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When the Kamala Harris campaign started using the chant, “We’re not going back, We’re not going back,” I don’t think anyone realized how prescient that chant was in capturing what would happen if Trump won.

In the two weeks of his second term he has taken immediate steps to ensure the nation goes back to the days of white privilege in which he grew up.

That is exactly what his attack on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) is all about. But I wonder how many Americans actually know what DEI is.

I am confident Trump has no idea. He didn’t say or do anything about it during his first term, but it was in place just as it is now. The only difference is that he now knows his voters like it when he attacks it so he does.

The history of DEI makes one thing clear. Having people opposed to it is nothing new, but as misguided, uniformed, and ugly as it has always been. Let me explain.

The roots of DEI stretches back to the 1964 Civil Rights Act signed by President Lyndon Johnson that made discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin illegal in employment.

The Civil Rights Act was followed by affirmative action policies that were implemented in various organizations, businesses, governments, and especially in colleges and universities, to address the historical underrepresentation of black Americans that was the by-product of ubiquitous racism.

Then the women’s movement as the heir to women’s suffrage began to raise the nation’s awareness of the extent to which women, both white and black, had been and still were experiencing discriminatory practices regarding employment, leading to DEI programs to add a focus on providing equity to women in order to make American businesses, industries, and schools more diverse and inclusive.

By the 1980s DEI programs sought to address the exclusion and widespread discrimination against gay and lesbian Americans, and then eventually expanded to include transgender individuals who were also experiencing open and at times vicious discrimination in schools, the workplace, and just about every aspect of American life.

Government, businesses, and schools began to establish offices in order to be more intentional in becoming more diverse, more inclusive, and more equitable in their employment practices and advancement opportunities.

Diversity training workshops and seminars became common during this time that educated employees on cultural differences, unconscious biases, and prejudices common in the workplace.

Today programs, policies, and laws aimed at righting the historic impact of prejudices and discrimination in all its manifestations are called DEI because the equity efforts have in fact become more diverse and inclusive of individuals and groups not initially targeted.

The fundamental truth about DEI is this. It is a sign of our nation’s commitment to live out the dream on which our nation was and remains founded as stated in the Constitution:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

DEI is the “we the people” at work to help us become a more perfect union.

But from the beginning, there were people who didn’t want to form a more perfect union. They preferred a “union” less than perfect in protecting white male privilege of land owners, not a “union” that gave the federal government any power to upset the status quo.

That resistance became an enduring backlash, a strong and adverse reaction to social change.

Heather Cox Richardson says the backlash used – and uses – the race baiting claim that Affirmative Action – and now DEI – is nothing more than an “attempt to redistribute cash from white taxpayers to undeserving racial minorities, especially black Americans.”

In short, the goal of the backlash was – and is – to protect the status quo, specifically, male white privilege.

Women’s Suffrage was the first challenge to that status quo, then the Civil Rights movement, followed by the women’s movement and, finally, public efforts to recognize gay and transgender Americans as full citizens.

DEI is the term that brings together under one name all the efforts to give full and equal rights to everyone in the quest for America being more diverse, more equitable, and inclusive. It hasn’t been perfect, but it has helped us as a people grow into the nation the majority of us want to be.

Affirmative Action is gone now, but in the 60s it opened doors of opportunity to minorities that could not be opened any other way, but in 1978 the backlash led to a 1978 Supreme Court ruling that state universities “go too far when they set a certain quota for the number of minority students who enroll.”

The ruling was in response to the first so-called reverse discrimination law suit filed by Allan Bakke, a white applicant at the University of California (Davis) med school because of its admission policy that used race as one of its criteria.

But the court didn’t give Bakke everything he wanted. Instead, it upheld Affirmative Action itself, stating that state’s did in fact have a compelling interests to consider race as a means of creating a diverse classroom environment.

That lasted until 2023 when the current Supreme Court conservative majority not surprisingly declared Affirmative Action unconstitutional and even unnecessary in today’s environment, much the way in 2015 they foolishly struck down the requirement of certain states with a history of voter suppression needing preapproval by the Justice Department before changing their voting laws.

As a footnote, the day after the Robert’s Court said pre-requirement was out of date with the changing times, 13 states introduced voter suppression laws. Since then that number has climbed to 33.

Trump’s criticism of DEI as “absolute nonsense,” accusing those for it living in a different universe from those who don’t, reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is.

Dismantling important equity initiatives with one fell swoop of his pen, Trump is de facto saying that racism and sexism historically common in high-paying corporations and industries is acceptable again.

In the process he has also created chaos among government contractors who are scrambling to know how to follow Trump’s orders and at the same time follow federal anti-discrimination laws like Title VII and mandates for inclusion of veterans and disabled workers.

But it’s his gratuitous meanness toward transgender Americans that is so evil. The U. S. recognizes only two sexes, male and female, he declared, as if we didn’t already know that, ignoring the fact that experts tell us that gender is not the same as sex, and that “intersex” individuals, mostly teens and young adults, who feel inside themselves that their sex is not who they really are, a real because who they are is the result of biology, not choice. They may even show physical characteristics consistent with those feelings.

DEI programs are not intending to make whites feel guilty for how black citizens were treated in the past. They are programs intended to prevent those mistakes being repeated in the present.

Neither do they end-up “making boys into girls” or “girls into boys,” as Trump foolishly claims.

Trump’s actions is the equivalent of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, destroying something rather than taking the time to understand it before making broad based decisions about it.

His orders will even require transgender men in federal prisons who are in transition to becoming a woman be transferred to male facilities. The potential abuse they face is unimaginable.

Part of the tragedy of what Trump is doing is the fact that DEI has been allowing us to protect transgender civil rights, especially teenagers, as our understanding of transgenderism grows.

It also puts the weight of government behind listening to medical science in the hope that the more we learn the more misperceptions will change that lie behind transgender adults and kids being ridiculed, mistreated, discriminated against, and even brutalized and killed because they are different.

Trump doesn’t care about any of that. His halting of USAID to the poorest of the poor in the world that is resulting in babies, children and adults dying as I write this reveals how cruel and callous he is.

In truth, DEI is not a threat to anyone who appreciates what diversity brings to a group, who understands that equity is the only way to make a just society work, and who knows inclusion is the way we ensure that the benefits of being a free people are extended to everyone.

But here’s the real irony. The group that has benefited the most from DEI programs are not transgender Americans, gays and lesbians, or even racial minorities. The people who’ve benefited the most, especially in regard to the workplace, are white women.

Trump doesn’t know that. I doubt the people who agree with what he is doing do either. But, of course, knowledge has no value for Trump or Trumpers. He prefers to tell lies and they prefer to believe them.

There should be no applauding of Trump’s efforts to destroy DEI initiatives. It should make us sad and angry. We should be proud that women forced the nation to see them as full citizens, proud that our government passed the 1960s civil rights laws, proud that hundreds of minority students got an education or a job because of Affirmative Action, and proud of the rights, opportunities, and employment gains made among gay and transgender Americans because of DEI programs.

All of it has made America better. That’s something Donald Trump will never do.