Tiffany Ho
Tiffany Ho is a journalism student at the University of Toronto. Previously, she has worked in media and public relations for organizations like TEDx UofT, contributed to publications like the Toronto Observer, and been a research assistant within the spheres of race in media, and consumer psychology. She partnered with the Global Summitry Project as part of the journalism program’s experiential learning opportunity in 2025.
As a high school student in Farmington Hills, Michigan, Nico Capaldo was exposed to classes in Critical Race Theory (CRT) and student groups supporting people with disabilities.
Capaldo said CRT helped him learn more about identities that are different from his own.
“I still learned more, and I grew more because of that class,” Capaldo said in a Zoom interview. He is a 19-year-old student studying Experimental Animation at OCAD University in Toronto, and identifies as transgender.
However, some of these initiatives may cease to exist after U.S. President Donald Trump issued executive orders targeting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. These changes are concerning to some American youth like Capaldo.
Trump signed executive orders such as “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” and “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing”.
Under these executive orders, all DEI mandates and policies are being terminated at the federal level, and there is strong encouragement for the private sector to follow suit. At schools, the U.S. Department of Education has also been taking action to eliminate DEI, and to cancel around US$350 million in “woke spending” contracts. An executive order entitled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” has further ordered American schools to remove CRT content from their classes.
According to the White House’s website, the Trump administration believes that DEI policies have led to Americans being “stigmatized, demeaned, or shut out of opportunities because of their race or sex”, which “violate the civil-rights laws of this nation”.
This reverses much of the efforts that former President Joe Biden and previous administrations had made, such as requiring federal agencies to facilitate DEI in the workplace. DEI has been around since the 1960s, with laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Equal Pay Act of 1963.
How did previous DEI policies play a role in the lives of American youth?
“DEI stands for diversity, equity and inclusion, and these are really principles rooted in values of fairness and the belief that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect and have a fair shot to get ahead,” Katie Sandson, senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, said on a phone call interview.
The centre is based in Washington, D.C. and according to the website, seeks to “drive solutions to the gender inequity that shapes our society.”
Sandson says the executive orders have rolled back long-standing civil rights protections for workers employed by federal contractors.
“Those are protections that had been in place since the 1960s that prohibited discrimination by federal contractors,” Sandson said. To her, targeting -DEI measures signals “an effort to weaponize our civil rights laws to maintain the status quo.”
Under previous administrations like Biden’s, executive orders were passed to “pursue a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all, including People of Colour and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.” According to his administration, this has empowered American youth, particularly those who are members of marginalized communities.
What do Trump’s executive orders mean for American youth?
According to the White House website, the Trump administration has stated that anti-DEI executive orders are key to “restoring merit-based opportunity”. The website also states that these changes are important as DEI initiatives have historically undermined “national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement”.
Despite these assertions, members of marginalized communities and non-profits are pushing back against these executive orders.
“Anti-DEI orders really signal an attack on our civil rights laws,” Sandson said. “Young people really deserve to go to school and to work without a threat of discrimination or harassment, and to know that they’ll have access to equal opportunities for success in every area. And so I think with these executive orders, they’re really a betrayal of that promise of equal opportunity.”
Some American youth are not sure how exactly these orders will impact their lives at work. Nicholas Masso, a 26-year-old software engineer based in San Francisco is one of them. They work for an independent non-profit institute that regularly works under government contracts.
“I wonder, how is that actually going to manifest,” they said in a Zoom interview. As a member of PRISM, a group for LGBTQ+ team members at their workplace, Masso believes that the orders may not have a direct impact on their life.
“PRISM will not be allowed to exist and will not have a budget, and meetings will be disallowed. But also, that’s not going to stop me from having lunch with all my trans co-workers, and we’re still going to be a group,” Masso said.
Others, like Capaldo, worry about what these anti-DEI orders would mean for him when he applies for jobs, wondering if “[employers] don’t want to hire me just because I’m identifying as something, not my gender birth – they can just reject my job offer.”
He is not just concerned about struggling to find a job, but is worried about what this means for his health coverage. With health insurance tied to employment, Capaldo thinks that access to his health care and medication could be hindered if he is unable to find a job.
The anti-DEI executive orders have also affected educational institutions.
“The administration is trying to intimidate colleges and universities too — as part of that second executive order — into dropping DEI efforts, which I think can impact different programs and resources for students and impact young people,” Sandson said.
Anusha Nadkarni, 19, and a student at Stanford University in California, echoed that sentiment. She is the founder of the non-profit, Diversify Your Narrative (DON).
Nadkarni said that her organization seeks to “empower students as changemakers for an anti-racist future through education.”
She shared that at DON, they believe that knowledge is power, and highlighted the importance of knowledge that is “empowering and centred on community.”
“Under the Trump administration, that knowledge is rooted in oppression, that knowledge is rooted in erasure. And so the kind of power that our students are being exposed to is not a benevolent one,” Nadkarni said in a Zoom interview.
DEI programs shed light on how systemic barriers are constructed and not naturally occurring. Nadkarni worries that removing them would “create communities of students who are always going to believe that they’re not capable of creating change. I think that’s the greatest loss that we’re going to face.”
Phoenix Kloss, a 19-year-old marketing major at the University of North Alabama also believes that the removal of DEI programs are harmful. While Kloss is white and doesn’t fall under DEI initiatives promoting racial diversity, she says that she supports these efforts.
“I think it’s racist to get rid of it,” she said, stating that she thinks it would lead to a “predominantly white workforce and university population.”
She disagrees with Trump’s assertion that anti-DEI initiatives would promote meritocracy, and says that the social and cultural climate in the country makes it difficult for such an outcome to become reality.
“We’re not ready to get rid of DEI because we still have unconscious biases that prevent us from judging people purely based off their own success.”