Ben Crump speaks out after Trump administration eliminates DEI programs
NEW YORK (WABC) -- Attorney Ben Crump has been a cornerstone in the fight for civil rights.
He has represented countless victims of police brutality and civil rights offenses, from George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, as their families left behind seek justice and financial restitution.
Crump sat down with Eyewitness News as he states his case on the termination of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the federal government that's sparked quite a divide on the issue.
"You could not have made me believe five years ago that we would be saying we're going to debate whether diversity is a good thing or not. It's shocking," Crump said.
Crump is a fierce advocate for justice from the courtroom to the court of public opinion. He's outraged, following President Trump's blitz of executive orders eliminating DEI programs across the U.S. government.
"We will forge a society that's colorblind and merit based," Trump said at his inauguration.
"But yet you have people who were born into privilege who continue to benefit from that privilege," Crump said.
Trump's order on his first day in office uprooted DEI and its programs, planted in the 1960s legislative movement requiring companies to comply with anti-discrimination laws.
"What potential impacts could this have on several communities?" Crump said. "This is going to have a great impact on communities of color, but it's also going to have an impact on all the other people who were greater beneficiaries because of diversity, equity, inclusion programs like white women, like Hispanic men and women, like Asian men and women. When you look at who benefited the most from the initiatives, Black people were last on the list."
Experts say DEI was created because marginalized communities have not always had equal opportunities.
"So, I think it's very tricky because there is historic unfairness. I don't think current corporations are a genuine meritocracy. But correcting for those issues, trying to make work more fair is not easy," said Alison Taylor, NYU professor.
Taylor's research focuses on corporate responsibility and business ethics. She weighed in as critics argue some education, government, and business programs are discriminatory and threaten meritocracy.
"I think what critics have managed to do is suggest that DEI is somehow a threat to meritocracy, to suggest that if you promote underrepresented groups or women, that is somehow coming at the expense of performance, at the expense of financial success, at the expense of professionalism, at the expense of health and safety," Taylor said.
"They attacked affirmative action, then they attacked diverse equity inclusion. They attack anything that seems to give people who have historically been marginalized an equal playing field. And when you think about it, people say, I'm always careful to say, 'No, no, let's talk about the words diversity, equity and inclusion,'" Crump said.
Meanwhile, schools and universities across the country are navigating the Trump administration's sharp deadline to ditch DEI initiatives or risk losing funding from the federal government. While corporations that endorsed the three-letter acronym in 2020 change their tune.
"It now seems, given this stampede away from DEI policies and commitments that what companies were doing all along was responding to the legal environment, the political environment, and then, frankly, who's yelling at them on social media," Taylor said.
The NAACP and civil rights leaders are now calling on Black consumers to direct buying power away from companies that have cut or scaled back DEI commitments like Walmart, Target, Meta and Starbucks.
"All the progress that we made is under attack. So what we need to know is that this struggle is that being waged by the enemies of equality won't end if we don't stand up as Americans who believe in the constitution," Crump said. "We absolutely have to continue to litigate, challenge the enemies of equality to say read the constitution. When they try to tell us this attack is on DEI. It's an attack on Black history, ban on literature, all these things are legal, we must say, but that doesn't make it right."
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