remains unapologetic about the need to focus on young Black males, statistically as well as individually. There is no way, he argues, to counter the negative influences that surround those young men without consciously pulling them in, through DEI-type programs, helping them stay in, and passing them on to other mentors they can relate to.
“It’s very easy for some kids from multiracial backgrounds to want to forget the race part. They just have had a very different experience.”
American voters seem to agree with both Young and Hrabowski, and they struggle with the contradictions. In 2020, CNN found that 74 percent of Americans saw racism as “a big problem.” Pew found in 2019 that 75 percent deemed affirmative action important to “promote racial and ethnic diversity in the workplace.” But that same Pew poll found 75 percent opposed to using race as a factor in hiring, even if diversity suffered. And a 2018 University of Chicago poll found 71 percent opposed preferential hiring by race. In November 2020, 56 percent of voters in California rejected a push to overturn a state law that bans race, sex or ethnicity in hiring, state contracting or state college admissions.
To both persuade a conflicted public and effect real change, some DEI supporters now call for rethinking tactics. Harvard professors Mahzarin Banaji and Frank Dobbin are both leaders in carrying DEI into the workplace. In 2023, they wrote an op-ed calling for rethinking training approaches that “prove to trainees that they are morally flawed,” causing trainees to “leave diversity training feeling angry and with greater animosity toward other groups,” noting that such programs “can turn off even supporters of equal-opportunity programs.”
“We have to get to the point where we can have these conversations,” Hrabowski said, noting that in the current climate many DEI supporters are hunkering down, afraid to draw attention to themselves or their efforts. This is, of course, a fear that many DEI critics know all too well from the other side of the conflict.
For his part, Nan Zhong would like greater respect for those who resist being categorized. “It’s dehumanizing,” Nan Zhong told me. “Our Constitution is very clear. People should be treated as individuals, not as part of a group. Even if only one individual is getting discriminated against, it is still discrimination.” Zhong’s concern is echoed by Irshad Manji, a Muslim woman born in Uganda of Egyptian and Indian parentage, whose family fled Uganda, she says, after being targeted because their skin was brown, not black. She is the author, most recently, of “Don’t Label Me: An Incredible Conversation for Divided Times.” “If leaders want to rise to this moment sincerely and sustainably,” Manji writes, “they would be wise to remember: People are humanized by being seen as individuals within communities, not as labels on legs.”
“This is a time to take stock,” Hrabowski says. He cites an ongoing lack of minority faculty in many departments and graduate programs and ongoing challenges in the minority student pipeline, including K-12 preparation and retention in college. “How will we as a society become our best if we are not bringing forth the best talent from every group? What responsibility do we have to make sure that we are maximizing the brain power in this country, but not just the brain power, but our ability to be compassionate and supportive of each other?”
This story appears in the June 2025 issue of DeseretMagazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.