Why Woody White Wants to End DEI at UNC

On April 17, a UNC Board of Governors’ committee voted unanimously to repeal the diversity, equity, and inclusion policies the UNC System adopted in 2019. If the full board ratifies the decision later this month, the system and its 17 institutions will no longer have to employ diversity officers or work toward diversity goals. 

The committee’s decision came without discussion or public comment, but it wasn’t entirely unexpected. Texas and Florida recently eliminated their universities’ DEI programs, and North Carolina’s Republican legislative leaders signaled that they’d follow suit if the board didn’t act. 

This is the latest in a series of race-related controversies for the UNC System, including the 2019 removal of Silent Sam from the UNC-Chapel Hill campus and the 2021 tenure fight for Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spearheaded The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project. Last year, in a case partially originating at UNC-Chapel Hill, the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited using race in college admissions. 

To the degree most UNC leaders have commented on the proposed changes, they’ve stressed that the system is committed to equality and will still welcome students of all backgrounds. 

Board of Governors member Woody White hasn’t been so muted. On the day of the committee vote, White—a Wilmington lawyer and former state senator and county commissioner who was appointed last year—argued in a Carolina Journal op-ed that DEI “has severely damaged race relations.”

“On nearly every campus in the UNC System, complex DEI structures exist that have been used as litmus tests for hiring and admissions decisions,” White wrote. “This predictably has resulted in less diversity based on how people think.” 

(In 2021, White resigned from the UNC-Wilmington Board of Trustees to protest how the university “treats conservative voices,” including a professor who died by suicide after the university paid him more than $500,000 to retire amid controversy over his perceived racist and homophobic comments.)

White’s column closed with an anecdote about a recent visit to a Circle K in Jones County, where he encountered a Black man “in his early 40s, dressed in nice black slacks and a black turtleneck. As I turned to head for the checkout counter, he held out his fist and said, ‘Hey, brother; you’re looking sharp today!’” White recounted.

“Without missing a beat, I fist-bumped him back and said, ‘Thanks, my man; so do you! I hope you have a great day,’ to which he responded, pleasantly, ‘You too.’ We smiled at each other and departed.” 

White wrote that this interaction made him realize “that the sooner our higher-education system and other government institutions reject the toxic structures that seek to divide us, the sooner we will achieve a society where we are judged not by our ancestry, but by the content of our character—Dr. King’s unrealized dream.”

Liberals criticized White for naîveté. “Does he not know similar scenes unfolded even during the height of antebellum race-based slavery, when Black people were being lynched in the public square as thousands of white people cheered on?” wrote Davidson College professor Issac Bailey.

“If your standard for equality in society is that a Black man tells you that you look nice, then you sure sound like somebody whose respect for Black people hasn’t evolved much since the end of the Jim Crow era,” Democratic state Sen. Graig Meyer told The Assembly. 

In a wide-ranging interview last week, White conceded that the anecdote might not have been as “artful or convincing” as he intended. But he stood by his point: “Why would he do that if there’s a systemically racist society?”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

The Assembly: I wanted to give you a chance to respond to the critiques made by Bailey and Meyer. Do you think they were misrepresenting you? 

White: That was just a time, just like you’ve probably experienced any time in your life in the last day or week or month—somebody holding the door open for you or somebody being nice to you. 

That used to be just no real newsworthy event. But in this day and age, it struck me because, you know, if you believe what you see in social media, and you believe what you see in legacy media, it would be odd for a Black man to speak to a white man in his mid-50s that he doesn’t know and has no relationship with on a friendly basis. Why would he do that if there’s a systemically racist society? 

Maybe I read too much into that moment, but to me, it was just such a nice moment.

What I was trying to say is, that’s how most people are. Most Americans are like, that really doesn’t matter—skin color, background. Most people are nice and helpful and want to look after each other. 

I guess the way it related to me in the context of DEI is that I don’t see DEI as supportive of that. I see it as more combative, more adversarial, more balkanized. It’s discrimination for altruistic purposes. 

So that would be my only real response to Issac Bailey’s article, which I thought was not very well-written. Frankly, I didn’t think it in any way captured what I was trying to say, which is the essential message of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that we celebrate once a year and should celebrate more often, is this notion of a colorblind society. 

