(I wrote this originally wrote a draft of this post in February of 2025, several weeks before Senator Cory Booker’s 25-hour floor speech).
You know who would hate DEI? Former US Representative and Senator, Strom Thurmond.
Thurmond was so incensed by President Truman’s 1948 Executive Order integrating the US military, that he ran for president as a member of the segregationist Dixiecrats party. You can see Confederate flags in photos of the party convention and campaign rallies. Thurmond won 39 electoral votes in the 1948 election.
Later, he held the Senate floor for over 24 hours in his filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
A few years later he fought against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and then the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Oh, and a he had a Black daughter. At age 23, he got his parents’ housekeeper pregnant.
SHE WAS 15.
Governments, corporations, and other organizations are going to do what they will do with their laws and corporate policies, etc. and I have pretty close to zero control over that.
Though I like to think there would be contexts where I’d ask “What Would Strom Thurmond Do?” that I would strive to do something diametrically opposed to that.