Former White House adviser Susan Rice said on CNN’s “The Situation Room” on Tuesday that it was “deeply offensive and dehumanizing” for Vice President Harris to say she was hired on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) principles.
“Donald Trump has already slammed Kamala Harris, calling her ‘stupid as a stone.’ He says she’s stupid as a stone, while other Republicans say she was just doing her part as a diversity hire. How does that make you respond to that?” host Wolf Blitzer said.
“This is deeply offensive and dehumanizing,” Rice said. “Let me explain what it means when someone calls me or anyone else a DEI hire. It means that if you’re a woman of any background, a person of color, an immigrant, an LGBTQ person, a person with a disability, a religious minority, a veteran, and you’ve been successful and risen to a leadership position, you don’t deserve it, you didn’t get there on merit, you got there because you had an unfair advantage. This is incredibly insulting to the vast majority of Americans who fit into all of these categories.”
She added, “This symbolizes what this race is really about. This is a race about whether we move forward into a democratic future where every American has the opportunity to vote, to express their opinion, and to succeed, or whether we go back to Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and their Project 2025 vision of women not having control over their own bodies, not having access to birth control or IVF. An America that doesn’t educate its kids in well-funded public schools because it doesn’t want to give them the opportunity. That was the 19th century, and frankly, the only thing that mattered was white, Christian men. What they’re saying with DEI is that if you’re not a white, Christian man, you didn’t get where you are because you didn’t deserve it. That’s not our America.”
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