Category Archives: Racial Equality

The War On Inclusion

It’s a simple word, intended to communicate an equally simple concept. “Inclusion” is the practice or policy of extending equal access to opportunities and resources for people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalized. In other words, it’s an affirmative effort to avoid discriminating against people based upon their race, religion or disability…a commitment to simple fairness.

The goal is to treat people as individuals, to avoid unfair exclusions that aren’t based upon the  deficits of a particular person but rather upon the practice of stereotyping all members of a group–a practice properly described as discrimination. What is it about that goal that so terrifies the MAGA cult? 

Here in Indiana, our MAGA Governor Mike Braun has proudly announced the elimination of “DEI” from hundreds of state programs and websites. As various outlets around the state have reported, that effort has included cancellation of grants to reduce racial health inequities, elimination of scholarships for Black and Hispanic students, bias training workshops and much more. Programs have been abolished, and references to them in agency websites erased in order to comply with a directive from Braun that ordered agencies to replace “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI, throughout state government.

Instead, Braun decreed that state policies would elevate “merit, excellence and innovation.” 

I will just note in passing that the individuals currently governing Indiana fail–monumentally–to exhibit either merit or excellence, and that MAGA’s sole “innovation” has been an effort to return the state to the 1950s. I will also note that the clear intent of  substituting “merit and excellence”  for “equity and inclusion” is to convey the racist belief that merit and excellence aren’t attributes to be found in minority populations.

The Capital Chronicle dove into Braun’s effort, examining more than 3,800 pages of information released, and listing numerous examples highlighting the fervor of the attack on previous state efforts to ameliorate the effects of entrenched bigotries. For example, the Indana Department of Health has eliminated two positions– a disparities coordinator and a maternal health coordinator–despite the fact, as the Chronicle noted, that “Indiana has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the world — and Black mothers are more likely to die in the year following childbirth than their white counterparts.”

The linked report lists the elimination of dozens of these efforts, many of them obviously motivated by a desire to exclude minority populations, and others just unintentionally stupid or even humorous. The Indiana Economic Development Corporation, for example, which spends millions of dollars annually in an effort to bring new business into the state, has reportedly “revised its efforts.” I guess that means the agency won’t work to recruit businesses headed by Blacks or women, or enterprises seen as “woke,” despite the agency’s primary mission…

What about the other terms in DEI that so offend our MAGA White Christian male overlords?

Diversity simply means differences. For decades, scholarship has confirmed the benefits of diverse schoolrooms and business enterprises–benefits that are particularly important in a very diverse polity. If I visit your widget store and see no one who looks like me, it turns out that I am less likely to buy my widgets from you. If I am a resident of a city or town entirely governed by folks who represent only a small segment of the population, I’m less likely to participate in political life and more likely to harbor grievances.

And what about that third word: equity?

Equity is defined as the quality of being fair and impartial. Equity does not require giving minority folks extra advantages; it is a commitment to avoid disadvantaging people who don’t share your race, religion or able-bodiedness. When members of a majority group refuse to extend fundamental fairness to people outside their tribe, they are sending a message. They are telling us they don’t want to compete on a level playing field.

They are telling us who they are.  

Have some of the DEI efforts of the past few years gone overboard? Have some of them been less than effective–even “tilting” the playing field a bit too much? I’m sure they have. Whenever a society makes an effort to remedy a previous unfairness, some folks will go too far (and others will be too timid to be effective). But the all-out assault on efforts to erase practices that have been unfair and prejudiced isn’t an effort to correct excesses. It’s an effort to reinstate old prejudices, to offer justifications for bigotries, and to reinforce White (straight) male supremacy.

The Trump/MAGA assault on civic equality is an effort to return to some very Bad Old Days. We cannot allow it to succeed.

 
 
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Suicide By MAGA

Most of us have read about “suicide by cop”–a (hopefully rare) situation where someone desiring death purposely provokes a standoff with police. I don’t think MAGA cult members are that intentional, but I do think the result will be the same. The pandemic was a precursor: data shows that the MAGA science-deniers who refused to be vaccinated against COVID died in far greater numbers than more sane Americans.

Who coined that phrase “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”?

The Trump administration has already taken a meat-ax to medical research, derailing promising research into cures for cancer and Alzheimer’s and other deadly diseases. Those cuts will hurt all of us–Red and Blue alike. But as Paul Krugman recently pointed out, the administration’s radical changes in social spending, immigration policy and tariffs won’t simply hurt tens of millions of Americans — they will land disproportionately on Red, rural Americans.

The first thing you need to understand is that while rural Americans like to think of themselves as self-reliant, the fact is that poorer, more rural states are in effect heavily subsidized by richer states like Massachusetts and New Jersey.

