In a rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday, former First Lady Michelle Obama took aim at the notion of the “DEI hire,” a term that Republicans and former President Donald Trump have wielded to undermine Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy for president.
After offering a strong endorsement of Harris—and enumerating her qualifications for the role—Obama addressed those types of attacks, which are often used to discredit leaders of color. “We know folks are going to do everything they can to distort her truth,” she said of Harris. “My husband and I sadly know a little something about this.”
She was drawing a parallel to the racist attacks that Trump had lobbed at the Obamas over the years, including the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. and therefore not eligible to be president. “For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us,” she said. “See, his limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working, highly educated, successful people who happen to be Black.”
What Obama described is the kind of bias that many people of color experience beyond the realm of politics, when they are reduced to their racial identity, or their professional qualifications are questioned because of their background. It’s the same idea that animates claims from conservative politicians and business leaders that DEI practices are to blame for the failure of everything from Boeing’s planes to Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse.
Earlier in the night, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker made a more explicit reference to how the term “diversity hire” can be weaponized in the workplace. “Americans don’t want their kids to be taught in history class that slavery was a jobs program,” he said in his address to the convention. “And if Americans are Black or brown, they want to get promoted at work without being derided as a DEI hire for the sin of being successful while not white.”
In her speech, Obama also lambasted the controversial comments Trump has made on the campaign trail about “Black jobs,” when he claimed that undocumented immigrants were taking jobs away from Black workers. It was positioned as an anti-immigration argument, but Trump’s comments also insinuated that Black workers could only aspire to certain jobs.
In a moment that drew huge applause from the audience, Obama pointed out that the very job Donald Trump was gunning for—the office of the president—was, in fact, the sort of job that a Black person could hold. “Who’s going to tell him,” she said, “that the job he is currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?”