Here’s Why Obama Created DEI
12th February 2025
Affirmative action was created during the civil rights era, 1964 and ’65, and then, now, it has been with us almost 60 years. But remember what it was originally designed for—to address the historic racism and oppression of black Americans through slavery and Jim Crow, de facto segregation in some of the Northern states, but de jure segregation in the South.
And it said that because of that African Americans had not been given equality of opportunity. Statute never said anything about quotas or equality result. That’s something that came in later. But the point I’m making, affirmative action was envisioned for this historic minority that made about 12% of the population.
It was challenged in the courts for years. And it was often challenged by not just so-called whites but Asians as well because their SAT scores—to take the example of college admissions—or their GPAs were often 200 or 300 points, in the case of the SAT, and GPA, 4 versus 3.2, in the case of GPAs.
By that I mean, African Americans were being admitted with less impressive statistics than whites, but especially, Asians. And then something happened to this paradigm. When the Obama administration came in, they saw that that constituency was not big enough for the type of woke agenda that they were envisioning.