Former White House adviser Susan Rice said Tuesday on CNN’s “Situation Room” that it was “extremely offensive and dehumanizing” to say Vice President Harris is a DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) hire.
Host Wolf Blitzer said, “Donald Trump is already slamming her, Kamala Harris, in his words as being ‘dumb as a rock,’ his words. He says she’s dumb as rock, other Republicans are saying she was at diversity hire. What’s your reaction when you hear that?”
Rice said, “That is extremely offensive and dehumanizing. Let me tell you what it means when somebody calls a person like me or anybody else a DEI hire. What that means is, if you are a woman of any background, if you are a person of color, if you are an immigrant, if you are LGBTQ, if you are disabled, if you’re religious minority, if you’re a veteran and you 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 added, “It is 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 were women don’t control their own bodies, they can’t get contraception or in vitro fertilization. To an America where we don’t educate our children in public schools that are sufficiently funded because we don’t want them to have opportunity. That’s 19th Century, where the only people who mattered were frankly white Christian men. 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. That’s not the America who we are.”
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