Former White House adviser Susan Rice says it’s “incredibly insulting” to say Vice President Harris, who is expected to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, only will do so because she is a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) hire.
“That’s extremely offensive and dehumanizing,” Rice told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday.
Her response follows Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) calling Harris a “DEI hire” and Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) saying Democrats feel they have to stick with Harris after President Biden bowed out Sunday “because of her ethnic background.”
Some Republicans are warning their GOP colleagues to back off the DEI talk.
Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian decent, would be the country’s first female president and woman of color president.
Rice, who served in the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations, said calling Harris out for her gender and race represents an issue that affects many Americans.
She said women, people of color, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities or veterans and religious minorities face such attacks, and the messaging from Republicans is that if those people “achieved success, rose to a position of leadership, you didn’t deserve it. You didn’t get there on merit. You got there because you got some unfair advantage.”
“That is incredibly insulting to the vast majority of Americans who fall into all of those categories,” she said.
Rice argued that the language is problematic itself but “emblematic of what this race is really all about.”
“It’s a race about whether we are going to move into the future as a democracy, where every American has the opportunity to vote to have their voice heard, to have a chance to make themselves a success or whether we’re going backward to Donald Trump and JD Vance and their Project 2025 vision of an America,” she said.
That vision for America, Rice argued, is one where white Christian men are the only ones who matter.
“And that’s what they’re saying with this DEI thing that if you’re somebody who is not a white Christian man, then you didn’t get where you got because you deserved it,” Rice said. “That’s not the America who we are.”