The Trump administration’s “war on woke” seems to have claimed its biggest victim in DEI. Not so long ago, diversity, equity and inclusion was the favorite term of Fortune 500 CEOs and the political elite. More recently, it has been blamed for everything from the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore and the deadly Los Angeles wildfires to the crash between a regional jet and a helicopter in Washington DC.

“DEI means people DIE,” Elon Musk wrote last year.

Alongside culture-war attacks, DEI also became a legal liability after the US supreme court overturned affirmative action in higher education in 2023.

Some of the most powerful companies that once touted their DEI policies have backed away from them. Webpages celebrating diversity have been taken down, teams dedicated to promoting diversity have dissipated and now there is seemingly no one left to defend DEI in its final days.

That’s where Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow, two law professors at New York University, are stepping in. Both are longtime experts in anti-discrimination law and have spent years consulting leaders on how to make their workplaces more inclusive.

In their new book, How Equality Wins: A New Vision for an Inclusive America, Yoshino and Glasgow argue that the project of equality is far from over – but it’s in desperate need of a survival plan.

Yoshino and Glasgow spoke to the Guardian recently about the new book and their hope that the essence of DEI can live past the political moment that killed it.

“DEI itself, as an acronym, is dead,” Yoshino said. “But the underlying value of equality isn’t. Not by a long shot.”

The authors outline several strategies for equality’s survival. One of the most important is understanding what advocates are actually fighting for and what they’re fighting against.

Opponents say that DEI leads to incompetence. People are hired or given opportunities not because they are qualified, they say, but because of their race or gender.

But the authors posit that reasoning ignores just how biased the hiring process can be. In 1970, before symphony orchestras used screens to hide a musician’s identity during auditions, only 5% of orchestra members were women. By 2016, that number jumped to 35%. That increase didn’t come from the orchestras giving explicit preferences to women, but from the screens, which helped them remove bias from the process. Yoshino and Glasgow call this lifting versus levelling.

“A lot of Americans have been kind of deceived into believing that what DEI stands for is a version of race-based affirmative actions,” Yoshino said. “But that is only a part of DEI, and there are many forms of diversity, equity and inclusion that are completely consistent with the levelling approach, which removes bias from the system, as opposed to the lifting approach, which creates that targeted ramp up to a playing field.”

Yoshino likes to point to a quote from US supreme court chief justice John Roberts, from his written opinion that overturned affirmative action. Roberts wrote: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

“I would actually happily sign on to that vision of America,” Yoshino said. “It’s just that it seems like his notion of symmetry is itself quite asymmetrical, that it gets trotted out as the American value when it benefits the dominant group, and not when it benefits the non-dominant group.”

But despite the movement’s good intentions, Yoshino and Glasgow also encourage tough conversations about where DEI got things wrong, from fostering a culture of shame around disagreement to distracting debates on terminology.

The DEI movement paradoxically ended up becoming exclusive, narrowly focusing on race and gender when allyship could be found across different groups.

Opponents of DEI have been quite successful in “framing DEI as a set of unfair preferences that advantage some groups over other groups”, Glasgow said. “Even if you think that narrative is wrong, it could be very helpful to the cultural debate and the longevity of [equality] to show that actually, we are serious about benefiting everyone with this.”

One strategy, “embrace universality”, points out that though the legal environment after the supreme court’s affirmative action case makes it harder to have targeted programs based on race and gender, programs focused on equality can still exist.

Yoshino and Glasgow have for years offered a course to law students that emphasizes things not typically found in textbooks, like tips on negotiations and written communication. Though they open it to “all students with an interest in diversity and inclusion”, the vast majority come from marginalized backgrounds.

This embodies a universality strategy they call “a shift from cohort to content”. Instead of limiting the course to a specific cohort, such as students from a particular race or gender, they focus on content restrictions, which are legally permissible. “This strategy has already proven to be an amulet against legal liability,” the authors wrote.

Another strategy, “shift from cohort to character”, comes from a loophole the supreme court left universities in its affirmative action decision. The court said that universities could still consider “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise”, particularly in a student’s essay.

Yoshino and Glasgow point out this exemption allows organizations to get creative. They could, for example, openly ask candidates in interviews about how race has affected their life “be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise” – exactly as the supreme court allows it.

These strategies and loopholes are more important than ever. DEI’s death is not just coming through the cultural wars, but also from litigation that is attacking the private sector and state and local diversity programs.

Earlier this month, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which falls under Trump’s executive branch, announced it was investigating Nike over discrimination against white employers. In January, Trump’s justice department sued Minnesota over the state’s affirmative action program for its agencies.

Glasgow said that “even in the worst-case legal [environment], there are still lots of concrete steps that organizations can take to promote fairness in ways that do not involve the kind of preferences or affirmative action that are subject to litigation”.

Yoshino and Glasgow remain hopeful that DEI can still live on – maybe not by name, but by purpose – if people see it as something larger and more important than the cultural wars have framed it to be.

“We worry that a lot of people associate DEI with just a set of technocratic HR practices, like a bias training when you get onboarded at your new job or having a celebration of a heritage month at your university,” Yoshino said, but DEI ultimately has its origins in the civil rights movement. “It’s all gone by different names throughout time, but it’s part of efforts to ensure … that the promise of civil rights is made real in people’s everyday lives and the opportunities they get.”

Beyond the social case for equality, there’s also a resounding business case for inclusion in the workplace as the US gets more diverse. Research has shown the US will be a majority-minority country by 2040, a majority of college-educated workers are now women and 25% of gen Z identify as LGBTQ+, Glasgow noted.

“It’s really hard to imagine that your workplace, your organization or your community could achieve any of its mission if it wasn’t able to teach its people to work across differences,” he said. “That means the skills of diversity and inclusion are here to stay.”