By Daniel Acosta Jr.
I was born in El Paso as a son of emigrants from Mexico. I was unaware of diversity, equity, and inclusion while I was growing up in the 1950s and ’60s.
I graduated with a pharmacy degree (first in my class) from the University of Texas in 1968, served two years in the Army, and received a nationally competitive graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation to study for a Ph.D. in toxicology at the University of Kansas. I turned down a postdoctoral fellowship to further my research training at the prestigious Karolinska Institute in Stockholm to accept a position as an assistant professor at UT in 1974.
After I took the position, I was informed that UT needed to diversify its faculty with more people of color; I naively thought I was hired because of my academic and research credentials. I was one of the first DEI faculty hires at Texas, unsure what that meant for me and my career.
My supervisors quickly told me that I should be grateful because there were better white candidates vying for that position. I believe that I proved them wrong after receiving tenure and promotion to full professor in a shorter period of time than many of my white colleagues.
I later took a position as a dean of pharmacy at another university in 1996 after I was told that I was not suited to be an administrator at Texas. In the final years of my career, I was one of few senior Hispanic administrators at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration during the Obama and Trump administrations.
After 50 years of history with DEI, the Supreme Court, because of its recent ruling that color and gender can no longer be used as factors in college admissions, has opened the doors for the weaponization of DEI across all sectors of American life: employment, education, health care and medicine, and of course, politics.
It is now quite common to question how people of color and women have succeeded in the business, education, medical, legal, and government worlds. Some Americans contend that these individuals received special advantages and treatments in employment hiring, promotions and raises, and admission to certain colleges, mainly because they think that DEI has unfairly treated white men in these areas.
This is nonsense because most top CEOs, university and government administrators, legal and medical leaders, and elected officials are white men.
Republican politicians and others feel entitled to attack “DEI hires” as unqualified in their specific jobs and professions solely because of their gender and/or color and not even consider that these individuals are often more qualified in the areas of education, qualifications, training or experience than many of their white male colleagues.
These so-called DEI hires are now stigmatized for the success that they rightly earned through their own qualifications, persistence and hard work during their careers.
The use of DEI by some white Americans to demean women and people of color is a subtle way of hiding one’s racist and sexist viewpoints. It is not surprising that America continues to harbor people who feel threatened by the changing demographics across the country. In several states the population of its citizenry is majority-minority; that is to say, people of color make up a majority of the state’s population. Texas is one of those states.
Because many of his supporters have strong negative views on the issue of DEI, Donald Trump feels justified in calling Vice President Kamala Harris a “nasty DEI” hire.
It is provocative that Trump asked a reporter when he was interviewed at a Black journalists’ conference for a definition of DEI. Does he or doesn’t he know that it is a code word used by racists? You decide.
Daniel Acosta Jr., an El Paso native, is retired and lives in Austin.
The post Opinion: Why is Trump saying nasty things about DEI hires? appeared first on El Paso Matters.
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