What The Hell America!

IT WAS SEVEN YEARS AGO, during the first Trump administration, that Frances McDormand won an Oscar for Best Actress. She asked every woman nominated for any award that night to stand, pointedly noted that “we all have stories to tell and projects we need financed,” and urged Hollywood’s powerbrokers to follow up.

“I have two words to leave with you tonight, ladies and gentlemen: inclusion rider,” she said. Then she bent down, picked up her statuette, and walked off the stage.

As searches for the phrase surged online, McDormand explained what she meant backstage in an Oscar-night elaboration. She had recently learned, she said, that in negotiating a contract with a studio, an actor could “ask for, and/or demand, at least 50 percent diversity in not only the casting, but also the crew.”

That was an oversimplification, but the word was out. “Inclusion rider” went viral and, at least in Hollywood, triggered a reckoning on the underrepresentation of women and minority groups in the film industry. The #MeToo movement had erupted a few months earlier and journalists were exposing new stories of sexual harassment and assault every week. Harvey Weinstein was arrested a couple of months after McDormand’s speech. Diversity, equity, and inclusion were seen as ideals to live by, welcome and overdue.

A few short years later, instead of DEI, we’ve got DIE: discrimination, inequity, and exclusion. MAGA uses “DEI hire” as a slur. For them and their leader, Donald Trump, DEI is a reason for failures, an excuse for firings, a rationale for making sure white men get what they think they are owed. Because it’s their world and the rest of us just live here.

Darren Beattie, named by this month by Trump to run public diplomacy at the State Department after years of racist and sexist commentary and getting fired by the Trump White House in 2018 for appearing with white supremacists, put it this way on X a month before Election Day 2024: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”

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BACK IN 2018, I was one of the many women thrilled by McDormand’s speech. I wrote about my life as a “child feminist” and struggle to get into journalism when the field had few women and even fewer reporting on politics. At the same time, I worried about my two white sons, trying to make it in tough, traditionally male arenas that were finally aiming for more diversity. “Was ‘reverse discrimination’ about to become personal for me?” I wondered.

I am now, as I was then, skeptical of that concept and supportive of affirmative action—casting a wide net to help redress the discrimination, inequity, and exclusion of the past. It is real, unlike the aggrieved performance art of privileged people like Trump. It has for centuries limited the potential of women, LGBTQ people, disabled people, and people of all colors to be all they can be, as the Army would say, and contribute all they can to America.

It surprised me to learn this month that in September 2020, McDormand said she regretted tacking “inclusion rider” onto the end of what the Hollywood Reporter called her “inadvertently industry-shaping” speech. “I wish I’d never fucking said it now. . . . I was not educated enough, I didn’t have enough information about it,” she told the publication. The University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has done “very, very important” work on inclusion in the workplace, McDormand said. But she added that “it is complicated, and it has to be almost customized for every single event.”

The Annenberg inclusion rider template of the time was indeed complicated, and some nuances (like the words “whenever possible” repeated twice in the document and no mention of any particular percentage, despite McDormand’s 50 percent reference) were lost on Oscar night. A more recent version of the rider encourages companies to set “flexible goals” and diversify their workforces over time.

What’s inarguable is that McDormand sparked new awareness—both about the talent pools excluded from the industry and, in practical terms, what diversity brings to the table in terms of perspective, audience, and profits. As UCLA wrote last year in a headline announcing the school’s Hollywood Diversity Report on 2023 films (which included Barbie): “Diversity in demand: People of color, women—in audience and on the big screen—hold keys to industry survival.”

Even so, the fight against an “epidemic of invisibility” for women, particularly those who aren’t white, has yet to be won. A major Annenberg report on the 1,700 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2023 shows some progress for some groups in some categories, but parity and proportionality are still elusive.

IN THE FIVE WEEKS since Trump issued a pair of edicts against DEI in federal programs and contracts, the ripple effects have been felt across the country. Government agencies, universities, and many private-sector companies have been scrambling to end projects, scrap language, and fire or reassign people associated with DEI. In one of several lawsuits prompted by the two Trump orders, a federal judge in Maryland blocked them nationwide last Friday. The administration has made clear, the judge wrote, that “the government wishes to punish and, apparently, attempt to extinguish” viewpoints and speech supportive of DEI, and that is likely unconstitutional.

At their moral core, Trump’s DEI bans are a denial of the systemic racism and other discrimination that America in its better-angel periods has tried to remedy. While they present obstacles, whatever the legal outcome, they won’t succeed.

Diversity is inevitable in today’s America, and a proven resource as well. It’s a value rooted in both pluralism and profit, woven into our entertainment, food, and business cultures. Official DEI programs and employees may disappear, but hiring practices and lived experience, from Costco to the Super Bowl halftime show, will not.

We are certain to hear about this at the Oscars. The only questions are how many times, and whether anyone will surpass the speech 87-year-old Jane Fonda gave last week in accepting the Life Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild.

The guild, Fonda said, is different from other unions: “We don’t manufacture anything tangible. What we create is empathy. Our job is to understand another human being so profoundly that we can touch their souls.” That was her bridge to the current moment. “Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke,” she said, and added a money quote that MAGA opponents should repeat on a loop right through 2028: “Woke just means you give a damn about other people.”

Fonda also summoned film history to impress upon Americans that we are living in our own “documentary moment,” a moment that someday could inspire a documentary about heroes who rose to meet a challenge. “This is a good time for a little Norma Rae or Karen Silkwood or Tom Joad,” she said.

The word “Trump” never came from her lips, and I don’t expect to hear it from winners at the Academy Awards. But the Oscars pageant will be a celebratory (and no doubt over-long) reminder that our country contains multitudes. That’s our strength and our brand, and eventually Trump and his twisted fraternity will realize that trying to stamp it out is futile.