'Not a ban on teaching history': NC Republicans say critics of bill to ban DEI in schools are wrong

A new push to ban North Carolina public schools from engaging in diversity, equity and inclusion efforts shouldn’t be seen as being anti-diversity, state Senate Republicans said as they advanced a DEI-focused bill on Wednesday.

Senate Bill 227 would forbid the statre's public schools from instruction that touches on a broad category of issues related to race and gender. It addresses classroom instruction as well as training sessions for teachers.

Sen. Michael Lee, R-Wilmington, said he believes many efforts to make schools more inclusive started with good intentions but have gone too far, and they now need to be shut down.

“A lot of these concepts are laudable,” he said Wednesday during a legislative committee meeting. “But in practice, we’ve found it to go in a whole different ballgame.”

In an interview later, Lee said the goal is not to oppose diversity itself — or equity, or inclusion — but rather the broader context of what DEI has come to mean to many people.

“It's really the moniker that it's taken on,” he said. “Some of the trainings that are being done that advocate for things that are, No. 1, against federal law. No. 2, these concepts that say that because of your race, you should feel a certain way.”

The main intent of the new bill, Lee told the committee Wednesday, is prevent any teaching of ideas that a certain race is superior to any others, or that people should feel guilt over the past because of their race, or similar ideas. He said he wanted to be clear that the bill wouldn’t ban any books, or forbid teachers from teaching about certain topics.

“It’s not a ban on teaching history or discussing past injustices,” he said. “ ... It’s not a prohibition on individual research or study. Students and teachers can still access materials discussing a lot of these issues.”

In fact, Lee said Wednesday, the bill has earned him the ire of some on the right who think it doesn’t go far enough in banning things. He also referenced the fact that his mother is white and his father is Taiwanese to underscore that he understands racism isn’t a thing of the distant past.

When they got married, he said, it was still illegal in some states for them to get married.

The bill has also run into opposition from Democrats at the legislature, some of whom view the bill as an attempt to target programs that have helped Black students and educators in the past.

Sen. Caleb Theodros, D-Charlotte, said DEI efforts haven’t only been intended to help Black people such as himself. Many programs that fall under DEI, he said, are aimed at helping low-income people in rural, heavily white parts of the country.

“In a political sense, it’s been seen as sort of a Black thing,” Theodros said. “In reality, there are many people in our state who depend on these programs and may not realize it. It’s these folks in Appalachia, or rural communities, where there are development programs predicated on their specific socio-economic background.”

The bill also has an opponent in the the American Civil Liberties Union, which says many parts of the bill are identical to a New Hampshire law that was recently struck down as unconstitutional. Liz Barber, a state ACLU policy director, told lawmakers the bill is written too vaguely — and could therefore be enforced unevenly or unfairly as a weapon to target certain viewpoints while letting others go unchallenged.

The critics, however, were unable to stop the bill from advancing. Bill sponsor Phil Berger, the Republican Senate leader, is facing a 2026 primary challenge from his local sheriff and has so far this year filed several bills related to hot-button political issues on the right including immigration, guns and DEI.

On Wednesday a spokesman for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction — which is led by Mo Green, a Democrat — told WRAL that DPI has no DEI-based trainings, and it’s also not aware of any that exist in individual schools or school districts, either.

Theodros said in an interview Wednesday that it’s not hard to see why the bill is advancing regardless. “DEI played well in the elections, and this is essentially the reason why we're seeing it,” he said.

It’s possible the reason that DPI officials aren’t aware of any DEI programs at the local level in North Carolina is because that sort of information isn’t always required to be reported. This bill would create mechanisms for that reporting, Lee said in an interview — and not just by schools, but also by concerned parents or others.

“Certainly citizens can go like they do now, when certain school districts are violating the law, and report that to their school boards,” he said. “They can also report that to DPI.”