It was Sunny Hostin against the world — er, at least, most everyone else at the table — on Friday’s (February 21) first “Hot Topic” discussion of The View.

The cohosts responded to comments made by former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in which he decried certain Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts for “people [to] sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia.” While others on the panel were sympathetic to Buttigieg’s points and did their best to defend them, Hostin was having none of that.

“I like, Pete, of course, but I think he got that so wrong, and I think it was so tone-deaf,” Hostin said. “From 1776 to 1965, you have basically white men in charge of everything, right? Women, people of color, we’re left out of just equality, equality of opportunity, that sort of thing. And I think when that equality starts popping up in terms of a diversity program, equality now feels like oppression to those people who were at the top of the ladder, not necessarily because of their merit, but because of their identity.”

Hostin went on to cite a report from McKinsey & Company, where Buttigieg himself was previously employed, which “found that companies with more diversity financially and socially outperform those that are less diverse” and begged the question, “If the problem is these programs, what is the solution? Should we just then depend on the benevolence of Elon Musk and white billionaires to hire women and people of color? Should we just depend on corporations to, on their own, make the workforce more diverse? They didn’t do it from 1776 to 1965. Why do we think it’s going to be any different?”

Sara Haines had a different take, contending that he wasn’t being anti-DEI in theory but rather in practice. “I think that in this era, there’s been almost this DEI industrial complex,” she said. “A lot of consultants get hired by big corporations to make people feel really good that they’re achieving diversity, because they put on a seminar, because you watch something, because you said ‘LatinX’ instead of ‘Latina.’”

Ana Navarro thought the conversation should address a bigger issue altogether: the fact that Democrats are “tarring and feathering themselves … self-flagellating, talking about all the things they do wrong… I think there’s a place for that, but we’ve now had a month of Donald Trump, and I don’t understand why every Democratic strategist, elder, sage, person with a platform, isn’t out there laser-focused on getting the American public to understand the horrible suffering and cruelty that Donald Trump has brought on to the American people.”

Haines decided to pivot back to the topic at hand, though, and showed a clip of the very awkward moments from the event Buttigieg was talking about and said, “They’re losing sight of the spirit of what DEI was by doing this in this fashion…. So many people are so frustrated that people are pushing back on DEI that they’re not taking a minute to pause, that maybe DEI itself needed improvements in its actual application.”

She went on to cite an example in which Wells Fargo reportedly staged “sham” interviews for jobs that were already filled to fill diversity quotas. And when Hostin pushed back, “That implies that the woman wasn’t qualified for the job,” Haines quickly countered with, “There was no job.”

After Haines cited another study that presented blind hiring as an option for correcting the course, Alyssa Farah Griffin suggested that was “the opposite of DEI,” and Hostin once again offered her disagreement, saying, “That’s not true.”

“DEI programs make sure that the most qualified candidates traditionally excluded from opportunity are given the chance to compete. So this notion somehow that blind hiring could work, I think that’s something,” she said before Griffin interrupted to say, “But wouldn’t it take race or identity out of it and be purely based on what you put forward?”

“It’s not about merit because the people that are in these DEI programs are already the best of the best,” Hostin maintained.

“But the companies end up doing tokenism rather than helping,” Haines argued.

Navarro got the last word in by leveling with Hostin and noting their shared interest as fellow women of color and saying, “Donald Trump is now the president and has gotten rid of DEI in government and is coming down on corporations to do the same. So we’re going to see within the next six months, within the next year, if there are less people of color, or more or the same in the C suites,” she said, with Hostin promising that there will be less diversity. Navarro then continued, “I’ll tell you what, there’s a lot of diverse people like you and me who have power with our pockets,” and that was something Hostin could finally agree with and say, “That’s true.”

The View, Weekdays, 11 a.m. ET, ABC

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