I'm reading a book about the rise of Teddy Roosevelt. Not because I'm interested in him specifically. I just enjoy reading these types of books from time to time.
I forget the exact year this incident happened, but it would have been late 1800's.
Roosevelt is in Chicago and iirc he was involved in discussions for who would be the next Republican nomination for Governor.
Fairly late in the discussions, Roosevelt suggests nominating a black man. Why? Because he's black, obviously.
It got me thinking, who was the first DEI hire in the United States? I'm sure this wasn't the first. (although the black guy didn't get the nomination in this case)
Collectivist racial thought goes way back. At least back to the arguments between WEB DuBois and Booker T. Washington (who served both T. Roosevelt and Taft as a race advisor.) The academic DuBois' "The Souls of Black Folk" vs. Washington and Tuskegee Institute. Academic vs. Vocational education as a focus for Black America is a classic argument in the Black community about how to respond to Jim Crow and segregation settling over the South.
Arguably, Radical Reconstruction Era South had 'black for black's sake' as well; going further back, there was a Southern tradition of smart, effective, & social blacks getting a pass in polite society in spite of being black as 'honorary whites.' (Though this is more qualitative & individual than a collectivist/DEI sort of thing.) You can see this in early indenture suits, where a black man formalized the indenture of another black man, making him formally property.
The culture of Freedmen, Mulattos, and Quadroons in pre-civil war South(specifically, New Orleans, as that was the only real metropolitan area in the South pre-Civil War) is arguably insane, and something that's rarely touched upon.
Probably because they really don't want to answer the question of 'Wait, you had a stratum of French college educated Blacks that ran businesses and newspapers? What happened to them?'
What happened to them?