By Lydia Polgreen
Ever since speculation began that Vice President Kamala Harris might replace President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, there has been a steady, ugly chorus on the right. The New York Post published a column that declared that Harris would be a “DEI president,” and quickly the phrase ricocheted across the conservative media ecosystem.
The invocation of diversity, equity and inclusion programs meant to bring people from underrepresented backgrounds into institutions of power and influence clearly implied that a Black woman got power because of racial preferences. Black achievement, in this narrative, is always unearned and conferred without regard to merit.
Listening to JD Vance’s speech at the Republican convention Wednesday night, as he laid out his remarkable biography — a young man with roots in an economically devastated backwater who scaled the heights of the American elite — I couldn’t help thinking to myself: If Harris is a DEI candidate, so is Vance. It just depends on what kind of diversity you mean. It depends, indeed, on how you understand the role of identity in shaping the opportunities that define anyone’s life.
All politics is, at some level, identity politics — the business of turning identity into power, be it the identity of a candidate or demographic group or political party or region of the country. For modern presidential and vice presidential candidates, one of their most valuable assets is their life story. Some elements of that story are bequeathed at birth, but what makes politicians successful is their talent at narrating that story in a manner that allows voters to see some version of themselves and their own aspirations in the candidate. This kind of storytelling, embedded in American archetypes and ideals, has shaped our politics.
Vance’s entire business and political career has flowed from his life story, which is embedded in identities he did not choose: Born a “hillbilly,” of Scotch Irish descent, he grew up in poverty, son of a single mother who was addicted to drugs. Overcoming this adversity, these disadvantages, lies at the core of his personal narrative. His ascent would hardly be so remarkable if he started from a life of middle-class comfort. But no one is portraying Vance’s elevation to the Republican ticket as the outcome of some kind of illegitimate identity politics, nor is Vance perceived as having benefited from a political form of affirmative action.
And yet he almost certainly did. Race is not the only kind of diversity that gets noticed and embraced. Elite institutions love up-by-your-bootstraps Americans, and that archetype is all over Vance’s life story. A promising white candidate from a county that sends few students to an elite college such as Yale University would get a strong look, even if that person’s grades and test scores were less impressive than other applicants’. (To be clear, I have no idea what kind of grades or scores Vance had.) Regardless of race, applicants from working-class backgrounds, especially if they were the first in their family to attend college, are deemed to add class diversity.
Natasha Warikoo, a professor of sociology at Tufts University whose scholarship focuses on affirmative action and ideas about meritocracy, told me that race is a highly visible identity and the one that is most likely to be associated with unearned advantage. Yet race is not the only kind of identity that excites elite institutions looking for diversity. “We want a variety of perspectives and lived experiences,” Warikoo said.
Vance benefited from one of the most powerful forms of affirmative action that elite universities practice to attract low-income students: need-blind admissions. Like many elite schools, Yale pledges to help cover the cost of attending for poor students, and Vance wrote about receiving generous financial aid for law school, not “because of anything I’d done or earned — it was because I was one of the poorest kids in school.” I am familiar with this phenomenon — my much less elite college had a similar policy. Our family was penniless, so I received aid that covered nearly the entire cost of my expensive education.
The sort of affirmative action that helped Vance gets easily overlooked — it’s less visible than race, making it easier to ascribe the achievements of white men to merit alone. The playing field is never tilted to help white men, the theory goes. If anything, it is tilted against them, in favor of women and minorities, we’re told by the right. And if there are any advantages for white men, they exist only to help elites remain elites — legacy admissions, preferences for athletes and players of expensive sports such as sailing, old-boy networks.
In truth, it is pretty common for white men to get a leg up for some special part of their identity. Yet these men do not get labeled DEI beneficiaries. No one worries that their surgeon or pilot or president was a “DEI hire,” even though he might have gotten his spot at an elite college because he was the son of a wealthy alumnus, or because he happened to come from a state that is historically underrepresented in elite higher education. Indeed, he may have impressed an admissions officer with an unusual story of overcoming obstacles — a family rived by poverty and addiction in a forgotten corner of the country.
Harris and Vance, despite their political differences, have a few things in common. They were raised by tough, charismatic matriarchs. They both pursued legal careers. They both sought and won high elected office. They both come from backgrounds that are underrepresented in the halls of power. And now they are both engaged in the core work of politics — translating their stories into power. We would do well to ask why only one of these two remarkable Americans stands accused of getting where she is based on DEI. The answer, I fear, is written on their faces.
Comments