Before Tuesday's debate, Donald Trump and his supporters insisted that Kamala Harris was a lightweight who was barely able to speak coherently. Trump has called Harris "dumb as a rock," "low-IQ," "unable to put two sentences together," and "unable to put two sentences together without a teleprompter."

Conservatives have fixated on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in recent years as, in their view, a kind of reverse discrimination against white people, white men in particular, that elevates people to jobs they are unqualified to do. Inadvertently, their reactions to Harris, and her subsequent thrashing of Trump, illustrate why diversity outreach is important and necessary in a world where people still face discriminatory assumptions because of their race and gender.

Now, it would be simpler for conservatives who claimed Harris was an imbecile to admit that maybe the current vice president and former senator, attorney general, and district attorney is just smarter than they were giving her credit for. But that would require abandoning the assumptions about Black people and women that drove them to make their initial assessment. They cannot do that, because doing so would illustrate why diversity efforts are necessary in the first place: that plainly competent people are often wrongly assumed to be stupid because they are not white men, and denied opportunities as a result.

Nothing is inherently racist about arguing that a Black person is incompetent; what is racist is assuming that because he or she is Black. Conservatives have taken to referring to DEI as "didn't earn it."

Trump was born a multimillionaire who drove one business after another into the ground, and his reputation as a brilliant businessman is largely due to him playing one on television. His term as president was mired by incompetence and corruption despite being relatively uneventful, and when faced with a real crisis - the coronavirus pandemic - he proceeded to bungle it in a catastrophic fashion that led to needless deaths and economic calamity. Vance has spent very little time in elected office, an office he won mostly on the success of his memoir and a Trump primary endorsement in a red state. He appears to have been selected as the vice-presidential nominee on the basis of his willingness to debase himself on Trump's behalf. Neither of them has a compelling record of public service.

That's the irony - the actual "didn't earn it" candidates are the two white guys running on the Republican ticket.