Trump and his white male supremacist buddies in government and rightwing media have been playing our legacy media and the American people for suckers. And it’s working.
“Big Balls” and his openly racist buddies at DOGE have been, according to reports in the media, scouring federal agencies for “illegal DEI” programs. Meanwhile, rightwing radio hosts are speculating whether the Delta Airlines crash in Toronto this week was the result of a female or Black “DEI hire” pilot flying the plane because Delta has refused to kill off its own DEI programs.
The explicit and implicit message Trump, Musk, and their goon squad have been promoting is that when a woman or Black, disabled, or Hispanic man is hired they are inherently inferior in their intellect and capabilities to the white man from whom that job was taken.
It’s an evil lie.
And every time it gets promoted by Trump, Musk, or the media every woman or Black pilot, manager, doctor, or any other position historically filled by white men can feel white people looking at them and wondering if they’re an “inferior” person hired just because of their gender or the color of their skin.
How’d we get here?
For most of my lifetime, white men have enjoyed a “Mad Men” privileged status when it comes to employment. Part of it was because — after centuries of legal discrimination — Blacks and women were less likely to own businesses or be in management positions to hire staff.
It’s a natural human instinct to want to surround oneself with people who’re consider simpatico; people who look, think, and talk like you do. Thus, white men doing hiring had a built-in bias (sometimes unconscious) to hire other white men. Similarly, many hiring choices are made without even posting job offers because the person doing the hiring “knows someone” who’d be able to do the job.
There’s also the reality of conscious and unconscious bias that tends to keep mostly male and white workplaces that way, and the result of that is that most white Americans’ default assumption is that white people are generally the most competent. After all, look at all those white people who have all those great jobs!
Stepping into this reality, people of good conscience have spent the past half-century trying to work out ways to break up the “old white boy network” of hiring and promotions, to allow highly qualified women and Black men (among others) to have equal, merit-based job opportunities.
Starting as the Civil Rights movement, followed by the 1980s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, a clear effort to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace took form in the 1990s and early 2000s.
It was never meant to elevate incompetent women and Black people into positions above their ability; instead, it was designed to preventincompetent white men from getting jobs for which there are more competent women or Black people.
In other words, by definition “DEI hires” are the most qualified people available, regardless of their race or gender. DEI programs are almost universally meritocratic; their goal is to simply open the hiring door to a wider variety of people beyond just white men.
But you won’t hear that from openly racist rightwing media and Republican politicians; they’re committed to convincing white men that their jobs suck because women and Black people took the “good jobs,” rather than that 45 years of Reaganism/neoliberalism gutted America’s manufacturing base and destroyed our unions.
Thus, when Musk and Trump and their people talk about DEI, what they’re really saying is that women and Black people (among others) are simply inferior to white men, and a giant conspiracy/system — DEI — is handing these inferior people jobs that rightfully belong to white men.
Probably the most disgusting part of this entire charade is how the media goes along with Republicans in this racist, misogynist framing of the issue.
For example, have you ever heard a media commentator, when discussing DEI and the Trump/Musk apartheid war against it, point out that DEI generally guarantees the most qualified people get the job? Have you ever heard them explain that DEI is really just about opening the pool of job candidates to a wider cross-section of Americans?
I haven’t.
I hear them discuss DEI and “DEI hires” as if Trump was right when he knew a woman had piloted the helicopter that crashed into a plane over the Potomac and then blamed it on DEI. As if that woman must be less qualified than the white man who wasn’t piloting the chopper.
And that’s a racist, sexist lie. Why can’t the media just say that?
There’s no more vivid example of white people and men getting hiring preferences over more highly qualified women or minorities than Trump’s cabinet nominees: case in point Pete Hegseth.
Our Secretary of Defense lost no time at stopping the military from recruiting at girls’ schools and the Black Engineer of the Year Awards: he only wants white men as incompetent, alcoholic, and into womanizing as himself in his White Men’s Military.
The reality is that Trump and Musk are all about DEI hires, using their twisted definition of the term. Musk’s team appears to be entirely white and male, as are most of the people Trump surrounds himself with. One could argue, in that context, that DEI stands for “Don, Eric, and Ivanka.”
Let’s just tell the truth. Trump’s anti-DEI policy is about white and male supremacy. Trump’s immigration deportation policy is about white supremacy. And Trump’s assertion that he knows “what the law is” and is above the law is about white billionaire supremacy.
As Delta Airlines knows, DEI hiring — by opening wider the gates through which job applicants can come — insures the best and the brightest become Delta pilots, flight attendants, engineers, etc.
Republicans and rightwing media will complain all day long that air crashes and every other problem are caused by women and Black people being hired into jobs that were historically filled by white men.
But it’s always been a racist, sexist lie and still is today. And the media should have the courage to say so.
Pass it on.