Glenn Youngkin, an Anti-D.E.I. Governor, Once Championed Diversity

Before Glenn Youngkin was a culture warrior who cheered the demise of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, he was a financial executive who worried about a lack of diversity in his field.

“One of the clear challenges in the financial sector broadly is both race and gender diversity,” Mr. Youngkin said in a 2018 interview with Bloomberg Markets, soon after becoming a co-chief executive at the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm.

His company, he noted approvingly, had worked for years to address disparities in representation.

“The second we stepped into this role, we emphasized that this approach was not only going to continue,” he added, “but it was going to be one of our key priorities.”

Seven years later, Mr. Youngkin is the Republican governor of Virginia, an ambitious conservative who harnessed concerns about classroom instruction on race into political power, and who has energetically embraced President Trump’s hostility to D.E.I. initiatives.

“D.E.I. is dead in Virginia,” he declared recently.

In tone and emphasis, his transformation has been striking, and more drastic than commonly understood, according to interviews with half a dozen people who worked with Mr. Youngkin during his time leading Carlyle, as well as a review of company statements, official filings and other documentation from that time.

But in many ways, the evolution of Mr. Youngkin — who some Republicans hope will run for president — reflects the ever more chameleonic nature of his party at the dawn of a second Trump era.

If just a few years ago the Republican Party still had a sliver of room for notes of sympathy for social justice causes or for championing diversity initiatives, Mr. Youngkin’s trajectory shows how that space has been overtaken by an ever-greater fealty to anti-identity politics. That view, demanded by the Trump administration, has increasingly caught on in corporate America and academia, as well as among some Democrats.

“I thought he wanted to learn,” said former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia, the country’s first Black elected governor and a moderate Democrat who served on Mr. Youngkin’s transition team after his 2021 victory.

But Mr. Wilder, who has since criticized the Youngkin administration’s approach on issues concerning diversity and equity, called him “a disappointment to a lot of people.”

Certainly, plenty of Americans say they support the notion of diversity, while also thinking that some formal D.E.I. programs, or a Democratic focus on identity more broadly, have gone too far. At some colleges, for instance, D.E.I. programs that began as initiatives to diversify the student body turned into vast, lightning-rod bureaucracies that critics said chilled free speech and were overly focused on left-wing ideology.

In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Youngkin suggested that there was no inconsistency between his support for workplace diversity at Carlyle, and his opposition to D.E.I. programs more broadly now.

Mr. Youngkin, who renamed Virginia’s D.E.I. office “the Office of Diversity, Opportunity and Inclusion,” suggested that calls for “equity” amount to prescribing “equal outcomes” rooted in identity politics, rather than ensuring access to opportunities. But he still believes that “diversity of thought, diversity of experiences, contribute to that best talent,” he said, and that there must be “pathways for that talent to come work for your organization.”

“It has been the radicalization of those concepts of diversity, equity and inclusion that have so fundamentally changed,” he said.

Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster in Virginia and a fan of Mr. Youngkin’s, cautioned against comparing private-sector stances with records in public office, noting that those are “two completely different roles.”

But in American politics broadly, he said, “‘diversity,’ ‘inclusion,’ all of that is left-wing vocabulary. That’s not Republican vocabulary.”

Yet for a time, it was for Mr. Youngkin.

Progress in Diversity Despite ‘a Long Way to Go’

Mr. Youngkin rose through the ranks at Carlyle over 25 years to lead the company during a period of sweeping cultural change.

He became a co-chief executive in 2018, when many corporations were racing to emphasize their social justice and diversity credentials. Mr. Youngkin appeared to embrace the moment.

“At Carlyle we believe that diverse teams and experiences bring tremendous value to our firm,” read a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission signed by Mr. Youngkin in 2019. “We are committed to growing and cultivating an environment that fosters diversity in gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, religion and age, as well as cultural backgrounds and ideas.”

As the filing laid out, that was not empty talk.

In 2013, Carlyle had established a diversity and inclusion council — “which we believe is the first of its kind in our industry,” the filing said — and Mr. Youngkin and his fellow chief executive, Kewsong Lee, were chairs of that effort when they led the company.

