Quote · The Bulwark Podcast
Clint Smith: Make America What It Set Out to Be
Where this was said
Steelmanning the DEI Critique — and Why This Isn't It
At 39:50 · chapter starts 39:00
Tim Miller poses a genuine challenge: setting aside the racist bad actors, isn't there a legitimate argument that some DEI programs metastasize into administrative overhead while the actual goal — hiring and promoting more Black employees — gets lost? Smith takes the question seriously, agreeing that a thorough, good-faith audit of what DEI programs are actually achieving would be legitimate. But he draws a sharp distinction between that hypothetical exercise and what is actually happening. The administration's anti-DEI effort, he argues, is not a policy audit — it's a structural campaign. Drawing on Adam Serwer's reporting, Smith makes the case that the executive branch is attempting to reconstitute Jim Crow: building a federal, military, and corporate infrastructure that treats Black people as incapable of serving in positions of authority and systematically removes or bars them from those positions. He acknowledges that this framing would have felt hyperbolic to him a few years ago, but argues that the policy record, taken as a whole, is no longer ambiguous about the intent.
There is a good-faith argument for auditing DEI programs for effectiveness. That argument is not what the Trump administration is making. Hegseth's campaign isn't about efficiency — it's about reconstituting a federal and military infrastructure that excludes Black people from positions of power, full stop.
The administration isn't just being selective about history out of nostalgia — it's a deliberate power move. If people don't know why one neighborhood in D.C. looks different from another, they assume inequality is the natural order of things rather than the result of deliberate policy. Controlling the story is how you control the present.
