The Inner Monologue

Imagine a company that spent decades dumping waste into your town’s water supply. It made billions in profit while your community paid the price — in sickness, in lost property value, in diminished opportunity. Then one day the truth comes out. The company apologizes. They promise to do better. They hold a press conference and announce a new era of corporate responsibility.

Now the question: is that enough?

Of course not. You can’t simply say “we won’t do it again” and call it justice. The harm already happened. The people already suffered. The scales are already tipped. The only moral next step is restitution. A class action lawsuit is filed, and when it’s settled, the company is ordered to compensate the very people it wronged — not everyone, just those whose lives and futures were damaged by the company’s misconduct. Those who were unaffected continue as they always have. The payment isn’t a handout; it’s a rebalancing. It’s the restoration of fairness.

This is, in essence, what the United States calls Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — though few seem to understand it in those terms.

The Historical Harm

For generations, certain groups of Americans were locked out of opportunity by design. Laws, policies, and cultural norms made sure of it. Redlining dictated who could own homes. Jim Crow dictated who could vote and where they could live. Hiring practices, school funding, and professional networks kept entire demographics outside the gates of prosperity.

These were not accidents. They were systemic architectures of exclusion. The results compound like interest. A family denied a home loan in 1950 didn’t just lose a house — they lost the wealth that house would have generated for their children and grandchildren. A person denied access to higher education in 1960 didn’t just lose a degree — they lost a lifetime of income potential. And the cycle spun on.

To look at the disparity today and say “everyone should start from the same line now” is like showing up after the marathon has been run and insisting the winners and the exhausted latecomers are now equal competitors.

The Promise to Stop

When those injustices were finally exposed, the nation made a promise to do better. Laws changed. Discrimination was outlawed. Civil rights were declared universal. And while that was a monumental step forward, it was only the beginning — the equivalent of that company saying, “We promise not to dump in your river anymore.”

Good start. But the river is still poisoned.

Ending discrimination doesn’t erase its effects. It just halts further damage. Without active restoration, the inequality remains embedded in the landscape — in schools, neighborhoods, hiring patterns, and generational wealth. The damage becomes invisible but persistent, disguised as “individual choice” or “market outcomes.” The victims are left to rebuild without compensation.

The Discount as Justice

In a class action settlement, those harmed are compensated directly. They might receive money, medical care, or access to services. The goal is not to punish, but to make whole. To repair the imbalance that was created by the wrongdoing.

That’s what equity means in the DEI equation — not equality of treatment, but equality of footing. It’s the moral version of a discount offered to those wronged, paid for by those who benefited, even if indirectly. And just as in a settlement, not everyone gets the same check.

If your town wasn’t poisoned, you don’t get compensated. You don’t need to be, because you weren’t the one harmed.

And yet, when this principle is applied socially — when we give preference in hiring, scholarships, or access to those historically excluded — people recoil. They call it unfair. They call it reverse discrimination. They insist everyone should pay the same price now, ignoring the fact that some have been overpaying for generations.

Fairness, in this sense, isn’t sameness. Fairness is proportionality. It’s context. It’s history. If one group’s climb was made steeper by deliberate design, the fair thing isn’t to lecture them about personal responsibility. It’s to flatten the hill.

The Other Towns

There’s always that question in both legal and social restitution: what about the others? What about the towns that weren’t poisoned, the families who weren’t discriminated against? Should they have to bear the cost?

The uncomfortable truth is yes — sometimes they do. Because the system that allowed harm to persist benefited them, even passively. Lower taxes, cheaper labor, better schools, cleaner neighborhoods — these were not isolated perks but interconnected advantages. The imbalance of one side propped up the prosperity of the other.

That doesn’t mean guilt. It means participation. In the same way that taxpayers fund settlements for public corruption they didn’t commit, society funds social restitution for injustices it inherited. This is how collective systems repair collective wrongs.

Recalibration, Not Permanence

The goal of DEI is not endless preference. It’s recalibration. In a class action, the settlement doesn’t go on forever — only as long as it takes to repair the damage and prevent its recurrence. The payments taper off when the harm is healed.

So too with DEI. The endgame is not perpetual advantage for one group, but balance — a time when systemic disparities no longer require artificial correction because the system itself is fair. That future is not today, but it’s the target.

The people who rail against DEI often imagine it as an eternal punishment for past sins. But that’s not its nature. It’s a temporary mechanism to bring the social contract back into alignment — to detoxify the river, not dam it permanently.

The Misunderstanding of “Merit”

One of the loudest objections to DEI comes from the cult of meritocracy. The idea that we should reward only the “best qualified.” But this too assumes the playing field was level to begin with. Merit, as practiced, is never pure. It’s filtered through opportunity. A résumé is a record of access as much as ability.

If one candidate had generations of privilege and another had generations of systemic suppression, their equal performance isn’t a sign of equal effort — it’s a sign of disproportionate struggle. The same output from unequal inputs reveals, in fact, greater merit from the one who had to fight harder to achieve it.

In a class action, nobody asks whether the victims were the most deserving of compensation. They ask whether they were harmed. Justice doesn’t require purity of virtue — it requires acknowledgment of injury.

Justice Is a Balance Sheet

DEI, at its core, is an accounting exercise. It’s an attempt to reconcile the historical balance sheet of opportunity and loss. Equity is the credit line extended to those who were debited by history. Inclusion is the mechanism to ensure they’re actually allowed in the room. Diversity is the visible result of those two efforts working together.

The only people who call it unfair are those who mistake the correction for the crime. They see the payment, not the damage. They forget that fairness isn’t when everyone gets the same — it’s when everyone gets what they’re due.

The Settlement We Owe Ourselves

The United States is, in a sense, one long class action case — a nation suing its own past to recover the equity it withheld. The defendants are dead, but the damage remains. And like any settlement, it’s not about revenge. It’s about closure.

When critics mock DEI as social engineering, they forget that the original imbalance was also engineered — by law, by policy, by prejudice. What’s being dismantled now is not fairness, but its counterfeit. And if that dismantling occasionally makes the comfortable uneasy, that’s the sound of justice doing its work.

Rebalancing the scales is not an act of generosity. It’s the least we can do. Because the promise to “never do it again” means little until we make right what was already done.

In the end, DEI is not a political slogan. It’s the moral equivalent of a settlement check.
It doesn’t erase the past, but it acknowledges it. It doesn’t fix everything, but it begins to make things right.
And just like in every class action, those who received the most unearned benefit are often the loudest in claiming injustice — forgetting that the only reason the discount exists at all is because someone else paid full price for far too long.