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(Adapted from a portion of this week’s HEADLIGHTS podcast.)

Many Southern state legislatures have ramped up attacks on diversity efforts over the past five years, as they have become favorite targets of conservative commentators and culture warriors. These attacks prefigured and in many ways laid the groundwork for the broader assault on DEI currently being waged at the federal level by President Donald Trump and his appointees.

The 2025 legislative session has brought a fresh round of anti-DEI bills across the South, many of which share a central irony — or perhaps it’s more accurate to just call it cynicism. In seeking to limit efforts to foster diversity and reduce socioeconomic disparities, they are using the language of the civil rights movement to attack its core achievements.

Most conservative-dominated states in the South have seen a range of bills in recent years aimed at public schools, universities and state agencies, all alleging in various ways that any efforts to recognize or remedy the legacies of legally enforced discrimination in the South — or in some cases even to discuss that history — amount to forms of discrimination themselves.

This year’s statehouse sessions have been no different, although not every anti-DEI bill passed.

In Georgia, for example, the state Senate approved a bill that would have placed a raft of restrictions on how schools talk about race and gender and American history. Among other things, it would have forbidden public schools and universities to promote or maintain “any programs or activities that advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

As examples for colleges and universities, it restricted any institutional support  for a laundry list of terms conservative lawmakers apparently find offensive, including:

“unconscious or implicit bias, cultural appropriation, allyship, gender ideology or theory, microaggressions, group marginalization, Antiracism, systemic oppression, social justice, intersectionality, neopronouns, heteronormativity, disparate impact, racial privilege, sexual privilege, or any similar or related formulation of these concepts.”

In other words, the state where Martin Luther King Jr. was born into a legal system of racial oppression was proposing to make it legally hazardous for universities to talk about systemic racial oppression.

But after clearing the Senate in the final days of the session, the bill stalled in the state House, which was scrambling to finish its own priorities. It could well return next year, of course.

Another anti-DEI bill is moving through the Louisiana Legislature, hitting on some of the same themes as the Georgia bill. It would restrict any hiring preferences in state agencies based on race, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation.

It would also restrict state universities from mandating course content dealing with certain topics — again, including a list of conservative rhetorical bugbears:

“​​Instructional content that relates to critical race theory, white fragility, white guilt, systemic racism, institutional racism, anti-racism, systemic bias, implicit bias, intersectionality, gender identity, allyship, race-based reparations, or race-based privilege.”

The bill does have language protecting individual faculty members’ rights to shape their own curriculum and choose their own instructional materials. 

It also says that it will still be legal to teach about U.S. historical events including slavery, the forced removal of Native Americans and Japanese-American internment during the 2nd World War.

Still, as in Georgia, it is remarkable to see a state like Louisiana take issue with concepts like systemic or institutional racism.

New Orleans was one of the national centers of human trafficking in enslaved people up until the Civil War. It was also home to Homer Plessy, famous as the losing plaintiff in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, in which the U.S. Supreme Court gave its blessing to Jim Crow regimes of racial segregation. It is hard to think of more obvious examples of systemic and institutional racism.

That bill is up for a vote this week in the Louisiana State Senate.

In Tennessee, meanwhile, the state’s General Assembly passed a set of bills in April aiming to “dismantle DEI” in state and local governments and education systems.

Tennessee had already passed versions of curricular restrictions in previous years, forbidding the teaching of what it calls “divisive concepts” around race and gender.

This year’s bills focused more specifically on hiring practices, prohibiting the consideration of race, gender or other personal characteristics in employment decisions. They also forbid state or local governments or schools from maintaining departments or programs to promote diversity, equity and inclusion.

The Texas Legislature is considering a bill much like Tennessee’s, although it is limited in scope to the state’s public schools. It forbids the consideration of race, sex or ethnicity in hiring decisions, or the assigning of diversity, equity and inclusion duties to school employees.

That bill passed the Texas Senate and is awaiting a vote in the state House.

If all of these bills sound fairly similar, so does the rhetoric surrounding them. 

The Republican legislators who have sponsored the bills uniformly depict them not as attacks on diversity but as protection against state-mandated discrimination.

In Georgia, state Senator Max Burns said that his anti-DEI legislation should be embraced by people who want to see racial equality.

According to the Georgia Recorder, on the Senate floor Burns said, “DEI is the antithesis of equality. If you believe in equality, if you believe in equal opportunity, this bill does not strip you of that. It enhances it.”

