DEI Is Now a Four Letter Word

I’d love to be writing about something fun. Something that makes us think about things in a new way, or something exciting that will take us into the future. There are lots of such things happening, but there’s too many Orwellian actions happening that I can’t be silent about.

Diversity, we’re told, is actually a pretext for racism – against white people. Equity is foolhardy at best and pernicious at worst. Inclusion only matters if you are the “right” kind of person. “Meritocracy” is the new buzzword; we want only the “best and brightest,” with none of the lowering of standards that we’re being told comes with trying to ensure that everyone has a fair chance to prove their merits.

The Trump Administration has declared war on DEI. It has fired scores of workers whose jobs involve DEI, has asked other workers to inform on people they think may be involved in DEI, and is searching out even workers who attended diversity training (mandated or not). All that would be horrifying enough but it isn’t ending there.

Federal websites are being cleansed of any references to anything that might be construed as DEI. Pages are being edited, or taken down entirely. The NIH has ground to a halt until the appropriate authorities can ensure that no grants are being even to anything that might possibly be related to DEI. The CDC has been forced to pull papers from its researchers that are up for publication for similar review.

The Atlantic reports: “the government was, as of yesterday evening, intending to target and replace, at a minimum, several “suggested keywords”—including “pregnant people, transgender, binary, non-binary, gender, assigned at birth, binary [sic], non-binary [sic], cisgender, queer, gender identity, gender minority, anything with pronouns”—in CDC content.”

Thousands of pages of data from the CDC and Census Bureau have “disappeared,” and the same from other agencies. Health data is prominent among the missing. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, told Science: ““I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t know it was going to be this bad. It’s like a data apocalypse.”

Just one example

Elon Musk, who has no official power yet seems to have control over government IT and the data it contains, is shutting down U.S.A.I.D., who provides almost $40b annually in health services, disaster relief, anti-poverty, and other social mission programs. Previously the Administration had shutdown, then reinstated, PEPFAR, a vital international HIV program that has been credited with saving millions of lives.

The President and his team even tried to blame last week’s Washington D.C. plane-helicopter collision on DEI.  That’s just “common sense, ok,” according to President Trump.

As if all that wasn’t enough, The Washington Post reported:

Late Friday, newly confirmed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the agency to stop commemorating cultural celebrations such as Black History Month. The message to staff was headlined: “Identity Months Dead at DoD.”

On Thursday, the FBI directed janitorial staff at Quantico to paint over a multicolored mural that once featured the words “FAIRNESS,” “LEADERSHIP,” “INTEGRITY,” “COMPASSION” and “DIVERSITY.”

I can’t even…

The breadth and depth of the changes caught many off guard, but people are starting to respond. Stat reports that CDC’s advisory board has demanded to be told why information has gone missing from CDC websites, and when it will be restored. “Silence is not an option right now,” said one advisory board member, Daniel Dawes. “I try to use the term unprecedented sparingly, but I believe this is an unprecedented moment. There will be dire consequences if they do not restore this information and it may not come back if we do not speak out.”  

The Guardian reports that a union representing 5,000 NIH researchers filed a legally binding demand to bargain over the sweeping changes. Marjorie Levinstein, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse and a union bargaining committee member, told The Guardian: “We cannot do our research effectively, and this is putting into question delaying research on cancer and diabetes, on drug addiction, on heart disease. And this is going to delay medical breakthroughs that the American people deserve.”

Alexander Jordan Lara, a postbaccalaureate fellow at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research and also a member of the union’s bargaining committee, added: “We were anticipating changes, and that it would be a new relationship we would have to manage but I don’t think anyone expected this firehose.”

We should have expected it.

Let’s be clear what all this is. “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 said.

When I heard “meritocracy,” I think of an exchange in the TV adaption of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere. When the rich employer criticizes her minority employee about her life choices, the latter responds: “You didn’t make good choices. You had good choices. Options that being rich, and white, and entitled gave you.”

Somehow the meritocracy never see that.

And let’s be clear where this is all going.  As George Orwell’s 1984 said:

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.

Sadly, we’re only beginning to understand.

As Professor Dawes said, silence is not an option now. Make yourself heard.