Gov. Greg Abbott touts dismantling DEI as a way to build a stronger Texas. Instead, it’s offered a convenient pretext for defunding public schools and dismantling higher education. Credit: Instagram / govabbott

Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.

Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn. — Martin Luther King Jr., “Where Do We Go From Here?” (1967)

In one of history’s unforgiving ironies, President Donald Trump’s second inauguration fell on Martin Luther King Day.

“In his honor, we will strive together to make his dream a reality,” Trump declared to thunderous applause. “We will make his dream come true.”

Safe to say Trump’s bygone vision of national greatness would count among King’s worst nightmares.

Where King inspired us to “develop a world perspective,” Trump touts America First. Where King preached nonviolence, Trump fomented a riotous mob to storm the Capitol. And on his first day in office, Trump ordered the termination of all “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility” programs, abbreviated as DEIA, or more commonly, DEI.

“What lawful DEIA programs actually do is expand recruitment efforts — interviewing not just at the Ivy League but also at state universities, community colleges and historically Black colleges and universities, for example — so that a broader cross-section of talent can compete for job opportunities,” civil rights attorney Karla Gilbride, former counsel for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, wrote in Slate magazine.

“[DEIA programs] also remove barriers that would make it difficult for some workers to advance, like offering training and networking opportunities at different times of day rather than only in the evenings when people with caregiving responsibilities would have a hard time attending. And [they] seek to make sure that all workers are valued and supported, such as by having floating holidays that allow people with different religious observances to take off from work. Lawful DEIA efforts could also involve ensuring that any company systems accessed by employees are compatible with assistive technology used by people with disabilities … which hits particularly close to home for me as a blind person.”

Even so, those affordances to create welcoming places to work and to learn are what Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order maligned as “shameful discrimination.”

Once again following Trump’s lead, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott seconded that false framing in his Feb. 2 State of the State address.

“We must purge DEI from every corner of our schools and return the focus to merit,” Abbott asserted.

In Texas as elsewhere, DEI has served as a convenient pretext for defunding public schools and dismantling higher education — axes that reactionaries would grind regardless of whatever buzzwords were popular.

Yet who would presume that accommodating a person in a wheelchair, for example, discriminates against those more able-bodied? As Gilbride noted in her Slate article, former President Joe Biden’s DEI orders, since rescinded by Trump, “covered such topics as making sure federal office buildings were physically accessible to people with disabilities.”

Must a meritocracy be a needlessly difficult society to get around in?

If “the Biden Administration forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs … into virtually all aspects of the federal government,” as Trump’s order alleged, we’d surely expect to mark the effect on our nation’s largest workforce: federal employees.

However, the numbers tell a different story. More than 75% of senior executives in government jobs are white and more than 62% are men. Would truly merit-based hiring mean an even greater percentage of white men with anything less supplying knock-down proof of so-called reverse racism or sexism?

“DEI has become the new N-word,” progressive broadcaster Mehdi Hasan opined in The Guardian this month.

Trump’s bygone vision of national greatness would count among Martin Luther King Jr.’s worst nightmares. Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Rowland Scherman

Hasan is now the editor-in-chief at Zeteo, an independent news organization he started after MSNBC cancelled his show around the same time he stepped up his uncompromising coverage of the decimation of Gaza. In other words, he’s someone who persevered in the face of actual cancel culture..

As evidence that DEI functions as a coded slur, Hasan quoted Trump advisor Alina Habba, who claimed during a Fox News appearance that Biden’s White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre “was put in there for DEI reasons.”

Jean-Pierre earned a master’s degree from Columbia University and went on to lecture in international and public affairs. She also worked on the successful presidential bids of Barack Obama. Call her a dummy if you like, but she’s far from unqualified. It seems obvious she’s ripe for targeting by MAGA mouthpieces because she’s Black and gay.