The sponsor of the Louisiana bill, state Representative Emily Chenevert of Baton Rouge, responded to criticism of her bill from other lawmakers by saying, “This is not divisive. This is protecting every Louisianian. This is about equality for all.” 

And in Tennessee, state Representative Aron Maberry said his “Dismantle DEI” bills were similar to past efforts to fight workplace prejudices. “If discrimination in the past was wrong, and I agree, it was; it is, then discrimination today is wrong,” he said.

And here’s where the rhetoric around all of these bills becomes tricky. Like Maberry, the bills’ sponsors — and conservative anti-DEI pundits and activists in general — suggest either explicitly or implicitly that they are fighting against some kind of widespread patterns of discrimination under the guise of DEI programs.

They allege that diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — which can include everything from workplace anti-discrimination training to job fairs that aim to reach traditionally underrepresented groups — actually end up promoting a different kind of bigotry.

They rarely say it explicitly, but what they mean is that majority groups or groups that have traditionally been overrepresented in government workplaces or in leadership positions — which is to say white people in general, and white men in particular, and especially straight white men — are now themselves victims of discrimination.

The problem with that assertion, and perhaps the reason it is rarely stated quite so directly, is that there is very little evidence to support it.

The reality is that any kind of discrimination in hiring on the basis of race, ethnicity or gender is already illegal throughout the United States — and has been since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

That act, of course, was one of the crowning achievements of the Civil Rights Movement — and was fiercely opposed by white Southern conservatives. The same political demographic that is now passing their own versions of anti-discrimination laws, but with a very different class of alleged victims in mind.

Like everyone else in the country, white men are already protected against employment discrimination on the basis of race or gender. Like everyone else, if they believe they have been discriminated against, they can file complaints with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

And some of them do! Just … not that many.

A large study in 2019 found that about 25 percent of Black women said they had experienced some form of workplace discrimination, compared to 18 percent of Black men and 16 percent of white women. Only 11 percent of white men said they had.

Meanwhile, a 2023 study of U.S. Fortune 500 companies found that 59 percent of company executives were white men, even though they make up only about 30 percent of the total U.S. population.

20 percent of Fortune 500 executives were white women, 14 percent were men of color, and just 6 percent were women of color. 

The breakdown of company board members and people in corporate governance followed nearly identical patterns: Over and over in the American workforce, white men remain overrepresented in top-tier positions and underrepresented in reporting incidents of being discriminated against.

It may not surprise you to know that another place white men are overrepresented is among Republican state legislators in the South.

In Georgia, for example, 96 percent of the Republicans in the General Assembly are white, and 85 percent are men.

In Tennessee, 86 percent of the GOP supermajority in the Legislature are white men. 

In other words, these bills alleging discrimination against white men are being written and passed by Republican majorities that are overwhelmingly — and disproportionately — made up of white men.

That’s why the political minority parties in Southern state houses — which also include most of their legislators who are women and people of color — have tended to see the anti-DEI movement’s true aims as perpetuating racial inequities rather than fighting them.

They allege that what the bills are really trying to do is create chilling effects that will make people in state agencies and schools think twice about hiring anyone who isn’t a white man, and afraid to discuss any kind of racial or gender disparities.

In Georgia, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harold Jones the 2nd, who is Black, accused the state’s Republicans of wanting to “take Georgia backwards — backwards to days when people did not have full rights.”

In Louisiana, State Representative Edmond Jordan said the state’s anti-DEI legislation was “an anti-Black bill,” and his fellow Democratic State Representative Candace Newell of New Orleans said, “This is the most racially oppressive piece of legislation that I think I’ve seen.” 

Jordan and Newell are both Black. So is Tennessee state Representative Antonio Parkinson, a Democrat from Memphis, who said during debate on the “Dismantle DEI” bills that Republicans had created a false narrative around DEI.

“It is simply to show you that we exist,” he said. “It removes the invisible cloak from veterans, disabled individuals, Black people, women and others. We exist.”

And that is maybe the most irrational thing about the wave of attacks on diversity in the South — most of these states are pretty diverse. Non-White residents make up one-third or more of the population in 9 out of 12 Southern states. 

In Texas, non-Hispanic white people make up only an estimated 39 percent of the total state population. In Georgia, it’s 49 percent, and in Louisiana it’s 56 percent. Even Tennessee, one of the whiter states in the country, has a nonwhite population of nearly 30 percent. 

And like the U.S. overall, we’re getting progressively less white. Every Southern state has become more racially and ethnically diverse over the past 30 years. Whatever else the anti-DEI movement accomplishes, it doesn’t seem likely to change that.

— Jesse Fox Mayshark