The Kamala Harris-DEI Attacks Seem to Go Only in One Direction

Republicans called the vice president a diversity hire. Then they went silent when she hired a white male to diversify her ticket.

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to members of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center on July 10, 2024 in Dallas, Texas. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

IN THE THREE WEEKS SINCE Vice President Kamala Harris emerged as the likely and then presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, a number of Republican politicians and right-wing commentators—in shorthand mockery of “diversity, equity, and inclusion”—have dismissed her as a “DEI hire.”

Some have complained that Joe Biden, in his vetting of running mates four years ago, promised to choose a woman. Others have alleged, falsely, that Biden promised to choose a black woman. Either way, they argue, Harris’s race and gender are the only reasons she got the job.

But as Harris vetted her own potential running mates in late July and early August, none of these critics raised objections that her short list consisted entirely of white men, or that the conventional wisdom said it had to be that way. When she picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, some in the anti-DEI chorus accused her of snubbing a Jewish governor—Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, who was reportedly her second choice. But none protested that women and people of color weren’t on her list at all.

The contrast between these two situations is revealing. The “DEI” rap on Harris isn’t about objecting to the selection of running mates based on race and sex. It’s about objecting when that selection process favors women and minorities.

The DEI attacks on Harris have been persistent and crude. Rep. Tim Burchett led the way, calling her “our DEI vice president.” When CNN asked Burchett about this, he claimed, falsely, that Biden “said he was going to hire a black female for vice president.” Burchett went on: “What about white females? What about any other group? It just—when you go down that route, you take mediocrity. And that’s what they have right now as the vice president.”

On Fox News, Rep. Chip Roy made a similar crack about the “DEI vice president.” Rep. Harriet Hageman called Harris “intellectually just really kind of the bottom of the barrel. . . . I think she was a DEI hire.” Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, told Newsmax that Harris—“the laughing lady who’s never accomplished anything”—“would be the queen of DEI if she were elected. She is DEI.” Patrick vowed that with a Donald Trump victory in November, “we will be rid of all this DEI woke culture.”

Two former Trump administration officials joined in these attacks. Ric Grenell, Trump’s former acting director of national intelligence, told NBC News that Harris was the “product” of a cushy “revolving door of DEI appointments” in California. Sebastian Gorka, who served as a deputy assistant to the president under Trump, used coarser language. “She’s a DEI hire, right? She’s a woman. She’s colored. Therefore, she’s got to be good,” he jeered in a Newsmax interview on July 9.

Later that month, Gorka asserted that Harris’s “only qualification was having a vagina and the right skin color.” On Newsmax, he called her “a DEI hire” who would inherit the nomination “because she’s female and her skin color is the correct DEI color.” Gorka went on to slander female Secret Service agents who were part of Trump’s security detail when he was grazed by a bullet on July 13:

Outside of the open border and the cost of living, what is the thing that’s most annoying Americans in the last three years? It’s diversity, it’s equity, it’s inclusion, which probably almost got my former boss murdered last Saturday—those short, overweight, incompetent female agents screaming, “What do we do? What do we do?”

Other figures in right-wing media joined in the DEI ridicule. Fox News host Jesse Watters sneered, “The only reason Kamala is in the White House is because of the DEI deal Biden cut with Bernie [Sanders] to seal the nomination.” Another Fox News talker, Jeanine Pirro, said Harris represented “classic DEI culture. Do you not understand why she was chosen in the first place? She has proven to America why DEI doesn’t work.”

DEI is a complicated topic. The idea is to diversify workplaces, colleges, and other settings by deliberately seeking and sometimes giving extra consideration to applicants from groups that have been historically underrepresented or disadvantaged. Sometimes this practice crosses over into something that feels more like discrimination against men or white people, and that’s where conservatives raise concerns. But often, they exploit these clumsier versions of DEI to rally the Republican base against the whole idea.

Harris is an example of DEI as it’s broadly understood. Biden has acknowledged that he sees her, in part, as an affirmation of “the values of diversity, equality, inclusion.” But the Harris campaign’s vice-presidential selection process has exposed an embarrassing asymmetry in the outcry against DEI.

When Harris set out to find a running mate, one of her goals was to diversify her ticket. She looked for someone who would appeal to white men, and she narrowed her short list to white men. On July 24, NBC News reported:

The campaign is particularly interested in someone who will appeal to the demographics and the voters that Biden would have brought to the table, including older white voters and suburban women, according to a source familiar with the campaign’s thinking. That source said Harris’ team also would like the running mate to appeal specifically to white men who don’t like Trump but who may question whether they want to vote for a Black and South Asian woman.

A week later, the New York Times reported that Harris was “seriously considering only white men” for her ticket. Specifically:

While other nominees started with lists of dozens of names, Ms. Harris has quickly narrowed hers to six, with Mr. Shapiro, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona widely seen by Democrats as the top contenders. Mr. Beshear, Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg have also participated in the vetting process.

Harris wasn’t looking for a white male running mate to rectify past discrimination or disadvantage, as is often the case with DEI on behalf of women and minorities. But she was pursuing the “diversity” part of DEI: using race and sex to balance her ticket and broaden her campaign’s representation of the population. 

I can’t find any evidence that the people who called Harris a DEI hire have objected to her campaign’s obvious filtration of potential running mates by race and gender. In the days since she chose Walz, none of them has complained that he’s white or male. Instead, they’ve complained that he’s soft on undocumented immigrants, sympathetic toward radical Muslims, and too cozy with Black Lives Matter.

Last week, on a right-wing podcast, Roy denounced “woke-transgender-DEI nonsense” in the Democratic party. He claimed that Walz had “advanced DEI” and had “embraced . . . radical elements of the Islamic push in Minnesota.” Hageman, in a tweet, protested that Walz “gave illegal aliens free healthcare and college tuition. And he cheered BLM riots that burned Minneapolis to the ground.”

Gorka, on his own podcast, scoffed that Walz “genuflected to BLM” and had been chosen to “placate the pro-Hamas, pro-jihadi voters in Minnesota.” Pirro accused Walz of condoning free health care and education for illegal immigrants. “He throws us right back to George Floyd,” to a “time in our history that we want to forget,” she groused, referring in part to the COVID era and in part to the black man whose murder by a white police officer set off protests and riots in 2020.

Watters, on his TV show, fumed that Walz “didn’t protect Minneapolis when it was barbecued by Black Lives Matter.” He told the Fox News audience, falsely, that “Walz let his best city burn down, flooded it with illegals, and helped cancel the state flag to make it look more like the flag of Somalia.” And he mocked Walz for saying after the Floyd riots that “a society that does not put equity and inclusion at the center of it” would “eventually come to the places where we’re at.”

If Republicans and people in conservative media want to criticize DEI, that’s fine. They’re welcome to make a principled case against consideration of race and gender in employment, college admissions, and politics. But if they don’t object to considering race and gender when the favored group is white men, that’s a clue that what they’re harboring isn’t a principled position. It’s a bias.