Anti-DEI politics does not restore merit. It restores discretion—and asks the public to pretend discretion has no racial history. Royal Politics examines the rhetoric behind the performance.

One of the most dishonest ideas circulating in American politics is the claim that eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion automatically restores “merit.”

The equation is presented as though it were self-evident:

DEI means race-based preference.

No DEI means neutral competition.

Neutral competition produces the most qualified person.

Therefore, they conclude that eliminating DEI restores excellence. However, every step in that argument is questionable.

“Non-DEI” describes what a system excludes. It does not tell us what the system rewards. It does not prove that the hiring process is open. It does not prove that the evaluation criteria are relevant. It does not prove that standards are applied consistently. It does not eliminate nepotism, political loyalty, ideological conformity, social connections, subjective ideas about “professionalism,” or the tendency of powerful people to choose people who resemble themselves.

A system can eliminate every DEI office in the country and still be corrupt, biased, intellectually stagnant, politically captured, and thoroughly unmeritocratic.

That is the contradiction anti-DEI politicians do not want examined.

Russell Vought and the Manufactured Choice Between DEI and Merit

Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, has participated in the administration’s campaign to present DEI and merit as opposites.

During Vought’s January 23, 2025 confirmation hearing, Senator Bernie Moreno described DEI courses and promotions as an alternative to promotion “based on merit.” Vought accepted the premise rather than challenging it. The exchange treated it as obvious that DEI displaces merit instead of asking whether inclusive procedures can help institutions recognize merit more accurately.

That framing is politically useful because it avoids the question that should come next:

What evidence proves that the system replacing DEI is actually merit-based?

Calling something “merit-based” does not make it so.

The federal government’s own merit principles are more demanding than the political slogan. The Office of Personnel Management says competitive hiring should involve fair and open competition, recruitment from all segments of society, equal opportunity, and selection according to applicants’ relative knowledge, skills, abilities, and competencies.

Equal opportunity is therefore not an enemy of merit. It is part of the process required to make merit credible.

Without fair access, relevant standards, consistent evaluation, and meaningful competition, “merit” becomes whatever the person in power says it is.

The Black Worker Is Being Cast as the Presumed DEI Hire

Let us be brutally honest about what much of the anti-DEI rhetoric communicates.

When some white Americans hear that a Black person was hired through an organization with a DEI policy, they are encouraged to wonder whether that person was qualified.

When a white person is selected through personal referrals, family connections, executive discretion, legacy admission, an informal network, an ideological alliance, or a subjective interview process, that person is rarely branded a “nonmerit hire.”

White selection is treated as normal.

Black selection is treated as requiring an explanation.

That is why “DEI hire” has become an insult. The phrase is not merely criticizing an administrative program. It is being used to place an asterisk beside the competence of Black professionals.

The underlying message is that white workers arrive through merit while Black workers arrive through accommodation.

That message is not only insulting. It is unsupported.

A Black applicant can be the most qualified person in the pool and still benefit from a process designed to ensure that qualified Black applicants are actually seen, interviewed, evaluated fairly, and protected from exclusionary networks. There is no contradiction between being highly qualified and being recruited through an inclusive process.

DEI does not manufacture Black intelligence, discipline, education, experience, creativity, or leadership. Those qualities already exist. Properly designed DEI practices are intended to prevent institutions from overlooking them.

The Supposedly Neutral System Has Never Proven Its Neutrality

The anti-DEI argument asks Americans to place enormous faith in ordinary managerial discretion.

But experimental research has repeatedly shown that qualifications are not always evaluated independently of race.

In the landmark résumé experiment commonly known as “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal?,” researchers sent fictitious applications to real employers. The résumés were assigned names perceived as either white or African American. Applications carrying white-sounding names received approximately 50 percent more callbacks, despite the experiment’s controlled qualifications. Better résumé quality also produced a larger callback benefit for white-named applicants than for Black-named applicants.

That is not merit.

That is racial perception altering how merit is recognized.

A later meta-analysis of available hiring field experiments found no meaningful decline over a 25-year period in discrimination against African American applicants.

That finding destroys the fantasy that removing equity safeguards simply reveals a naturally fair labor market.

If identical or similarly qualified applicants can receive different treatment because of the racial identity employers infer from their names, then the pre-DEI or non-DEI system cannot simply be presumed neutral. It must demonstrate neutrality through evidence, transparent procedures, and accountability.

Anti-DEI politics reverses that burden. It demands extensive proof that an inclusion policy is fair while granting the traditional system an automatic certificate of innocence.

“Merit” Often Means Familiarity to the Decision-Maker

Merit is not a self-executing force. Institutions must decide how to identify it.

