I spent my childhood on 74th Street and South Shore Drive, watching how Chicago negotiates the boundaries of who belongs. Long before I analyzed race and public policy for a living, I was a Hyde Park Academy graduate in the South Side legislative district Barack Obama once represented. I learned early that “merit” is not neutral when the people in power define the measure, set the threshold and decide whose qualifications are presumed credible.
That lesson has felt familiar all summer.
In June, Chicago Public Schools CEO and Supt. Macquline King testified before a Republican-led House committee in Washington, D.C., after being subpoenaed alongside superintendents from San Francisco and Virginia. At a hearing titled “Breaking Trust,” lawmakers portrayed CPS policies involving transgender students and its Black Student Success initiative as attacks on parental rights and violations of civil rights law.
That spectacle was not an isolated incident. It was part of a broader federal campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion that has only accelerated. That same month, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul joined a coalition of attorneys general challenging the Trump administration’s DEI restrictions on federal contractors.
Trump’s Executive Order 14398 directs federal agencies to add contract terms restricting DEI-related practices and places existing contractors at risk of losing federal work if they will not accept them. The July 24 deadline for contractors to accept new terms has passed; litigation over the requirement is pending.
This is not a minor policy adjustment. It puts research universities, public agencies and other federal contractors under pressure to audit programs designed to broaden access and participation, often while their work depends on federal research, defense or transportation funding.
The rhetoric driving this campaign relies on a seductive story: Diversity initiatives are inherently discriminatory, trading competence for quotas and eroding a supposedly pure, objective standard of “merit.”
Chicagoans should recognize that script. We have heard versions of it in our own public institutions for decades.
Consider the Chicago Fire Department’s 1995 entrance exam, litigated all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The city labeled applicants who scored 89 or above “well qualified” and hired almost exclusively from that group for six years, even though the passing score was 65, and the city’s own expert warned the 89-point cutoff was arbitrary. Roughly 6,000 Black applicants who had passed were never called. The city did not dispute the cutoff disproportionately excluded Black candidates. It defended the practice as neutral and job-related.
That is the crucial distinction. Standards are not illegitimate simply because they produce unequal outcomes. But neither are standards automatically legitimate because they are described as neutral. Who designed the test? Why was a passing score of 65 deemed inadequate? What evidence justified a threshold of 89?
Those questions are not an assault on merit. They are what serious institutions ask when merit is invoked to preserve an exclusionary status quo.
When national leaders now suggest that opening doors to qualified women and people of color makes an institution less capable or less safe, they are not inventing a new philosophy. They are reading from an old Chicago playbook.
Fictitious problem
Blaming diversity is also a political dodge. It directs public anger toward an imagined cause while actual problems remain unfunded and unresolved. After an American Airlines jet and a U.S. Army helicopter collided over the Potomac River last year, President Donald Trump blamed DEI before investigators had completed their work. But the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation identified systemic failures in airspace design, safety oversight and risk management — not diversity initiatives — as central to the catastrophe.
In Chicago, the same misdirection is visible in institutions people depend on every day. The Federal Aviation Administration has capped O’Hare at 2,708 daily operations, more than 300 fewer flights than airlines had scheduled, because of operational constraints.
Chicago Public Schools, meanwhile, confronts a roughly $732 million budget gap, and King has warned that without viable financing, the district could struggle to make payroll in September. Those are not diversity problems. They are governance, staffing, infrastructure and public investment problems.
Defending student initiatives or baseline workplace equity does not undermine institutions. What undermines them is a political reflex that fights imaginary diversity demons rather than funding the staff, infrastructure and classrooms required to keep the public safe and educated.
When leaders weaponize “merit” to dismantle equity tools, they create deeper public cynicism, especially among Black and Latino Chicagoans who have ample historical reason to question institutions charged with managing their risk.
When politicians turn DEI into a catch-all culprit for complex failures, Chicagoans should look past the spectacle and ask: What are they hoping we will not notice while we argue about the wrong thing?
Donathan L. Brown, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Northeastern University, a former U.S. Fulbright professor, and the author of five books on civil rights and voting rights. A native of the South Side, he graduated from Hyde Park Academy.