ATLANTA – In a last-minute legislative maneuver, Georgia Senate Republicans have revived a measure that seeks to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the state’s schools and colleges.
These programs, known by the acronym DEI, were well-intentioned but have been abused, said Sen. Max Burns, R-Sylvania, the author of Senate Bill 120 to ban such programs.
His bill stalled in the House of Representatives, so Burns and fellow Senate Republicans stripped House legislation that had passed to the chamber and replaced it with Burns’ measure Thursday evening.
The Senate Education and Youth Committee then passed House Bill 127, which had been aimed at increasing the number of sick days that teachers can take.
Instead, HB 127 would now withhold state funding from public schools with DEI programs and withhold state funding or state-administered federal funding — including scholarships, loans and grants — from colleges with such programs.
Sen. Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, said DEI has morphed into “neo-Marxist” ideology that has “infected” the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech. It “squelches” academic freedom, he said,
The legislation targets terms such as “allyship,” “cultural appropriation,” “gender ideology,” “heteronormativity,” “implicit bias,” “intersectionality” and “racial privilege.”
It also targets “antiracism,” a term popularized by the author Ibram X. Kendi in the book “How to be an Antiracist” first published in 2019.
Democrats on the committee pushed back, especially against the idea of punishing schools for teaching antiracism. “So you think we should have a position in support of racism?” asked Sen. RaShaun Kemp, D-Atlanta, who is Black.
Burns, who is white, responded that he believes everyone should have “equal opportunities.” But he accepted an amendment by Kemp to ban the proper noun “Antiracism” rather than the lower-cased “antiracism.”
The amended HB 127 passed the Senate’s education committee in a vote along partisan lines. This was the last meeting of the committee in this legislative session and thus a last opportunity to alter a bill in this manner, though there is still time to make major amendments in the Senate Rules Committee, where this bill is now headed, or on the Senate floor, where the Rules Committee might send it.
For a DEI ban to become law, HB 127 would have to pass the Senate, and then the House would have to agree to the amendments.
The original author of HB 127, Rep. Brent Cox, R-Dawsonville, did not welcome the gutting of his bill, so the House might not appreciate the Senate’s changes.