That [“I Have a Dream”] speech that he gave at the Lincoln Memorial, looking toward the Washington Monument is probably in the pantheon of human history in the top-five of all speeches ever given by any human being. That speech is central to what his message was all about. [Editor’s note: Many scholars—and King’s late widow—have pointed out that King supported affirmative action programs.]

I think my opinion piece speaks for a lot of people who started out initially in support of lowercase d-e-i. Who could possibly object to the positive meanings of those words when they’re looked at in a one-dimensional way? But when they’re put together and then used as what I think is a left, to some extent, woke political agenda at some institutions, it’s a real problem. 

The Assembly: You wrote that DEI has “severely damaged race relations.” Could you point me to an example where that happened in the UNC System? You also argued that “litmus tests” in hiring and admissions have led to less intellectual diversity. Could you tell me how increased racial or gender diversity leads to less intellectual diversity? 

White: The answer is it really depends on the specifics of what you’re asking about. If you’re asking about it in the context of implicit bias training, for example—that was forced and compelled in many campuses and institutions. Implicit bias training adopts the teachings of, starting with intersectionality with [Kimberlé] Crenshaw [the professor who coined the term in 1989] and moving to [How to Be an Antiracist author Ibram X.] Kendi and [Nikole Hannah-] Jones’ 1619, and adopts this whole paradigm of oppressor-oppressed, white privilege, and all of the monikers that divide races. 

So when I say that it has set race relations back, that’s what I’m talking about. Because your average white person, your average Black person, your average Hispanic, up until the last eight or 10 years, I don’t think saw skin color. I do not think and still don’t think there is systemic racism among a vast majority of Americans. [Editor’s note: Systemic racism is the idea that laws, policies, and practices advantage certain people, regardless of individual prejudices.]

You know, we lived in a time—and I am 54 years old—but the ’80s, ’90s, 2000s, where race, we were moving the ball down the field. Tremendous progress was being made—and not fast enough. I totally agree. We still constantly have to move the needle forward in making up for past transgressions. 

But my personal opinion is that DEI has set all that behind, because now a lot of folks feel like they’re being called racist for the last seven or eight years or nine years because of their white privilege. 

The Assembly: Do you believe the UNC System should be engaged in any diversity initiatives—if not race or gender, then class, perhaps? 

White: Every decision, not just in the university context, but in the world in general, should be based on merit, period, and equality of opportunity. And if you don’t subscribe to that, if you say, ‘No, I don’t think we should have a merit-based society, I don’t think we should have equality of opportunity only,’ then you are simply making decisions based on immutable characteristics that give you no indication of a person’s performance. 

The Assembly: But removing race from the equation, do you think that people who are born into poverty and go to poor-performing schools have the same equality of opportunity as people who are born into wealthy families? Is the playing field balanced? And when kids from those disparate backgrounds apply to UNC, should their life circumstances be taken into account? 

White: Well, it depends on what their SATs and GPAs are. Is the kid poor or is he just a minority? 

The Assembly: I’d say poverty probably plays a role. 

White: OK. So that’s what [Black conservative writer] Coleman Hughes writes. He’s the most recent iteration of this idea of, let’s attack the problem. The problem that needs to be solved—and it’s true that there are disproportionate numbers of minorities that go to failing schools and perform poorly in testing and grades—but at least in higher ed, we have approached it the wrong way, when, in fact, those problems exist K through 12. 

This idea that you’ve just mentioned in your question suggests that an applicant who has demonstrated less proficiency in a certain area should get into a class-A school, but another person who, regardless of his background, has a higher proficiency should not. It’s a very complicated issue, obviously. 

What I’m saying is DEI has not made it better. DEI has instead furthered racial divisions. Classrooms have become segregated—not fully, but to some extent, depending on what groups you go to, and what clubs you join, and what student centers you go to. 

I mean, young people can choose to go to whatever clubs they want, or whatever student centers they want. I’m not suggesting they not be allowed that choice. But that is a real outcome, and I think DEI has exacerbated that outcome. 

