Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott’s Office Calls Diversity Hiring ‘Illegal’
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is waging a war on diversity in his state.
In a Feb. 6 memo obtained by The Texas Tribune, Abbott's chief of staff Gardner Pate claimed initiatives to hire diverse job candidates violate federal and state employment laws, appearing to insinuate that white workers are in fact those being discriminated against.
“The innocuous sounding notion of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) has been manipulated to push policies that expressly favor some demographic groups to the detriment of others,” Pate wrote.
He continued, “Rebranding this employment discrimination as ‘DEI’ doesn’t make the practice any less illegal. Further, when a state agency spends taxpayer dollars to fund offices, departments, or employee positions dedicated to promoting forbidden DEI initiatives, such actions are also inconsistent with the law.”
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Andrew Eckhous, an Austin-based lawyer for Kaplan Law Firm, which specializes in employment and civil rights litigation, accused Abbott’s framing of the issue as an attempt to block diversity in hiring practices in a statement to The Texas Tribune, “Anti-discrimination laws protect all Americans by ensuring that employers do not make hiring decisions based on race, religion, or gender, while DEI initiatives work in tandem with those laws to encourage companies to solicit applications from a wide range of applicants, which is legal and beneficial. The only piece of news in this letter is that Governor Abbott is trying to stop diversity initiatives for the apparent benefit of some unnamed demographic that he refuses to disclose.”
There does not appear to be any evidence that particular “demographics” are being discriminated against because of diversity. A 2020 feature in The Dallas Morning News reported that regardless of similar education, Black and Hispanics get fewer good jobs than whites. According to “The Unequal Race for Good Jobs,” a study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, workers of color are paid about $10,000 less annually than whites with a bachelor’s degree or higher.
