More Than Skin Color
Why DEI Fails and Why Biblical Revelation Is The Remedy
America finds herself at a crossroads, and the path forward requires us to reckon with a fundamental question that our culture has been avoiding for decades: What is man? The answer to this question determines everything, from our laws to our social policies to the very fabric of our national identity. For too long, we have outsourced this inquiry to ideological frameworks that deny the transcendent origin of human dignity, and the fruits of this decision have been bitter indeed.
The modern experiment in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has revealed itself as a failed project, one that has managed to inflame racial tensions rather than heal them. What began as a well-intentioned effort to address historical wrongs has metastasized into a bureaucratic apparatus that judges individuals by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. The irony is staggering: in attempting to remedy racism, we have institutionalized a new form of it. It is time to cast that effort into the trash heap of history.
The Harvard Scandal: A Case Study in Reverse Discrimination
Consider the Harvard admissions scandal that captured national attention and eventually found its way to the Supreme Court. For years, Harvard University employed admissions practices that systematically discriminated against Asian-American applicants, holding them to higher standards than their peers of other racial backgrounds. The university assigned subjective “personal ratings” that consistently marked Asian-American students lower in categories like “likability” and “leadership,” despite their stellar academic achievements and extracurricular accomplishments.
This was affirmative action taken to its logical conclusion: the reduction of human beings to their racial category, followed by the application of different standards based on group membership. The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard rightly struck down these practices as unconstitutional violations of the Equal Protection Clause. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” a principle that seems obvious to anyone operating from a framework of natural law and human dignity.
The Harvard case exposes the fundamental flaw in DEI ideology: it replaces individual dignity with group identity, and in doing so, it commits the very sin it claims to oppose. When we sort people into categories and assign them advantages or disadvantages based on their membership in those categories, we have abandoned the principle that every human being possesses inherent worth that transcends accidents of birth.
The Bankruptcy of Secular Solutions
Why do secular approaches to racism consistently fail? The answer lies in their anthropology, their understanding of what a human being actually is. Modern progressivism operates from a materialist framework that reduces human beings to their biological characteristics, their economic circumstances, or their position within power structures. This reductionism cannot ground human dignity in anything permanent or transcendent, which means it cannot ultimately protect anyone from the abuse of power.
If human beings are merely products of evolutionary forces or social construction, then there exists no objective standard by which we can declare racism wrong. We can only appeal to shifting cultural preferences or raw political power. This is why DEI initiatives so often devolve into exercises in power redistribution rather than genuine reconciliation. Without an anchor in objective truth, the pursuit of “equity” becomes an endless game of tribal competition.
The Christian tradition offers something radically different: a vision of human beings as creatures made in the imago Dei, the image of God Himself. This doctrine, articulated in the first chapter of Genesis, declares that every human person possesses an inherent dignity that comes from our Creator and cannot be taken away by any earthly authority. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that this image grounds our capacity for reason, freedom, and relationship with God, and it is the foundation upon which all genuine human rights rest.
When we understand that every person bears the divine image, racism becomes impossible to justify. We cannot hate or discriminate against someone who carries within them the very likeness of God. This is the teaching that transformed the ancient world, overturning the pagan hierarchies that divided humanity into Greeks and barbarians, masters and slaves. St. Paul’s declaration in Galatians 3:28 that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” represents a revolution in human consciousness that no secular ideology has ever matched.
The Founders’ Vision: A Religious and Virtuous Nation
The Founding Fathers of the American Republic understood something that our contemporary elites have forgotten: a free society requires a virtuous people, and virtue requires the cultivation of religious faith. John Adams famously wrote that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” George Washington, in his Farewell Address, warned that “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
These men were steeped in the natural law tradition that stretches back through the English common law to the medieval scholastics and ultimately to the ancient philosophers. They recognized that human beings possess certain inalienable rights, as the Declaration of Independence proclaims, precisely because those rights are endowed by our Creator. The architecture of American liberty rests upon a foundation of objective moral truth, and when that foundation crumbles, the entire structure becomes unstable.
The solution to racism, therefore, requires us to recover this vision of a nation grounded in natural law and divine revelation. We must reject the false anthropology of materialism and reclaim the biblical understanding of human dignity. This means teaching our children that they are made in God’s image and that every person they encounter bears that same sacred imprint. It means reforming our institutions so that they judge individuals by their character and accomplishments rather than their membership in racial categories. It means cultivating the virtues of justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude that enable genuine community across lines of difference.
A Call to Human Flourishing
The path forward is clear, even if it is difficult. We must dismantle the DEI bureaucracies that have infected our corporations, universities, and government agencies. We must replace racial quotas and preferences with genuine meritocracy, understood within a framework of natural law that recognizes each person’s inherent dignity. We must evangelize our culture with the truth about the human person, drawing from the deep wells of Scripture and the Catholic intellectual tradition that has preserved and developed this wisdom over two millennia.
This is the architecture of truth that can actually solve racism: the recognition that we are all children of one Father, made in His image and called to love one another as He has loved us. Every human being, regardless of their racial or ethnic background, possesses a dignity that demands respect and protection. When we build our laws and institutions upon this foundation, we create the conditions for genuine human flourishing, where individuals are free to develop their God-given talents and contribute to the common good.
The alternative is the continued fragmentation of our society into warring tribes, each demanding its share of the spoils in an endless zero-sum game. DEI has already demonstrated its inability to bring peace or reconciliation, and doubling down on its failed premises will only accelerate our national decline.
Let us choose instead the way of truth, the way of biblical anthropology and natural law, the way that our Founders understood and that the Church has taught for centuries. In this way alone lies the hope for genuine healing and the restoration of the unity that our nation so desperately needs. As I have written previously about reclaiming the cultural conversation, Christians must engage the public square with confidence, bringing the transformative power of the Gospel to bear on the most pressing issues of our time.
The hour is late, and the need is urgent. May we have the courage to speak the truth in love and to build a civilization worthy of the human dignity that God has bestowed upon us all.