Boeing’s anti-DEI backlash: How Elon Musk and his followers are distracting from real safety concerns

Earlier this month, Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 took a rather terrifying turn shortly after takeoff from Portland, when one of the door plugs on the plane, a Boeing 737 Max 9, blew out at around 16,000 feet. Suddenly, passengers went from drowsily debating whether to spring for in-flight Wi-Fi to frantically pulling on their drop-down oxygen masks and trying not to look at the gaping hole in the side of the fuselage or the nothing beyond it. 

The pilots made an emergency landing back in Portland, and no one was seriously hurt. But in the days that followed, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded Max 9s for safety inspections, which, sure enough, turned up more door plugs with more loose bolts on other planes operated by Alaska and United Airlines, too. Shortly thereafter, the FAA announced that it would audit Boeing’s production line and suppliers. Shares of the company’s stock have since fallen by about 19%, which, given the nature of the precipitating event, actually feels kind of modest. 

While all this was going on in the real world, the right-wing culture war brigade took to social media to point the finger at the only villain they know. Because Boeing has incorporated diversity, equity, and inclusion—DEI for short—in its business plan in recent years, they argued, it must necessarily have stopped caring about quality control along the way. This bizarre zero-sum theory of corporate resource allocation gained traction after Elon Musk weighed in. “Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety?” Musk wrote on X. “That is actually happening.” Other blue-checked Musk hangers-on with University of Wikipedia aerospace engineering degrees quickly warned that absent rapid C-suite intervention, the demographic composition of Boeing’s engineering teams would surely result in fiery crashes and mass death. 

This unfathomably stupid discourse ended with a little armchair phrenology about the IQ scores of Black airline pilots, which Musk appeared to solemnly endorse. It should go without saying that none of the principals here noted the logical leap from bigoted hypotheses about the cognitive abilities of Boeing engineers to bigoted hypotheses about the cognitive abilities of commercial airline pilots who do not work for Boeing, the company whose product’s dramatic midair disintegration got the internet’s most enthusiastic revanchists all worked up in the first place. Once these people break out the calipers, pertinent details tend to fall by the wayside.

The better explanation for DoorGate is simpler and way less racist: Planes are among the myriad products and services you depend upon that, thanks to some combination of corporate greed and basic incompetence, are becoming actively, appreciably worse. This is not a generalization: Boeing started as a worker-friendly, engineer-led outfit that built some genuinely revolutionary planes, and became something of a household name in the process. The ethos of that era has been described as “go-for-it-and-damn-the expenses—but not damn the quality,” which doesn’t roll off the tongue, really, but you get the idea.

Today, that version of Boeing is long gone, thanks to a dizzying sequence of moves, mergers, and restructures that seemed designed to cut costs, bust unions, and maximize shareholder value. In 1997, the company merged with longtime rival McDonnell Douglas, whose executives appeared openly contemptuous of the idea that product quality might be relevant to the bottom line. Among the post-merger outfit’s internal slogans were “a passion for affordability” and “less family, more team,” neither of which inspire confidence in the structural integrity of jets rolling off the assembly line. As Bill Saporito recently put it in the New York Times, “What got lost in all this shuffling is a corporate culture that once prized engineering and safety, replaced by one that seemed to be more focused on delivering profits over perfection.” 

The choice to gut the actual plane-manufacturing enterprise beneath the familiar logo came with consequences. Five years ago, for example, regulators grounded 737 Max planes after a pair of deadly crashes that killed 346 people; the fallout cost Boeing dozens of orders and billions of dollars. Details about Alaska 1282 are still coming out, but according to reporting from the Seattle Times, some whistleblowers claim that the door plug was improperly installed by Boeing mechanics—and, thanks to a series of lapses in safety protocol, was not subject to a formal inspection. (Boeing said it was unable to comment for this story because of the ongoing National Transportation Safety Board investigation.) 

On January 26, Boeing announced that airlines were returning 737 Max planes to service, and vowed to regain the confidence of customers, passengers, and regulators. “We have to be better,” said Stan Deal, president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes. “We have to deliver perfect airplanes each and every time.” Yet a high-profile near miss like DoorGate raises an obvious question that will linger in mind of every air traveler as they fasten their seatbelts: If megacorporations appear willing to risk the lives of paying customers strapped in an aluminum tube hurtling through the sky, what other calculated risks are they taking that just haven’t been discovered yet?

People do weird, gross things when confronted by structural problems with no obvious solution. As demonstrated by the persistence of outraged voters blaming undocumented immigrants for a multinational conglomerate’s decision to move factory jobs overseas, demonizing marginalized out-groups is a classic method of regaining a sense of agency, even—maybe especially—among people who never actually had it. For at least some people who are (understandably) frightened by what happened on Alaska 1282, it is mentally easier to scrutinize the representation of Black people on an assembly line than it is to accept that a once-trusted brand might be cutting dangerous corners in pursuit of slightly more robust profit margins.

Cynical though it may be, the ongoing backlash to diversity, equity, and inclusion can do real harm if people in power take the wrong lessons from it. In the wake of last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in higher education admissions, conservative activists are targeting similar initiatives in the workplace, sometimes winning without a fight. A large law firm, for example, recently repurposed a scholarship awarded to “students who identify with an underrepresented group” for students “who have demonstrated resilience and excellence on their path toward a career in law.” And as the journalist Ari Drennen has observed, search traffic suggests that DEI is well on its way to joining BLM and CRT on the reactionary bingo card. This is going to get worse before it gets better.

I do not think there is a subject in the world that people who exploit racial animus for pecuniary gain cannot shape into a moral panic if they put their minds to it. But there is a grim lesson here for people who (rightly) care about diversity, in the workplace or anywhere else: If the pro-bigotry coalition will never be satisfied, there is no reason to bother trying to do so. In other words, the choice that the anti-DEI movement presents is not between upholding one’s values and appeasing one’s critics. It is between upholding one’s values and caving to some of the worst-faith actors on the planet. Better to simply ignore them in the first place.