The Racist Undercurrents of Trump's Anti-DEI Agenda

Each day of the Felon's second regime seems to bring new worries and fears to many Americans, especially those who are nonwhite, foreign born or non-heterosexual. Despite untruthful denials, the Felon is steadily implementing Project 2025, a white Christian nationalist agenda (with emphasis on the "white") that in many ways seeks to return the nation back to the era before the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-1960's, a time when Jim Crow still held sway in the South and LGBT citizens largely remained invisible out of self-protection.  Many of the architects of  Project 2025 are the descendants of whites who opposed desegregation and from religious groups that seek to inflict their perverted form of supposed Christianity on all of society and to punish those who fail to conform.  For these people and their adherents anything that impedes their ability to discriminate and mistreat others is labeled as discrimination against them and anything that allows women and particularly blacks to succeed is an assault on the rights and privileges of white heterosexual males.  As the Felon's anti-DEI crusade continues, the racism that underlies the agenda is becoming increasingly clear.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this reality"

As Navy divers searched the Potomac River for bodies from the worst air crash in the United States in 20 years, President Trump zeroed in on what he saw as the cause: hiring programs that promote diversity.

The meaning behind his words was clear, that diversity equals incompetence. And for many historians, civil rights leaders, scholars and citizens, it was an unmistakable message of racism in plain sight at the highest levels of American government.

“His attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion aren’t about a particular program or some acronym — they’re just a sanitized substitute for the racist comments that can no longer be spoken openly,” Margaret Huang, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s president and chief executive . . . . “But the message is the same, that women, ​Black and brown communities are inherently less capable, and if they hold positions of power or authority in government or business, it must be because the standards were lowered.​”

In the weeks since he took office, Mr. Trump has made a point of purging the federal government of D.E.I. initiatives in order to usher in what he called a “colorblind and merit-based” society.

In his actions, Mr. Trump has aligned himself with those who are brandishing the term D.E.I. as a catchall for discrimination against white people, and using it as a pejorative to attack nonwhite and female leaders as unqualified for their positions.

The issue plays into deep tensions among Americans about the role of race in society and helped supercharge Mr. Trump’s political comeback. Many voters, conservative and not, hoped to see a correction to what they saw as progressive politics gone too far.

D.E.I., in effect, became an all-purpose target for society’s ills.

“It’s the latest term that serves as a proxy for race, and it’s used as a politically expedient slur, as a way to stoke white grievances and to give a convenient scapegoat to whatever ails our nation,” said Timothy Welbeck, the director of Temple University’s Center for Anti-Racism.

A White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, said Democrats’ focus on D.E.I. undermined “decades of progress toward true equality.”

In Mr. Trump’s remarks last week on the plane crash, he cited no evidence that diversity programs had anything to do with the fatal accident. When asked how he could say that diversity hiring was to blame, he said, “I have common sense.”

In a misleading claim, Mr. Trump insinuated that the administration of President Barack Obama — the first Black president — had stocked the Federal Aviation Administration with people who could not do their jobs.

The concept behind the federal government’s diversity programs is not new; it developed as a result of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The goal is to remove discriminatory barriers for women, minority groups and people with disabilities from jobs. The earliest benefactors were white women, white people in rural areas and disabled veterans, Mr. Welbeck said.

The idea was that qualified people were being overlooked.

Critics of D.E.I. say an emphasis on diversity means that hiring standards are compromised and that the focus on race and gender is a distraction from more urgent goals and the overall mission. . . . . But in the F.A.A. and elsewhere, officials say, the programs follow the same aptitude, medical and security standards for all hires.

“If it was all about merit, then we wouldn’t have Pete Hegseth,” said Mr. Abdul, referring to Mr. Trump’s defense secretary. Mr. Hegseth, a veteran and former Fox News host, took over the job of overseeing the Defense Department and its three million employees with little management experience beyond running veterans groups that he was accused of mismanaging.

For many, Mr. Trump’s attacks on D.E.I. point to his long history of inflaming racial tensions using dog whistles — from a campaign dating back to the 1980s against five Black men who were wrongfully convicted and ultimately exonerated of assaulting and raping a white woman, to his attempt to paint the first Black president as a noncitizen. But now, they say, the dog whistle is a bullhorn.

The uproar over D.E.I. is similar to the one over critical race theory a few years ago, in which conservative activists alleged that schools were indoctrinating students to become radical race warriors, and shaming students by teaching them about the history of slavery.

The architect of the movement to turn critical race theory into a Republican rallying cry, Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, laid out a blueprint for Mr. Trump in December to eliminate “left-wing radicalism” from the federal government.

In an emailed response to an inquiry from The New York Times last week, Mr. Rufo said that he had been in touch with members of the Trump policy team since the summer of 2020, when the fight against critical race theory began. He said Mr. Trump’s D.E.I. fight had been years in the making by several conservative groups whose staff members have now joined the administration. He called the administration’s execution of their plans “phenomenal.”

Civil rights groups say that it may be a new day, but that the themes have clear echoes, including the years after Reconstruction, which were marked by a violent backlash against Black people, and the tenure of President Woodrow Wilson, who resegregated the federal work force.

Samuel Spital, the associate director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, said Mr. Trump’s dismantling of D.E.I. was an attempt to “remake our society.”

It is an effort, he said, to “collectively gaslight the American people” about the real victims of discrimination in the United States.