The Anti-Diversity Attacks Have Taken a Dark Turn

Political posturing turns into actual harm

At the end of February, I wrote about how decades of conservatives arguing that government can’t do anything morphed into the chaos we’ve seen from DOGE and the Trump Administration.

The last five weeks have made clear the extent to which the disease has metastasized. One of Musk’s professed reasons for sending out his “what did you do this week?” emails was to uncover fake employees. If they didn’t respond, maybe they were never there. Trump said something similar in one of his daily press avails, doubting that employees were real.

Given the unquestioned premise that the federal government can do no good, arguing that entire departments are promoting Marxist ideology, that USAID is rife with fraud, that Medicaid is full of able-bodied people sitting on the couch eating Cheetos, that technology can do air traffic control, is just a logic extension of the premise.

The same thing has happened with concerns over diversity, equity, and inclusion. What started as vague assertions that people of color were only token hires (and maybe caused plane crashes) has taken a much more strident tone. This is how Justice Amy Coney Barrett gets accused of being a DEI appointment because she was on the majority side of the decision says that funds inappropriately held by the administration had to be released.

Top leaders in the Defense Department were removed as the new SecDef took office. Naturally, they were black or women. Then there has been the removal of all diversity references on government webpages. One presumes this was done through AI reviews of all webpages doing a Control-F to find the offensive words. That’s how pictures of the Enola Gay got removed from DOD history pages.

This is my joke

One could laugh at President Trump referencing “transgender mice”. While there were some hormone-related experiments, these was mostly transgenic research; inserting non-mice genes into mice to study disease.

Things started ratcheting up. The administration said that it would limit federal dollars to any entity — public or private — that pursued diverstiy initiatives. Target and Amazon immediately backed off from their stated policies. Costco opted to keep there’s and Apple stakeholders took a vote to protect their policies.

In mid-February, the Department of Education (before Linda McMahon was confirmed) issued a “Dear Colleague” letter saying that discrimination of any kind “is illegal and morally reprehensible”. The letter suggested that universities had to clean up their policies and programs by the end of February. This letter was quite draconian in its demands and would have crippled many institutions even if they could achieve compliance in two weeks. Many tried while others waited to see how things would play out. After the two weeks passed, the DOE toned down their demands and gave institutions a little more wiggle room.

Then the administration pulled contracts on research that dealt with differential health impacts in disease. They also removed all programs designed to study environmental impacts on minority populations.

This latter piece was encouraged by the Biden administration but has long been a point of need. People in my city living near the SunCorp refinery struggle with differential health issues because of their proximity to the plant and their lower social class status. Does anybody remember Flint or the Ninth Ward of New Orleans? These are critical areas of study and the elimination of federal supports will not improve their health concerns just because the administration deemed them “Woke”.

The elimination of USAID funding follows the same misguided logic. Find something that sounds outrageous (like gay operas) and then cut programs that benefit needy populations around the world or address significant but manageable health concerns deems them unworthy because they’re “not like us”. As in the health concerns above, people will die needlessly.

President Trump, in his speech Tuesday night (I didn’t watch) said that we were now a country “based on merit”. Now that the rhetorical bans have eliminated discussion about inequality and its structural antecedents, what follows is that white men of a certain type are not only leaders but the default position against which all others are compared.

I saw a reference today that said that when the DOGE-bros get to a new agency, their first question is to determine the SAT or IQ scores of leadership. This, supposedly, is merit. However, given some of what they have recommended, it’s clear to me that there are better measures of leadership —like successful experience — that many of those arbitrarily removed from government had in spades.

Some book updates: Thanks to Scot McKnight for continuing his weekly review of chapters from the book. I have an interview with Sojourners tomorrow and a podcast with Future Church on Friday.