The Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2024. Photographer: Andi Rice/Bloomberg
By Claire Suddath
February 29, 2024 at 2:00 PM MST
Hello, it’s Claire Suddath and welcome back to the Equality newsletter. This week I’m going to take a closer look at Alabama’s anti-DEI bill, one of more than 30 such proposed bills in states across the U.S.
But first...Anti-DEI lawsuits are leading to job losses, fleeing investors.
Anti-Diversity in Alabama
It’s been a busy week in Alabama. Just days after the state’s Supreme Court granted embryos personhood status (throwing IVF clinics into disarray and sparking federal attempts to protect fertility treatments) , the state Senate also passed a controversial bill barring diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in education.
In short, the bill bans DEI offices at public schools and universities, and prohibits schools from sponsoring programs that are open only to people of a certain race or gender (more on that in a minute) or advocate for what it calls “a divisive concept,” a term found in several similar bills proposed in other states. If the House approves it, Alabama will become the seventh state to pass an anti-DEI bill within the last year.
The bill is, well, hard to understand. If you read the text (which you can here) you’ll find that while disbanding DEI offices seems pretty straightforward, later the bill says that “promoting racial, cultural or ethnic diversity or inclusiveness,” is still fine. Presumably in some other, less formal way that doesn’t involve a DEI office, although it doesn’t specify what’s allowed. It’s all very confusing. And maybe that’s the point.
“Usually when a bill is vague, you assume they want it to be vague,” says Ralph Richard Banks, a law professor at Stanford University, “People don’t want to go to jail, so when they don’t know what a law prohibits, they might refrain from doing lots of stuff that should still be legal.”
This has been the situation in Texas. Last year the state banned DEI offices at public institutions as well as any program that provides “special benefits” to people based on race, color or ethnicity. Texas’ law says that it doesn’t apply to student groups but according to the Texas Tribune, the University of Texas at Austin has closed a multicultural center that was used by several student groups, terminated a scholarship program for undocumented students, and declined to fund the school’s Black Student Alliance for fear of running afoul of the new law.
Alabama’s bill will likely have the same effect, says Banks. It prohibits state funds to be used for school organizations that condition participation on a person’s “race, sex, gender identity, ethnicity, national origin or sexual orientation” — but then carves out exceptions for athletic and “social organizations” that segregate based on sex. In other words, the legality of a university’s Black student alliance may now be in question but fraternities and sororities are just fine. Your Bama Rush TikTok videos are safe.
The list of “divisive concepts” that schools can’t teach is also confusing. Among other things, schools are not allowed to promote the idea that “slavery or racism are aligned with the founding principles of the United States.” But it does allow for historical events to be taught in a “historically accurate context.”
So let’s do that.
In January 1861, Alabama became the third state to secede from the United States of America. “Our new government is founded,” Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy’s Vice President, said in his speech a couple of months later, “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.” At the time, Alabama had one of the largest enslaved populations in America.
More than 100 years later, in his 1963 inauguration speech, Alabama’s governor George Wallace honored the Confederacy’s legacy and promised to enforce “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
Also that year, 14 Black students were denied admission to Tuskegee High School, an all-White public school in Macon County, despite the fact that the Supreme Court had struck down racial segregation in schools nine years previously. They sued. A federal judge issued a desegregation order. In response, Wallace issued an executive order postponing classes and mobilized the National Guard to prevent the students from attending. (President Kennedy overrode his order.)
When the Black students finally enrolled in Tuskegee High School, Wallace promised White parents that they could receive tuition assistance from the state if they wanted to enroll their kids in the newly created private school, Macon Academy. (A federal court later prohibited this.)
According to Auburn University’s Encyclopedia of Alabama, between 1965 and 1975, nearly 100 new all-White private schools opened in Alabama and 50,000 White students left the public school system. A 2021 study by professors at the University of Kansas and the University of Alabama found that Black children in Alabama’s “Black Belt” (the term for the area that was once home to many of the state’s plantations; many current Black residents are descended from former slaves and the area has some of the highest poverty rates in the state) attend schools that are more racially segregated now than they were in 1990.
The University of Alabama didn’t officially desegregate its sororities and fraternities until 2013. The share of Black students who are Greek members at the school remains miniscule. Explicit language requiring racial segregation in public schools was not removed from Alabama’s state constitution until 2022. The poverty rate for Black people in Alabama is twice that of Whites.
“You don’t have to have a formal DEI office to address educational inequality—or could you just change the name?—but it does take real, concerted work,” says Bryan Mann, an education and policy professor at the University of Kansas, and co-author of that 2021 study of Alabama’s Black Belt. “If you’re legislating whitewashed interpretations of history and proscribing how schools and educators can address the issue, you’re making it a lot harder for them to put people on equal playing fields.”
Today, 27% of Alabamans are Black but they account for only 11% of University of Alabama students.
By the numbers
5,977The number of Black workers from Tesla Inc.'s California factory who can sue the carmaker over claims it failed to protect them from racism.
New Voices
“At the current rate of progress it will take nearly half a century to close the gender pay gap in the UK.”
