by Aswad Walker
Houston Defender Network
Anyone who knows me knows my favorite progressive thought leader is author, activist, lawyer and Sirius XM Radio show host Lurie Daniel Favors. If you’re familiar with Favors, you’ve probably heard her use the phrase WEI—on the regular.
For those unaware, WEI stands for “White, Entitled and Inept,” or “White, Entitled and Incompetent.” Either works just fine.
Lurie Daniel Favors
Favors coined the phrase out of disgust with the national framing and defaming of the acronym DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). Used as a derogatory label to paint all Black people with the brush of inferiority, DEI, for White nationalists (and their off-white “help”) is their stamp of disapproval of everything and everybody Black.
DEI demonized
Favors wasn’t having this all-out assault on DEI (and implicitly, Black people) by the Trump administration and the entire Republican Party. She, like so many of us who “are like us,” immediately saw through the shenanigans of non-melanated folk using the phrase DEI to define and demonize Black people as being unqualified and thus underserving of seemingly all positions.
Favors, like the rest of us, was reminded that racism is the combination of biases backed up by institutional power. And that the biases that demonized three positive, uplifting words (diversity, equity and inclusion) were backed up by the institutional power of corporations and governments (local, state and federal).
The result: Hundreds of thousands of Black professionals have been fired and replaced by White people who more often than not lack both the experience and qualifications that the fired Black professionals brought to the table.
WEI damage
Case in point: Brother Lloyd James Austin III, a retired United States Army four-star general, who led the U.S. Department of Defense from 2021 – 2025, was replaced by WEI hire Pete Hegseth, a FOX News weekend anchor.
According to military scholars, former military officers, and political scientists, Hegseth has made errors so egregious that they have put countless government workers, military personnel and the entire country at risk.
Hegseth’s mother described him as an abusive drunk who didn’t belong anywhere near nuclear codes, military secrets or human beings, for that matter.
Another brother, Miguel Angel Cardona, the Biden/Harris administration’s Secretary of Education, built his entire professional career in education, literally teaching at all levels… from elementary to college. He was fired to make room for someone whose Q&A appearances before Congress showed her complete and utter lack of knowledge about any aspects of education.
The current DOE leader, Linda McMahon, wasn’t even familiar with the global phenomenon that is reshaping the educational landscape—AI (artificial intelligence).
McMahon referred to AI as A1 (as in A-One… as in the steak sauce). McMahon, who has zero educational credentials but comes with pockets full of sexual harassment lawsuits against her, wrote a letter to Harvard demanding that the University acquiesce to Trump’s anti-DEI policies. The good people at Harvard responded by marking up McMahon’s letter with so much red (from all of McMahon’s grammatical errors) that it made the Game of Thrones’ “Red Wedding” look like a white Christmas.
The drop-off in educational accomplishments, professional achievements, institutional knowledge and on-the-job experience from Austin and Cardona to Hegseth and McMahon is embarrassingly astounding. It’s like falling off a Denver Mile High cliff into a below sea level New Orleans swamp (absolutely no shade meant to New Orleans, by the way).
Yet, under the White nationalist rubric of DEI inferiority, any person of color in any position, be they Austin, Cardona or any of the hundreds of thousands of Black women who recently lost their jobs due to DEI reasons, giving these positions to unqualified, untested, unintelligent and uncouth individuals simply because they possess white skin, is the kind of entitlements Trump and crew are perfectly fine with.
You may recall that Trump connected DEI with the horrific January 2025 crash between a commercial jet and an Army helicopter that killed 67 people. Funny thing about statistics, though. They reveal that zero U.S. plane crashes had Black pilots at the helm. Well over 90 percent of U.S. airline crashes had White men flying those planes. The only thing Black involved in that tragic crash over the Potomac River was the plane’s black box.
And after Trump’s DEI policies booted all kinds of Black and Brown folk out of air traffic controller and other aviation-related positions, planes started crashing left and right.
DEI math
These realities back up Favors’ assertion that DEI math is real and it’s spectacular.
She often says, DEI math equates that because Black people have to work twice as hard just to get half as much as their White counterparts, once Black folk are in the same room with them, “The Blacks” are four times more qualified.
She points out that this Black reality “is what it is” simply because of the system of generational discrimination America’s white-favoring society set up, so White workers never had to face straight-up, level playing field-type competition from Black folk. And when the doors were finally open… again, we had to climb mountains, swim across oceans, produce grades that were intergalactically high just to get a job next to Mediocre Mikey.
More WEI damage
to come
This is why WEI is the real demon in this country. The immeasurable damage that WEI hires Hegseth and McMahon have already caused in just a few months isn’t even the tip of the iceberg.
MAGA world’s anti-DEI fetish, along with South African apartheid baby Elon Musk and his DOGE crew’s destruction, brought on the purge of hundreds of thousands of government workers. These are folk (many of whom are Black and Brown) who have done their jobs with honor and distinction, regardless of who was in the White House. Still, they are set to be replaced with a WEI hiring spree that will look like a snowstorm.
And if recent past is prologue, the damage Hegseth and McMahon have done as WEI hires will pale in comparison to the damage soon to be unleashed upon society by an army of roughly 50,000 WEI hires “running” everything from Social Security to Medicaid dispersals to nuclear power plant oversight. Yikes.
And I haven’t even mentioned the damage these WEI hires have done to America’s global standing. As we “speak,” world powers and nations are re-aligning and forming their networks of mutual economic benefit, leaving the U.S. to allow these inferior and dangerous WEIs to figure things out. Lord, Lord.
The potential future damage WEI hires can have on the country and planet is incalculable. Why? Every day, they one-up their stupidity and ineptness. Every day, a newer, higher (or lower) level of “dumbassity” is reached, plunging the nation and its inhabitants deeper into a dangerous economic, political, healthcare and military abyss.
DEI was never the problem. The drain on this nation’s progress has always been caused by members of the WEI club fighting tooth and nail to maintain their privileged and unearned position.
America and the world will continue to suffer from this WEI virus and its after-effects… unless and until we recognize it as the real evil to our well-being that it has always been.
About Post Author