Who writes the job description?

Who decides which credentials matter?

Who selects the interview panel?

Who determines whether leadership “presence,” cultural “fit,” communication style, or executive polish should outweigh measurable performance?

Who receives mentoring before the competition begins?

Who learns about the opening through an informal network?

Who is given a second chance after a weak interview?

Who is viewed as possessing potential, and who is expected to arrive already proven?

These are political and institutional decisions.

A supposedly race-neutral process can reproduce racial outcomes without containing a rule that explicitly says, “Do not hire Black people.” Exclusion can happen through networks, discretion, inherited practices, inaccessible pipelines, selective mentoring, unequal presumptions of competence, and standards that are applied more generously to some candidates than others.

Removing DEI does not remove those forces.

It may remove the people assigned to notice them.

Homogeneity Is Not the Same Thing as Excellence

Anti-DEI politics also rests on an intellectually weak assumption: that a more homogeneous institution is somehow closer to pure merit.

There is no general scientific rule saying that a room filled with people from similar backgrounds will make the best decisions.

Research on racially diverse mock juries found that diverse groups discussed a wider range of information than all-white groups. White participants in diverse juries cited more case facts, made fewer factual errors, and were more willing to discuss racial issues than white participants in homogeneous juries. The benefit did not come merely from adding Black participants; the presence of diversity changed how white participants prepared, processed information, and deliberated.

That matters because diversity is not valuable only for supplying a “Black viewpoint,” as though every Black person thinks alike. Diversity can alter the behavior of the entire group. People may examine assumptions more carefully when they cannot presume that everyone shares the same experiences, interpretation, or information.

In experimental financial markets, researchers found that ethnically diverse markets produced more accurate pricing, while homogeneous markets were more likely to preserve or amplify errors and produce larger price bubbles.

A meta-analysis of research on team information sharing also found a positive relationship between information sharing and team performance, with the sharing of unique information playing an especially important role.

This is the danger of groupthink: agreement can feel like evidence even when it merely reflects a narrow range of perspectives.

Homogeneous groups may experience less friction because fewer assumptions are being challenged. But comfort is not the same as accuracy. Easy agreement is not the same as good judgment. Confidence is not proof of competence.

Sometimes a group appears efficient because everyone is making the same mistake together.

Diversity Is Not Magic—and That Is Not an Argument Against It

The honest argument for diversity does not require pretending that every diverse team automatically outperforms every homogeneous one.

Research on culturally diverse teams is more nuanced. A major meta-analysis found that diversity can increase creativity while also increasing task conflict and reducing social integration under some conditions. Later reviews emphasized that outcomes depend on factors such as leadership, inclusion, task complexity, team tenure, organizational context, and the quality of communication.

That is exactly why the letters in DEI belong together.

Diversity brings different experiences, information, perspectives, and talent into the institution.

Equity examines whether access, evaluation, advancement, and resources are being distributed fairly.

Inclusion determines whether people can contribute their knowledge after entering the room.

A company that hires a diverse workforce but ignores exclusion, retaliation, isolation, or unequal access to decision-making has not built an effective system. It has assembled diversity without creating the conditions necessary to benefit from it.

Some DEI programs are shallow. Some are performative. Some rely on slogans instead of measurable standards. Some consultants sell expensive presentations that change almost nothing. Some organizations confuse demographic appearance with institutional reform.

Those failures deserve criticism.

But poorly designed DEI does not prove that discrimination disappeared. It proves that governance requires competence.

We do not abolish accounting because some accountants are ineffective. We improve the accounting system.

We do not abolish cybersecurity because some security programs are performative. We strengthen the controls.

Likewise, the answer to weak DEI is not blind institutional discretion. It is better-designed, legally compliant, transparent, evidence-based inclusion and accountability.

Anti-DEI Politics Has Its Own Preferred Groups

The anti-DEI movement presents itself as opposition to preferences. In practice, it is often highly selective about which preferences count.

Political loyalty can be preferred.

Ideological conformity can be preferred.

Personal relationships can be preferred.

Family status can be preferred.

Institutional pedigree can be preferred.

Familiar cultural behavior can be preferred.

Applicants who promise to advance a president’s agenda can be preferred.

But when an organization makes a deliberate effort to recruit qualified Black candidates, suddenly the country is warned that merit is under attack.

That is not a principled rejection of preferences.

It is a struggle over which preferences may remain invisible.

The traditional system has always made choices about whose experience counts, whose communication style appears authoritative, whose mistakes are forgivable, whose potential is recognizable, and who looks like leadership.

