MSNBC Host Tears Apart Right-Wing DEI Obsession With Brutal Reality Check

MSNBC host Ali Velshi scorched conservatives on Saturday over their fixation on diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives after President Donald Trump’s claim that such efforts were to blame for the deadly midair collision in Washington, D.C., this past week.

His comments arrived after Melissa Murray, an MSNBC legal analyst and law professor at New York University, argued that the attacks on DEI are “about rolling back the gains of the Civil Rights Movement” and “reestablishing, reentrenching a form of racial and gender hierarchy.”

Velshi chimed in and noted that there were “far more plane crashes” prior to the beginnings of DEI.

“Before we had diversity in the federal workforce, before there were any pilots other than the Tuskegee Airmen — there were no commercial, there were virtually no commercial Black pilots, there were no women,” Velshi said.

“Planes crashed a lot more and that has a lot more to do with technology and where we are and safety. We didn’t blame white people for the crashing of planes, nor should we have. We learned how to investigate plane crashes carefully and properly and come up with recommendations,” he continued.

Velshi added that conservatives have now made plane crashes about “something else” by pointing toward standards and diversity because there’s a “more equitable federal workforce.”

Eddie Glaude Jr., an African American studies professor at Princeton University, said people need to “understand that shift for what it is” while speaking with Velshi and Murray.

“It is a decidedly racist and sexist and masculinist agenda,” argued Glaude, who referred to elements of white nationalism showing up in the president’s policies.

“We’re relitigating the mid-20th century, we’re relitigating the Black freedom struggle, we’re relitigating the women’s movement, we’re relitigating the gay liberation movement, we need to understand what’s motivating it,” he added.

He later continued, “Every time the country tires of the quest for racial justice, it falls into this illusion, this fantasy of trying to get rid of us, of trying to move us to the margins, of trying to banish difference. That’s the only way a notion of American identity can cohere is that … whiteness and maleness must be its anchor, so we’re right back to where we have always been.”

Many on the right have sought to blame several other issues on DEI over the past year.