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In a speech last month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that the armed forces had “promoted too many uniformed leaders for the wrong reasons, based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts.” He called for countering past diversity efforts as a way of “clearing out the debris.”
Hegseth seemed to be making a common assumption: that white people are the default race, the ones naturally deserving of success and recognition, and that nothing but “debris” is lost when people of color are absent from positions of power.
Previously, Hegseth speculated that top military officials were DEI hires, specifically naming Air Force General Charles Q. Brown in his 2024 book. Brown was the first Black person to head a branch of the military and became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Biden. Trump then fired Brown and appointed Air Force Lieutenant General Dan Caine in his place. Caine, who had already retired and lacked Brown’s experience and honors, did not meet the requirements set by law for the position, but the law also allowed Trump to waive them, which he did.
General Brown was accused of not being held to equal standards because of his race and of not earning his position — despite the objective fact that he met every standard and, ironically, his white successor did not. Hegsesth’s desire to have Brown fired seems to have been based on his own tacit racial judgment of Brown’s achievement. This false dichotomy of “We don’t want diversity, we want merit” traps racial minorities in perpetual suspicion.
That is the paradox of prejudice, and of seeing white as the norm. When you believe that people of color must be underqualified, they are forced to become overqualified and go above and beyond to prove themselves. In the end, racial minorities aren’t just held to equal standards, but to higher ones.
In a 2024 podcast episode, Charlie Kirk said, “I’m sorry. If I see a Black pilot, I’m gonna be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’” Following criticism, he went on Megyn Kelly’s podcast to defend his remarks. “Of course I believe anybody of any skin color can become a qualified pilot,” he said. He explained that his point wasn’t to endorse prejudice, but to blame DEI for leaving us with no choice but to “look at everything through a hyper-racialized diversity-quota lens.” In the wake of DEI, he argued, it’s reasonable to conclude that a white person is truly qualified and a person of color may not be. That is, he described racial stereotyping not as an evil but as a rational judgement.
On another occasion, he named four accomplished Black women in politics and journalism and said they “do not have the brain processing power” to be taken seriously. “You have to go steal a white person’s slot.”
Kirk’s basic premise was that because of DEI, some Black people have been taking what isn’t rightfully theirs — even though, in the history of this country, or even just in the last century, that can’t possibly have been done by Black people nearly as much as it’s been done to Black people. From piloting to politics, Kirk believed that when it comes to achievement, white is to be expected and diverse outcomes are an exception.
This is the difference between seeing a Black pilot and wondering, “How did he make it through? What strings were pulled to achieve that outcome?” and seeing only white pilots and wondering, “Where are all the people of other races who could be pilots but aren’t? What’s standing in their way?” Kirk said that race should not be an advantage or a disadvantage, but he didn’t voice concern with the ways that white people are more likely to have gotten a leg up — such as intergenerational wealth, legacy admissions, nepotism, or simple “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” connections. By his own logic, these factors should cast doubt on all white pilots. But the race-based prejudice goes in only one direction. Kirk is not alone in this view. He was seen as a mouthpiece for millions — like Trump, often considered a leader brave enough to say what many are thinking.
Even if we don’t speak them out loud, we all have both covert and overt beliefs about who meets the standard. Race affects who gets the benefit of the doubt and shapes where we place the burden of responsibility. For example, Trump says he plans to provide a big bailout for farmers. Investment in rural populations is mostly bipartisan, and the decline in rural standards of living is viewed as a failing of the government. In stark contrast, investment and reparations in minority urban areas are extremely partisan, and the decline in urban standards of living is seen as a failing of the citizens. The situations admittedly differ in many regards, but one of them is race.
In recent years, more scholars have sought to bring recognition to the fact that white people are not just the race-less norm. They have a racial identity and social location, just the same as everyone else, though it may be invisible to them. Peggy McIntosh, the scholar who coined the term “white privilege,” explains: “As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.” White people tend to see themselves as outside the system of race, even if they are race-conscious when it comes to other groups. As in, they may think that other people have a racial identity, but they themselves are just people. A white pilot is a pilot; a Black pilot is a Black pilot. A white politician is a politician; a Black politician is a Black politician.
Generally speaking, white people have the privilege of being seen as individuals rather than as representatives of their race. This is why some say we should strive to be more conscious of whiteness even as we decrease the salience of race for people of color, bringing these disparate racial experiences into balance. Others say that, instead, we should strive to be less conscious of all races.
There’s a common saying that Black people have to work twice as hard to get half as far. This relates to Claude Steele’s research on stereotype threat, which he presents in Whistling Vivaldi. Stereotype threat is triggered by the fear that you might be stereotyped, causing you to feel “at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one’s group.” It leads to over-efforting, performance anxiety, and underperformance. In other words, it leads to working twice as hard and getting half as far — all prompted by the sense that you must set out to defy others’ low expectations of you. Instead, those expectations become a sad, self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the burden W. E. B. Du Bois called double-consciousness: “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”
It creates issues when we normalize the assumption that people of color are likely to be less qualified or capable, or that they are infringing on what should default to a white person. It is critical that every single person of color be seen just as they are, so they can show you what they are capable of.