DEI made some of those decisions visible.

The backlash is partly an attempt to make them invisible again.

Black Excellence Did Not Begin With DEI

Black Americans were building, inventing, governing, organizing, studying, healing, teaching, creating, engineering, litigating, serving, and leading long before corporations created DEI departments.

The problem was never a shortage of Black merit.

The problem was that American institutions repeatedly denied Black merit access, recognition, compensation, authority, and ownership.

A society that excluded Black people from schools, professions, neighborhoods, voting booths, unions, executive suites, financing, contracts, and public accommodations cannot credibly declare that every resulting white-dominated institution was assembled through pure competition.

Historical advantage does not become merit merely because it is old.

Institutional inheritance does not become neutrality merely because current beneficiaries did not personally design it.

And removing the mechanisms intended to detect exclusion does not prove that exclusion is gone.

It may only make exclusion harder to document.

The Real Merit Test

An institution serious about merit should be able to answer concrete questions.

Was the opportunity publicly accessible?

Were the qualifications connected to actual job performance?

Were candidates evaluated against the same standards?

Were interviews structured enough to reduce personal favoritism?

Were referrals and family connections disclosed?

Were evaluators required to explain their rankings?

Were racial disparities investigated rather than automatically rationalized?

Did qualified applicants from outside familiar networks receive genuine consideration?

Could the organization defend the selection process using records rather than rhetoric?

Did the final team contain enough intellectual independence to challenge leadership?

Could employees disagree without being punished?

Those questions test merit.

Simply announcing that DEI has been abolished tests nothing.

The Brutal Truth

The phrase “merit over DEI” works politically because many people have been trained to imagine a qualified white applicant and an unqualified Black applicant.

They are rarely encouraged to imagine a highly qualified Black applicant being rejected by a less qualified white decision-maker using subjective standards.

They are rarely asked to consider an average white employee who entered through a familiar network.

They are rarely asked whether an all-white leadership team may reflect limited recruiting, favoritism, inherited access, or institutional groupthink rather than an astonishing coincidence in which every superior candidate happened to be white.

The racial presumption runs in only one direction.

Black presence is treated as evidence that standards may have been lowered.

White dominance is treated as evidence that standards must have been followed.

That is not meritocracy.

That is racial ideology disguised as administrative common sense.

Conclusion: Non-DEI Is Not a Qualification System

Ending DEI does not tell us who will be hired.

It does not tell us how candidates will be evaluated.

It does not tell us whether bias will be measured.

It does not tell us whether dissent will be protected.

It does not tell us whether informal networks will dominate.

It does not tell us whether political loyalty will replace professional independence.

It does not tell us whether the institution will become more competent or merely more homogeneous.

“Non-DEI” tells us what the system has rejected.

It does not prove what the system values.

Until anti-DEI institutions demonstrate fair competition, transparent standards, equal treatment, job-related evaluation, protection from favoritism, and measurable performance, they have no basis for claiming the word “merit.”

They have removed an accountability framework.

They have not proven excellence.

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NON-DEI: The Game of Connections, Credentials, and Convenient Definitions of Merit

A Royal Politics Satirical Strategy Game

Tagline:
Remove DEI. Keep every other preference.

Players: 3–6
Playing time: 45–75 minutes
Recommended age: 16+
Genre: Political satire, institutional strategy, social commentary

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The Premise

Welcome to the Institution, where diversity programs have been abolished and “merit” has officially been restored.

Unfortunately, nobody has defined merit.

Players compete to place friends, relatives, donors, loyalists, alumni, protégés, and socially connected insiders into positions of authority while publicly insisting that every selection was based exclusively on excellence.

The objective is not simply to hire the most capable people.

The objective is to control the institution, protect your network, maintain the appearance of fairness, and prevent the public from noticing that “non-DEI” never eliminated preferences—it merely protected the preferences that were already normalized.

In NON-DEI, players discover that removing diversity safeguards does not create a neutral system. It creates an unmonitored system where nepotism, patronage, ideological loyalty, credential worship, social familiarity, and subjective definitions of professionalism can operate under the prestigious label of “merit.”

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The Central Satire

The game is built around one statement:

“Non-DEI” describes what a system excludes; it does not prove what the system rewards.

Every player publicly supports merit.

Every player privately manipulates the meaning of merit.

Players earn power by promoting their preferred candidates while avoiding accusations of favoritism. The less transparent the institution becomes, the easier it is to reward connections. However, continually selecting loyal, familiar, or prestigious insiders can reduce the institution’s actual competence.

Eventually, a crisis may expose the difference between appearing qualified and being capable of performing the job.