Stephen A. Smith sat down with President Donald Trump at the White House in mid-October and made a point that deserves more attention than the usual partisan scorekeeping.
The ESPN commentator told Trump that the aggressive rollback of DEI programs has produced an unintended side effect: Private corporations are growing hesitant to support historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Donors fear that a gift once viewed as ordinary philanthropy will now be read as a DEI initiative, inviting government scrutiny or accusations of engaging in racial preferences. Smith, an HBCU graduate, said the president acknowledged he had not fully considered that chilling effect and said he would look into it.
The conversation was useful precisely because it separated opposition to race-based mandates from hostility toward Black institutions and people.
That distinction is essential.
Opposition to DEI programs that impose racial quotas, “check-the-box” hiring or the elevation of identity over competence is not anti-Black. It is pro-equality and pro-merit. Preferential treatment that sorts Americans by race, ethnicity or sex violates the principle of equal treatment and, in some circumstances, runs afoul of federal anti-discrimination law. It substitutes political fashion for individual achievement.
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Companies and universities that adopted these systems after 2020 often did so under intense social and reputational pressure, not because rigorous analysis showed they improved performance or expanded genuine opportunity. Corporate shareholder proposals seeking disclosure of the actual return on DEI spending — including net present value, litigation risk and opportunity costs — have been necessary correctives. They do not attack Black Americans. They challenge a management ideology that treats race as a proxy for qualification.
The danger arises when the correction overshoots.
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When federal agencies, corporations and advocacy groups begin treating almost any race-conscious activity as suspect or potentially illegal, rational actors respond by avoiding the perceived risk altogether.
Federal agencies have terminated or paused some research awards and outreach efforts involving HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions after determining that they conflicted with administration priorities or anti-DEI directives. Private foundations and corporate philanthropy have followed a similar pattern of retreat.
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The practical result risks becoming a de facto hands-off policy toward Black institutions, even when the stated motive is colorblindness or risk avoidance.
That outcome serves no one who believes in free markets and equal opportunity.
Black Americans, like every other group, benefit when talent, capital and institutions can connect without artificial barriers or artificial preferences. HBCUs have long played an outsized role in educating Black professionals and creating pathways into engineering, medicine, education, business and other fields.
Voluntary corporate support for those institutions — for skills training, small-business capital or rigorous recruiting — is not the same thing as mandatory racial quotas in a corporate boardroom or university admissions office. One expands the pool of qualified competitors; the other distorts the competition once that pool exists.
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Conservatives and free-market advocates who oppose DEI must make this distinction clear.
Silence or indifference to the chilling effect invites the accusation that the real goal is exclusion rather than fairness. Critics will make that charge regardless; conservatives should give them no ammunition.
The constitutional and economic case against race preferences is strongest when paired with a clear commitment to expanding access: better K-12 preparation, vocational pathways, capital formation and the removal of unnecessary licensing and regulatory barriers that limit entry for everyone.
Merit is not the enemy of Black advancement. It is the only durable basis for it.
Industry, competence and character should be rewarded wherever they appear. Bigotry should be excluded by ordinary business judgment and by law, not by new forms of discrimination that simply reverse the old ones.
Smith’s observation is a reminder that policy has second-order effects. Rejecting the check-the-box games of DEI does not require abandoning engagement with Black institutions or individuals who compete on the merits.
It requires the opposite: confidence that free enterprise, equal rules and voluntary association will produce more durable opportunity than either racial set-asides or fear-based withdrawal.
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The goal should be neither a system that rewards mediocrity in the name of equity nor one that treats Black Americans as too risky to include. It should be a system that expands the field of competition and then judges the results without regard to ancestry.
That standard is both constitutional and practical. It is also the only one that treats Black Americans as full participants rather than permanent subjects of a political project.