In October 2018, they also announced a new role: a chief inclusion and diversity officer.

That executive, Kara Helander, told Leaders magazine the next year that she had joined Carlyle because of what she saw as “commitment to diversity and inclusion from the top.”

“It’s not just words, but very tangible action that I’m seeing from our co-C.E.O.s and other leaders across the firm,” she said, describing metrics the firm was using to evaluate progress on such issues.

Ms. Helander did not respond to interview requests. Mr. Lee declined to comment for this article.

Internally, Mr. Youngkin was not known for throwing around diversity-related buzzwords, but he was seen as promoting the careers of senior women.

“One of the big steps we needed to take was to make diversity and inclusion not a program at Carlyle, but to embed it in the way we think about how to grow,” he said in a May 2020 webcast, adding that half of the people who had joined Carlyle the previous year were women. “We’ve still got a long way to go, but I think we’ve made really, really good progress. And the key to this is, it’s about diversity of experience and diversity of thought, not box-ticking.”

During his time as co-chief executive, Carlyle also received a 100 percent rating on the Corporate Equality Index, an assessment from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation focused on workplace policies for L.G.B.T.Q. employees. Criteria that Carlyle met included “equal health coverage for transgender individuals without exclusion for medically necessary care.”

That coverage, Mr. Youngkin noted, reflected state-level requirements. But the rating was also plainly a point of pride for his company, which promoted it frequently.

Asked if he was comfortable with that coverage, Mr. Youngkin said it was management’s job to maintain “an inclusive environment that believed in seeking talent and complied with the law.”

As governor, however, Mr. Youngkin has rolled back some accommodations for L.G.B.T.Q. students and attended Mr. Trump’s signing of an executive order aimed at blocking transgender women and girls from competing in women’s sports.

As the country erupted after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, Mr. Youngkin and Mr. Lee — like so many other corporate and civic leaders — tried to communicate that they grasped the pain of the moment.

“Carlyle has grown and prospered by deliberately building a fabric of partnership with diversity of experiences and perspectives,” they wrote to colleagues that May, vowing to invest “even more resources towards diversity and inclusion.”

That included a new matching funds program “to support organizations that are working on social justice and reform of the U.S. criminal justice system,” including the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Less than a year later, Mr. Youngkin was distancing himself from that letter as he ran in the Republican primary race for governor.

On Sunday, he said he did not recall where he donated and encouraged a staff member to follow up. Rob Damschen, a spokesman for Mr. Youngkin, later said that he had not donated to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“What we stood against, and I still stand against, is the violence, the senseless death of George Floyd, the fact that we had riots in the street, we had Asians that were subjected to hate crimes,” he said. “The letter was an expression of the unacceptability of violence.”

Questions From Critics and Admirers

Mr. Youngkin’s evolution has baffled some who worked with him at Carlyle, none of whom would speak publicly, citing professional constraints or concerns about alienating a man they said they respected personally.

Some mused that perhaps he had drawn distinctions between his conservative private beliefs and upholding the more culturally progressive initiatives that shaped his workplace.

Others wondered whether ambition had prompted a broader transformation. In the interview, Mr. Youngkin insisted he was consistent.

“I have always believed that we are a society built on the equal opportunity that should be available to everyone,” he said. “I’ve always believed that excellence and a meritocracy are at the heart of our nation.”

“The basic premise of D.E.I.,” he added, “moved materially.”

Yet to some of Mr. Youngkin’s onetime supporters, the Republican Party’s emphasis on fighting D.E.I. is a galling distraction from the chaos in Mr. Trump’s Washington, where leaders of some of the nation’s most powerful agencies have thin résumés and where the president’s tariff policies have rocked the stock market.

“OK, we don’t have D.E.I. anymore,” said former Representative Barbara Comstock, an anti-Trump Virginia Republican who is backing former Representative Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat running this year to succeed the term-limited Mr. Youngkin. “What do we have? We have incompetence.”

Kitty Bennett and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.