The reversible power test: Free speech and the DEI backlash

An investor I saw often once teased me for wearing a suit.

It was the mid-2010s, a time when Silicon Valley chic was reshaping business attire. He was proudly casual — another bicoastal jet-setter whose formal wear consisted of a blue blazer over dark jeans and fresh sneakers. More often I remember him in a lot of zip-up sweaters. 

He knew me as an adherent of the startup uniform: a graphic t-shirt under a zip-up hoodie. (Incidentally, that look is still in my closet, like this aging millennial startuper’s answer to my grandparent’s shag carpets.) To him, spotting me in a shirt, tie, and jacket — even if I had snagged it in a buy-one-get-one deal at a faded discount retailer — signaled that I had submitted to a system that optimistic startup life back then was committed to disrupting.

I pushed back. Trading one required uniform for another isn’t freedom; it’s just oppression by another fabric.

This, I submit, is a main takeaway from the current Trump-led backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs: Effectively forcing firms to scrap their diversity pledges is no different than requiring them.

Political theorist John Rawls posited in the 1970s that the best way to organize society is through a “veil of ignorance,” in which no one would know which position they’d be granted. The corresponding democratic principle could be called the “reversible power test”: Don’t wield power you wouldn’t want your political opponent to have.

Don’t confuse me for a strident partisan. I think it’s a mistake for universities — our laboratories of wide-ranging thought — to require faculty to sign politically charged pledges, as several had begun to do. Research has long shown that mandatory diversity training is counterproductive, repelling could-be champions. Likewise, as one PhD science executive told me, as the COVID pandemic wore on, masks worked better than mask mandates. 

Within reason, I believe most people should be left alone to make their own decisions. 

In 2021, I wrote with ambivalence that “Tech CEOs have nowhere to hide anymore.” Regardless of my personal beliefs, bending someone to your political will can demonstrate short-term gain but seems to always swing back. 

Yet, I also take very seriously the reality that race-based economic disparities remain abhorrent. Every mandate reads to me as in-group signaling, rather than serious policy reform. Culture change lasts longer, but it requires slower, coalition-driven progress. It should not be lost on anyone that the Civil Rights victories of the 1960s required both historic grassroots organizing and the improbable White House pairing of a New England liberal with a reluctant Southern Senate machinist.

Dogged advocacy — not impatient executive mandates — won the day.

If I was skeptical of the effectiveness of mandates from the left, I am chilled by the Trump administration’s anti-DEI mandates from the right. They have already shaken local economic development and ecosystem organizing. 

The DEI backlash was already in full-swing last year, well represented by crusader Edward Blum’s lawsuit against the Atlanta-based Fearless Fund’s grant program for Black women entrepreneurs. Back in September, the Fearless Fund agreed to end the program.

Corporate backers of inclusive entrepreneurship and workforce development programs were retreating by 2023, per a Technical.ly special report. A federally-funded EDA Tech Hubs leader told me this month that most of their peers were walking back language in their proposals that included a focus on diversity metrics — a priority under the Biden administration that’s now seen as a vulnerability under Trump. Prominent Baltimore “equitech”-focused nonprofit UpSurge was folded into the Greater Baltimore Committee, that region’s largest business group. 

Now the Trump administration is cheerily cutting any programs, personnel and policies that sound too “woke.” The unorthodox Department of Government Efficiency (or, you know, DOGE, like the crypto meme), a presidential advisory group led by iconaclastic and chainsaw-wielding entrepreneur and troll-in-chief Elon Musk, is slashing budgets with an eye toward politics. Fresh Pew Research polling suggests most Americans disapprove of Musk’s approach, though opinion is predictably politically charged. This tone is flowing down to state, county and local governments and civic leadership.

An ecosystem organizer asked me for suggestions of what local leaders around the country were championing the necessary good of economic representation. For now, I said, most I talk to are cautious, quiet and in retreat. Social scientists call it “anticipatory compliance.”

Choosing one conformity over another is no victory. 

Give more people more freedom, more often — and then fight the battle in the public discourse. Short-term expediency backfires. Free speech and diversity can coexist, but only if we resist the urge to trade one mandated worldview for another.