I think we all know, don’t we?
Whatever happened to to Critical Race Theory, also known by its three letter acronym, CRT? If you’ll recall it was the cause celebre of the 2021 Virginia Governor’s race which had all the DC tongues wagging about the resurgence of the right wing culture war. “Moms for Liberty” which grew out of the anti-mask, anti vax crusades of the pandemic quickly adopted it as their crusade and was given credit for Glenn Youngkin’s win that year. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made it one of the primary targets of his “anti-woke” campaign for re-election in 2022 and rode it hard during his presidential run the next year.
The whole movement against CRT was the brainchild of a right wing activist by the name of Christopher Rufo who single-handedly pushed the idea into the mainstream in 2020, during the pandemic. He had been making some waves about it for a while and caught the attention of Tucker Carlson, then Fox News’ top talent. He appeared on his show and made a big splash with this comment:
“Conservatives need to wake up. This is an existential threat to the United States. And the bureaucracy, even under Trump, is being weaponized against core American values. And I’d like to make it explicit: The President and the White House—it’s within their authority to immediately issue an executive order to abolish critical-race-theory training from the federal government. And I call on the President to immediately issue this executive order—to stamp out this destructive, divisive, pseudoscientific ideology.”
Most people had no idea what it was but the Republican base was very excited at the chance to attack anything that sounded like a discussion of racism. Some school districts banned the teaching of CRT which was a very easy thing to do since schools weren’t teaching it in the first place. (It was a graduate school topic that never had any application to elementary and high school curriculum.) There was a spate of book banning and cancellations of African American history classes, particularly in Florida where Desantis was making his bones as a MAGA-style warrior and brought Rufo in as an adviser. But after the GOP defeat of 2022 and DeSantis’s spectacular flameout in the presidential race, CRT faded as a right wing boogeyman.
It had been replaced by a new three letter enemy, DEI, which stands for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. It too was the brainchild of Rufo and thanks to the disastrous restoration of Donald Trump to the White House, we are watching it being turned into policy on a national scale.
DEI is basically a concept that’s been around since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which made discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin illegal in employment. Over the decades as people began to fully recognize that the historic marginalization of those groups required greater effort to address that discrimination, the various institutions in society from corporations to academia to government put policies in place to ensure they had a fair shot. It eventually included ethnic, religious and LGBTQ+ communities and became part of the American workplace.
It was in 2020 when the George Floyd protests and the Black Lives Matter movement galvanized the whole planet and precipitated efforts to ramp up DEI programs across society that the backlash began in earnest. I’m sure right wingers had hated it forever, for obvious reasons, and there were plenty of other people who felt that some of it was overkill, fuelling the larger “anti-woke” fervor that had the MAGA base up in arms over everything from kitty litter in the schools to Mr. Potatohead to rainbow onesies at Target.
Trump explicitly ran on ending DEI throughout his campaign much as he had run against “common core” in his first campaign but he had no real idea what it was. It got an applause line from the MAGA faithful and that’s always good enough for him. But there are many people around him who do know what it is, namely the Project 2025 authors who explicitly called for a variety of terms to be deleted from “from every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists” as well as the dismantling of every DEI program that exists in the government.
He’s doing it exactly as they instructed. All the DEI programs have been cancelled and the people running them have been fired. Scientific research is being strangled by orders to the NIH and CDC as well as all University grantees to eliminate any research focused on diverse populations (which includes “women.”) Trump even blamed DEI for the fatal plane crash in Washington DC in February suggesting that the FAA had hired unqualified air traffic controllers. The EEOC and the Department of Justice are going after law firms, universities and private companies demanding they account for their DEI programs, suggesting they are guilty of discriminatory hiring practices. It is a full court press across all of society.
If you want to know the real motivation for all this you need to look no further than what’s been going on at the Pentagon over the last couple of weeks. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made it quite clear before he was nominated that he believes racial minorities, women and LGBTQ members of the military are inferior. His first step upon taking the job was to have Trump fire the Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (whom he had called “DEI” earlier) replacing him with a white man and the two top women officers leaving the military without a single woman in a four-star general or admiral leadership position.
The Pentagon web sites recognizing the contributions of racial minorities such as the Tuskegee Airmen and the Navajo Code talkers, as well as all the women pilots going all the way back to WWII, were taken down with urls that distinctly said “DEI.” They removed all the references to the same at the website of Arlington National Cemetery.
The Pentagon restored some of the web sites as they’ve caused public outcry but many that aren’t famous will probably go unnoticed. But even if they put them all back, we can see the intention. The Pentagon spokesman said “we salute them for their strong and in many cases heroic service to our country, full stop. We do not view or highlight them through the prism of immutable characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, or sex.”
In other words, they do not believe that the stories of these particular patriots having overcome the discrimination and adversity that led to them to being the “firsts” and the “few” are important. In fact, they want to erase all traces of that discrimination and adversity altogether and pretend it never happened. They want to pretend that the world is a meritocracy where white men just happen to be the best. DEI says that’s not true and they are not going to stand for it.
The State Department Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Darren Beattie said it most plainly in a post on twitter a while back: “Competent white men must be put in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”
That’s what the fight against DEI is all about. And in just two months, Trump and his henchmen have gotten a vast swathe of American society scrambling to ensure that no one will ever say otherwise again.
Salon
