Death to DEI and Disco: How One Racial Backlash Explains Another

On the balmy night of July 12, 1979, people attending the planned double-header between the Detroit Tigers and the Chicago White Sox at Comiskey Park were expecting to see a simple baseball game with many paying 98 cents for discount tickets by bringing along disco records.

The disco discount was the idea of Chicago DJ Steve Dahl, an anti-disco evangelist, who planned to blow up the thousands of LPs that people had brought. In the break between games, Dahl detonated the records, which went flying hundreds of feet above the diamond. On cue, as many as 5,000 people rushed the field, setting bonfires, taking bases, and tearing up the turf. The melee got so far out of control that the White Sox had to forfeit the second game.

Dahl denied there was any racist intent, but only whites, and mainly men, were seen storming the field. Later, the legendary Nile Rodgers of the iconic disco band Chic said, “it felt to us like a book burning.”

We’ll never know if the people who tore up Comiskey Park were a bunch of bigots, but they had an overwhelming, even frightening reaction to a musical art form whose origins are in New York’s Black and Latino gay culture, and descended from a rich tradition of soul music (RIP Larry Levan).

It also doesn’t seem accidental that Rev. Jerry Fallwell founded the Moral Majority that same year — a political movement that attacked pretty much anything in America that didn’t resemble a Billy Graham tent revival. It was a time of cultural pushback by the right wing. Disco wasn’t the only target. They balked at almost anything then-President Jimmy Carter said, court challenges to affirmative action had already emerged, and Ronald Reagan, the very symbol of neo-conservatism, had broken out of California and into the national political scene, resulting in his winning the White House in 1980.

Chutes and Ladders

The conservative sweep of those days seems at least comparable — maybe even identical — to the one happening today. And much like how the pushback was as broadly separate as Affirmative Action and the latest Donna Summer hit, this familiar sentiment targeted concepts beyond music with the intention to combat racism in society.

If you’ve been watching certain corporate movements since Donald Trump won back the White House, you’ve heard news of many corporations either removing or rolling back their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Companies like Walmart, John Deere, Boeing, Harley-Davidson, Ford, McDonald’s, Meta, and Lowe’s are among those who are ending DEI, and the latter three cite the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision on affirmative action in education as their reasoning.

But the silver lining is there are those who decided not to cower behind right-wing flag waving and “woke” culture complaints. The companies that apparently are still standing ten toes down include American, Delta, Southwest and United Airlines, Apple, and most vocally, Costco, whose executives said in a statement to investors that “DEI helps bring originality and creativity to our merchandise offerings, promoting the ‘treasure hunt’ that our customers value.”

Now the guys at Comiskey Park seemed pretty angry, but not about the music. From my own life experience, I gather the real culprit seemed to be how essentially Black disco was. My guess is they saw this permeation of Black culture into society (this was at the height of the Black identity movement) as an affront. Same with DEI these days. To be frank, what the Comiskey Park rowdies did is what the corporate shot callers are doing now — showing us who they really are.

Connect Four

At least since the time of Fallwell, certain white men have been complaining about things that seemingly benefit Black people, other people of color, people of different lifestyles, and women, and have made accusations that these actions are discriminatory against them. In some cases, they felt violence was necessary to enforce the status quo. It’s as if their goal is to seek out oppression and claim it for themselves.

Last year, conservatives threw a fit over DEI policies in the air transportation industry saying that having Black and LGBTQ people in cockpit crews jeopardized traveler safety and even blamed Boeing’s Jan. 2024 fuselage blowout on initiatives toward diversity hires rather than the actual technical issue found to have caused it. More recently, a wave of right wingers blamed the spread of deadly wildfires surrounding Los Angeles on DEI initiatives in the L.A. Fire Department, specifically fire chief Kristin Crowley, who is lesbian.

I really scratched my head with this one because wildfires spark in that area all the time naturally. There have also been many months of exceedingly dry weather there driven by climate change (I know, they don’t believe it exists), and hurricane-force winds to blow the flames all over the hills.

Anyone who studies fire dynamics could easily tell you that no fire department in the world would be equipped to deal with a catastrophe of this magnitude. It’s like blaming Hurricane Katrina on the Equal Rights Amendment. The damage from that storm, by the way, actually was the result of incompetence. Diversity issues were not the problem.

The Santa Ana winds have nothing to do with diversity, but everything to do with weather. Any Southern Californian can tell you how intense they can get and how dangerous they can be when they blow against a wildfire. So it must take a yet undiscovered level of malevolent ignorance to sit in an ivory tower, create a bogeyman, and blame political targets at a critical time when people have lost family members, their homes, and their way of life. Then again, we’re talking about Elon Musk and Megyn Kelly.

Now don’t get me wrong, DEI as a concept is not perfect. I found it flawed from the beginning because it seemed performatively reactionary to the social protests that rose after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd in 2020. There was quite a bit of talk, but actual action on the part of corporations to defeat systemic and institutionalized racism didn’t seem to materialize. But that didn’t mean the concept could not be improved and put into action. Instead, people who were never serious about it, and probably resented it, began to pull the plug as soon as others who derided the concept as disadvantageous for whites started targeting it.

Mr. Potato Head

The result is a neo-bro culture in which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is calling for more “masculine energy” in corporate America as if there’s a shortage of white dudes to give companies legitimacy.

The stats don’t agree with him, though. In 2023,  37 of the top 50 Fortune 500 CEOs were still white guys. Overall, 90 percent of them were white men. The reality is that men, particularly white men, are under no threat in this realm. A Yahoo! Finance analysis shows that in the S&P 100, a group of super-wealthy companies that basically represent the American economy, of 533 named executives, white men comprise 7 in 10. Of those companies, 1 in 7 had executive teams that were only white men. So what’s Zuckerberg worried about?

So with all this said, is it possible that Trump, Zuckerberg, Musk and a few others are really complaining about DEI because they’re really afflicted with Fear of a Black Planet? Your guess is as good as mine, but I’ll probably talk about that in a future blog post if this one doesn’t get me banned and sent to Siberia.

But these guys have defeated affirmative action, waged war on Critical Race Theory, and stomped on DEI. So with these hindrances to white supreme advantage virtually gone, what happens when the world doesn’t suddenly become this Utopia with everyone living happy, abundant lives? What happens when things like the LA fires keep happening? What happens when flooding in North Carolina continues? What happens when regional conflicts sustain themselves globally? What happens when the cost of living continues to rise? What happens when there are more incidents of domestic terror taking place? What happens with all of this when they don’t have DEI – and by proxy, minorities, women, LGBTQ people, and liberals to blame?

What happens when the group of powerful white men, who fashioned themselves gods and geniuses, can only look in the mirror when the time comes to ask “how’d this get so fucked up?”

If we’re all alive when that day comes, and that question gets asked, I’m going to remain silent and put on some disco music. Maybe Chic, maybe Sister Sledge, Rose Royce, or Heatwave.

The answers won’t be mine to give. It will be a White Man’s Burden.

Everybody dance.