The Assembly: You mentioned that most people supported what you called “lowercase d-e-i.” I’m wondering if there was a time when you thought diversity policies were beneficial, or if you supported the concept but not the way it was carried out, or if you thought it was a bad idea with a noble goal. 

White: I would probably say it’s the middle option. I’ll just tell you, speaking for myself, sitting in these meetings for community college, at [UNC-Wilmington], as a county commissioner, I remember this is the end of Barack Obama’s first term when I remember seeing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” on the agenda. And I remember thinking, “Yeah, that sounds pretty good. I totally support diversity, and I’m completely in line with the concept of equity. I love inclusion—let’s include everybody.” 

What we didn’t know—and maybe it came later, and maybe it was accelerated after the [Black Lives Matter] movement—it became an official Marxist agenda. All of a sudden, everyone had to have a DEI enforcement officer. All of a sudden, everyone had to have implicit bias training. You couldn’t get hired unless you signed a DEI statement. All of a sudden, the d-e-i—small, little, lowercase—became capital D, capital E, capital I. 

It reminded me of the Seinfeld episode where you don’t want to wear the ribbon. “You don’t support DEI? Well, then, you’re a racist.” [Editor’s note: In the 1995 episode “The Sponge,” Kramer was assaulted after refusing to wear a ribbon during an AIDS walk.] 

I don’t know what the tipping point was, but that’s how I recall it evolving. 

Let me tell you a little bit about my background. I’ve been practicing law for 30 years, and for 21 of those years, I was on the court-appointed list. I represented thousands of people who were indigent, poor, and disproportionately minority. 

I’ve stood there and argued the Fourth Amendment being applied to African Americans. I have filed and won motions of forfeiture for money that DEA agents have taken from Black families. I’ve won cases and had evidence suppressed because of constitutional violations that police have committed. I’m the only lawyer east of I-95 that I can find that has taken a federal civil rights action to a jury and won, which I did in 2008 here in Wilmington, for a Black defendant against two police officers. 

I have a long and very proud history of doing everything I can to help people see their day in court and have access to the judicial system. My opposition to DEI is not inconsistent with that. It’s based on this other political agenda that I think DEI has become. 

The Assembly: In a 2020 op-ed in the Wilmington StarNews, you wrote about traveling to Baltimore around 1989 to visit with NAACP leaders. You said you wanted to try to “understand inequality and work to make things better.” What did you take away from that experience? 

White: I had been involved in the ’88 campaign. I was a young person involved in and watched a presidential election, first time I’d ever voted, and I was just very cued into everything that was happening. And I couldn’t figure out why the Democrats got 95 percent of African American votes. I couldn’t understand the disconnect there. 

I was really just trying to understand, what are the disparities, and what can we do about them? So I called up and asked them if I could meet. I said I was a college student, I was going to be in Washington, D.C. And they said, “Of course.” 

I drove up there, went in the headquarters, and spent maybe two or three hours with them. I’m sure my questions at the time were odd. I just wanted to understand more about future policies relative to closing achievement gaps and disparities in income and achievement. 

I mentioned that not to self-aggrandize, but just to say that this has always been an important issue to me. I used that column to talk about how Black lives to me have always been important, and I think they’ve always been important to most Americans that I know, to most Americans that live today. 

But I just bristle at the idea that you have to have proportional representation, that you have to have—that white people cannot represent Black people and vice versa. 

And, you know, in the recent [Carolina Journal] column, I used the word “pernicious.” Because I feel like these systems have become pernicious. What did I mean by that? I think I think it sends an awful message to young minorities, Blacks, Hispanics, that unless you get help from a DEI officer, or unless the government gives you a head start at admissions or a job or whatever it might be, you cannot accomplish it yourself. 

I think that’s a pernicious message. I think that’s a terrible message. 

The morning after this conversation, White texted: “Though guised as a ‘student success’ support system, the reality is that on some campuses, the DEI regime has become the enforcement mechanism with which to push radical ideology. Under the auspice of ‘righting past wrongs,’ it has been weaponized to allow discrimination, and it pits races and genders against each other.” 

White declined to specify on which campuses he believes DEI has been used to push a radical ideology.