Indeed, the last time “DEI” was trending as high as right now on Google internet searches was back in July 2024. That’s when Republicans including Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett delighted in calling Vice President Kamala Harris a “DEI hire” shortly after she became the Democratic nominee. Whatever her shortcomings, unbiased political observers would put her credentials up against most any of Trump’s cabinet picks, who were chosen more for their loyalty and capacity to troll than on their merits.

For Hasan, DEI “is thrown around … for the express purpose of undermining Black people in public life.” And the term’s loose deployment has overshot the absurd.

“Plane crash? Blame DEI. Wildfires in LA? Blame DEI. Bridge collapse? Blame DEI,” Hasan lampooned, linking to receipt after receipt. “This isn’t a good-faith critique of diversity policies — whether they actually work or not; whether they restrict free speech; whether they are corporate box-ticking exercises. No, this is the weaponization of a three-letter term to denigrate Black people and pretend the political and economic advancement of minority communities over the past 60 years was a mistake.”

MLK devoted his life to that advancement. Now, an Office of Management and Budget memo sent out on the administration’s seventh day proclaimed, “The use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity … is a waste of taxpayer dollars.”

“It is worth noting that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely,” King accurately stated in 1968 at an event honoring what would have been the 100th birthday of one of his mentors, W.E.B. Du Bois, the father of American sociology.

“It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a communist,” King continued. “Our irrational obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking.”

Although minority outreach and boring sensitivity orientations hardly qualify as Marxist, the right-wing clickbait machine’s stoking of outrage over DEI appears to be goosestepping us straight into real danger.

A “DEI Watch List” now circulating on MAGA websites features photos, names and personal info of state health workers, mostly Black employees within the Department of Health and Human Services.

“It’s clear racism,” Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told NBC News. “This is a scare tactic to try to intimidate people who are trying to do their work and do it admirably.”

“Racism exists, always has, always will, unfortunately. It’s a disaster,” NBA legend Charles Barkley lamented on an Inside The NBA special devoted to MLK Day. “And I wish people would understand that politicians do a good job of making us fight with each other. They try to make it about Black, white, immigration, homosexuality and all these different things, but what it is, is rich people making people not like each other. And until we address that, we’re never gonna be successful.”

That’s a central thesis of Du Bois’ magnum opus, Black Reconstruction, the history of how newly emancipated Blacks and their Republican allies tried to expand our democracy, only to fall short as wealthy elites from both North and South colluded to strategically divide and re-conquer.

President Andrew Johnson, for example, terminated the Freedmen’s Bureau, intended to help the formerly enslaved establish homesteads and find jobs, due to objections over — you guessed it — alleged discrimination against whites.

One need not be an eminent historian to draw a line from Johnson to Trump’s recent edicts.

Not that the old-school civil rights guard is taking all this laying down. Ninety-four-year-old labor leader Dolores Huerta, who helped found the United Farm Workers, has called for a “Latino freeze” to boycott companies that cravenly rolled back their DEI initiatives after Trump’s election.

While anti-woke dittoheads target the nation’s caregivers for harassment, real anti-racists target their civil disobedience at the largest corporations on Earth.

DEI programs are not reparations for slavery and segregation — something supported by more than 75% of Black Americans — nor even John F. Kennedy’s now-discarded idea of affirmative action. We can exhaust a lot of energy debunking willful disinformation claiming DEI somehow lowers standards or imposes quotas — the latter of which have been illegal since the 1970s. Every air traffic controller, every surgeon, every student still had to pass the same tests as before.

And while DEI is a painfully long way from healing the injustices of the past, if we can’t even defend half-measures, what hope do we have of laying a sturdier foundation for an egalitarian future?

“In closing it would be well to remind white America of its debt to Dr. Du Bois,” King summed up in the commemoration of his friend. “When they corrupted African American history, they distorted American history, because we’re too big a part of the building of this nation to be written out of it … . White America, drenched with lies, has lived too long in a fog of ignorance. Dr. Du Bois gave them a gift of truth for which they should eternally be indebted to him.”

Until we repair the tattered remains of MLK’s dream, Donald Trump has every intention of stopping payment on that check.

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This article appears in Feb 5-18, 2025.