Tara Shrestha Carney
A PwC Economist on the widening UK gender pay gap
Bloomberg News supports amplifying the voices of women and other under-represented executives across our media platforms.
Morgan Stanley, UBS Group are paying male staff over 40% more than women in Australia.
Anti-Diversity in Alabama
It’s been a busy week in Alabama. Just days after the state’s Supreme Court granted embryos personhood status (throwing IVF clinics into disarray and sparking federal attempts to protect fertility treatments) , the state Senate also passed a controversial bill barring diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in education.
In short, the bill bans DEI offices at public schools and universities, and prohibits schools from sponsoring programs that are open only to people of a certain race or gender (more on that in a minute) or advocate for what it calls “a divisive concept,” a term found in several similar bills proposed in other states. If the House approves it, Alabama will become the seventh state to pass an anti-DEI bill within the last year.
The bill is, well, hard to understand. If you read the text (which you can here) you’ll find that while disbanding DEI offices seems pretty straightforward, later the bill says that “promoting racial, cultural or ethnic diversity or inclusiveness,” is still fine. Presumably in some other, less formal way that doesn’t involve a DEI office, although it doesn’t specify what’s allowed. It’s all very confusing. And maybe that’s the point.
“Usually when a bill is vague, you assume they want it to be vague,” says Ralph Richard Banks, a law professor at Stanford University, “People don’t want to go to jail, so when they don’t know what a law prohibits, they might refrain from doing lots of stuff that should still be legal.”
This has been the situation in Texas. Last year the state banned DEI offices at public institutions as well as any program that provides “special benefits” to people based on race, color or ethnicity. Texas’ law says that it doesn’t apply to student groups but according to the Texas Tribune, the University of Texas at Austin has closed a multicultural center that was used by several student groups, terminated a scholarship program for undocumented students, and declined to fund the school’s Black Student Alliance for fear of running afoul of the new law.
Alabama’s bill will likely have the same effect, says Banks. It prohibits state funds to be used for school organizations that condition participation on a person’s “race, sex, gender identity, ethnicity, national origin or sexual orientation” — but then carves out exceptions for athletic and “social organizations” that segregate based on sex. In other words, the legality of a university’s Black student alliance may now be in question but fraternities and sororities are just fine. Your Bama Rush TikTok videos are safe.
The list of “divisive concepts” that schools can’t teach is also confusing. Among other things, schools are not allowed to promote the idea that “slavery or racism are aligned with the founding principles of the United States.” But it does allow for historical events to be taught in a “historically accurate context.”
So let’s do that.
In January 1861, Alabama became the third state to secede from the United States of America. “Our new government is founded,” Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy’s Vice President, said in his speech a couple of months later, “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.” At the time, Alabama had one of the largest enslaved populations in America.
More than 100 years later, in his 1963 inauguration speech, Alabama’s governor George Wallace honored the Confederacy’s legacy and promised to enforce “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
Also that year, 14 Black students were denied admission to Tuskegee High School, an all-White public school in Macon County, despite the fact that the Supreme Court had struck down racial segregation in schools nine years previously. They sued. A federal judge issued a desegregation order. In response, Wallace issued an executive order postponing classes and mobilized the National Guard to prevent the students from attending. (President Kennedy overrode his order.)
When the Black students finally enrolled in Tuskegee High School, Wallace promised White parents that they could receive tuition assistance from the state if they wanted to enroll their kids in the newly created private school, Macon Academy. (A federal court later prohibited this.)
According to Auburn University’s Encyclopedia of Alabama, between 1965 and 1975, nearly 100 new all-White private schools opened in Alabama and 50,000 White students left the public school system. A 2021 study by professors at the University of Kansas and the University of Alabama found that Black children in Alabama’s “Black Belt” (the term for the area that was once home to many of the state’s plantations; many current Black residents are descended from former slaves and the area has some of the highest poverty rates in the state) attend schools that are more racially segregated now than they were in 1990.
The University of Alabama didn’t officially desegregate its sororities and fraternities until 2013. The share of Black students who are Greek members at the school remains miniscule. Explicit language requiring racial segregation in public schools was not removed from Alabama’s state constitution until 2022. The poverty rate for Black people in Alabama is twice that of Whites.
“You don’t have to have a formal DEI office to address educational inequality—or could you just change the name?—but it does take real, concerted work,” says Bryan Mann, an education and policy professor at the University of Kansas, and co-author of that 2021 study of Alabama’s Black Belt. “If you’re legislating whitewashed interpretations of history and proscribing how schools and educators can address the issue, you’re making it a lot harder for them to put people on equal playing fields.”
Today, 27% of Alabamans are Black but they account for only 11% of University of Alabama students.
By the numbers
5,977The number of Black workers from Tesla Inc.'s California factory who can sue the carmaker over claims it failed to protect them from racism.
New Voices
“At the current rate of progress it will take nearly half a century to close the gender pay gap in the UK.”
Tara Shrestha Carney
A PwC Economist on the widening UK gender pay gap
Bloomberg News supports amplifying the voices of women and other under-represented executives across our media platforms.
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