The war against D.E.I. and us

How many people can actually say what “diversity, equity, and inclusion” even means or why the Trump administration should target it for eradication as a dangerous “anti-American ideology”?

Why should there be anything particularly wrong with taking specific measures to include more Americans from historically disadvantaged backgrounds, such as racial minorities and disabled people, in more areas of our national life? Generally that’s a good thing in a pluralistic democracy, I would think.

In declaring a national culture war against diversity, equity, and inclusion, the Trump administration has turned U.S. life upside down, and in doing so, turned the lives of Jewish Americans into chaos. Trump’s drive to remove funding from the U.S. Department of Education and then abolish it threatens the continuation of its office for civil rights, the very body that has been the main vehicle to investigate and resolve complaints about antisemitism on college campuses. Canceling billions of dollars of already allocated funding for scientific research at institutions like Harvard University in the name of eradicating D.E.I. and antisemitism does immeasurable harm to the Jewish students there who are engaging in this research.

In February, Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defense secretary, announced that he was canceling the Pentagon’s annual Holocaust days of remembrance along with Black History Month, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and other observances that he claimed “erode camaraderie” in the ranks of the military. In March, Pentagon websites were scrubbed on any related content.

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The notion that the president’s war against D.E.I. is somehow intended to fight against antisemitism looks even thinner when you consider some other aspects of it. Alliyah Kazan, a Jewish senior at the University of Iowa who worked as a waitress at a campus restaurant, writes in the Des Moines Register that she turned to her college’s D.E.I. office for support and resources after confronting a customer with a swastika tattoo in the center of his bald forehead. But now the office has been closed by the state board of regents in furtherance of the Trump-Republican agenda. The president of Iowa State University, one of the three state schools affected, announced the closing of the program by referring to these priorities: “A young man, young white man, from rural Iowa, could come and be in a learning community and find a place where they belong.” A similar concern for a white (and Christian) sensitivity came out in the recent speech by Elon Musk telling Germans that there is “too much focus on past guilt” in their country and they should vote for the neo-Nazi linked far right Alternative for Germany party (AfD).

The anti-D.E.I. culture war has focused heavily on restricting teaching the history of Black Americans while at the same time restoring the symbols of the Confederacy, some of which had been taken down under previous administrations. Thus, one of Defense Secretary Hegseth’s first steps upon assuming office was to reinstate the names of Confederate generals Benning and Bragg to military bases in Georgia and North Carolina.

Trump’s Make America Great Again, by definition, has always been about catering to the nostalgia in some quarters for a cleaned-up version of the good old days — the years before the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the LGBT rights revolution. But a great many of those years were also before Jews were recognized as fully American. I can hardly imagine the degree of open anti-Jewish discrimination and hostility that my parents experienced in their lifetimes, but I have seen the vestiges. All but one of the 30 years I spent in public accounting were at the medium-to-small CPA practices Jewish accountants established because the large firms that catered to Fortune 500 clients never admitted appreciable numbers of our kin to their employment.

Like any other broadly defined movement, efforts at achieving diversity can be complicated, and in some cases such efforts can also go off the rails. Two Jewish employees at Stanford University’s Counseling & Psychological Services division filed a complaint a few years ago that they were wrongly told that “victims of Jew-hatred do not merit the attention of the D.E.I. committee,” because “Jews, unlike other minority groups, possess privilege and power.” We will undoubtedly hear of other disturbing cases in which some ideologues of the far left omit our people’s narrative from their list of folks who need inclusion. But this is far from the main picture.

The war on woke is hardly all a cultural thing, of course. More than 300 impoverished, mostly Black families in rural Lowndes County, Alabama, were beginning to benefit from the start of a federal program instituted under the Biden administration to help deal with inadequate sewage systems that were causing water infected with human waste to back up inside their homes. The Alabama Department of Public Health had not addressed the problem meaningfully. A 2017 study conducted by health professionals from Baylor College of Medicine found that one in every three adults in the county had the intestinal parasite hookworm, which was thought to have been largely eradicated in the U.S. Unfortunately for Lowndes County residents, the federal program initiated during Biden’s term was classified within the Justice Department’s files under the heading of “environmental justice.” That was enough for the incoming Trump bureaucrat Harmeet K. Dhillon to announce an end to the federal aid in April. “The DOJ will no longer push ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through a distorting, DEI lens,” Dhillon said.

Any discussion of President Donald Trump’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion would not be complete without mentioning the recent threats to the museums that are the prime repositories of our national history. A March 27 executive order from the president promised to “remove improper ideology” from, among other sites, “the Smithsonian Institution and its museums … and the National Zoo.” It’s hard to imagine what type of “improper ideology” the administration may worry attaches to the National Zoo. But the application of the anti-D.E.I. chainsaw to the 21 museums and the educational and research complex of the Smithsonian, a national treasure and the world’s largest such establishment, would have to be of great concern. The anxiety has been focused on the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which I had the privilege of exploring during a day in Washington six years ago. However, the Jewish Community Relation Council of Greater Washington has voiced its own dismay at the recent removal of the former Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff and a number of other Biden administration appointees from the board of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, long before the expiration of their five-year terms. What this type of politicization might mean for the future of the Holocaust Museum is not yet clear.

My strongest memory from my 2019 visit to the National Museum of African American History was the basement floor, which shows in graphic detail the artifacts of the centuries in which the ancestors of our African American friends and neighbors were held as property — that is, as slaves. It is a true but not a pretty sight, which may be the reason the anti-D.E.I. campaigners in Trumpworld have targeted the museum for cutting. If we allow that to happen, we can no longer consider ourselves Jews. After all, we were slaves in Egypt once. Or is that something we only say once a year at Passover?

Mark Lurinsky of Montclair recently retired from a career in public accounting. He is an activist in local politics and a member of the steering committee of J Street’s New Jersey chapter.