This reality makes it inevitable that the standard conservative fiscal agenda — tax cuts for the rich, benefit cuts for the poor and middle class — hurts the heartland more than it hurts major metropolitan areas. But MAGA’s Reverse Robin Hoodism goes far beyond the standard conservative agenda, in ways that will be especially devastating to rural areas and small towns.

I’ve previously posted about Trump’s horrendous “Big Beautiful Bill” that will rob the poor to further enrich the wealthy. The bill contains savage cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, programs that will hurt all poor folks; but will disproportionately devastate Trump-supporting rural areas.

Krugman notes that Medicaid is a far more important program than most Americans realize.

Almost 40 percent of children are covered by Medicaid, with some of the highest percentages in deep red states like Alabama and Mississippi. Medicaid pays for 42 percent of births in America. And more to my point, Medicaid covers a higher fraction of the population in rural than in urban counties. So deep cuts in the program will hit Trump-supporting regions especially hard.

Ditto the impact of the drastic cuts to food stamps.

Many people–even those who are opposed to the “Big Beautiful Bill”– fail to recognize its very foreseeable impact on rural hospitals.  Hospitals in areas with low population density and a high percentage of patients who cannot pay for care struggle to stay open even now. Without Medicaid reimbursements at current levels, most will close. 

Most of us also fail to understand the role that Medicaid and Medicare spending play in supporting what Krugman calls “rural and left-behind local economies.”

For example, the economy of West Virginia no longer rests on coal mining, which employs very few people these days. It would be more accurate to say that the foundation of West Virginia’s economy is federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid. That is, in deep red West Virginia, Medicare and Medicaid are directly and indirectly a major source of income.

We are already seeing the impact of Trump’s immigration vendetta on the nation’s farmers.  Our agriculture relies heavily on hired workers, and some two thirds of those workers are immigrants–most of whom are undocumented. Farmers are already seeing the results of the threat: even workers who are legal residents or native-born citizens feel unsafe from the ICE goons who very clearly think all Brown people are illegal immigrants–so we see growing reports of workers decamping out of fear of arrest and deportation.

And then there’s the trade war.

In case you haven’t noticed, Trump hasn’t yet delivered a single one of the 90 trade deals he promised to negotiate by July 8. China has already retaliated, and others will follow. And U.S. agriculture is highly dependent on exports…

While many are now realizing that Trump’s policies will produce social and economic disaster, relatively few understand that the disaster will fall disproportionately on rural Trump voters. But of course it will. For the purveyor of Trump bibles and Trump meme coins, screwing the little guy has always been his personal style of grift. It remains to be seen if rural Trump supporters will awaken from their naivete.

Krugman is kinder than I am. I have given up any illusion that Trump voters are merely naive or uninformed. I’m pretty sure that MAGA voters are so wedded to their racism and grievance that they will support their own suicide if that’s what it takes to “own the libs.” 

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The Stakes

Remember that old song lyric, “What’s It all about, Alfie?”

Those of us who are appalled and confused by the administration’s daily abuses of the Constitution and rule of law can be forgiven for losing sight of “what it’s all about.” As usual, Heather Cox Richardson has provided context–and an answer. She points to the obvious: Trump’s economic policies are designed to transfer wealth to the already-obscenely-wealthy from the rest of us–then provides context: “From 1981 to 2021, American policies moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.”

But just enriching the already-rich is only one part of the overall goal. Richardson points to the administration’s gutting of a government that “regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights and to replace it with a government that permits a few wealthy men to rule.”

The CBO score for the Republicans’ omnibus bill projects that if it is enacted, 16 million people will lose access to healthcare insurance over the next decade in what is essentially an assault on the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The bill also dramatically cuts Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Plan (SNAP) benefits, clean energy credits, aid for student borrowers, benefits for federal workers, and consumer protection services, while requiring the sale of public natural resources.

It gets worse. (I know, you’re thinking “how much worse can it get?” Trust me.)

Richardson is only one of the observers who pinpoints the real “mover and shaker” behind this assault on constitutional government–Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought. Vought is determined to decimate those parts of the government that are inconsistent with the Christian Nationalist goals outlined in Project 2025, the production of which he directed. As Richardson reminds us,

Vought was a key author of Project 2025, whose aim is to disrupt and destroy the United States government order to center a Christian, heteronormative, male-dominated family as the primary element of society. To do so, the plan calls for destroying the administrative state, withdrawing the United States from global affairs, and ending environmental and business regulations.

Racism is, of course, an essential element of Christian Nationalism, which works to elevate the civic and social dominance of (certain) White Christian males. Vought founded the Center for Renewing America (CRA), which focuses on combating its (utterly phony) version of “critical race theory.” The organization’s affiliated issue advocacy group, American Restoration Action, has a similar mission: to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God”.  Both groups hope to provide the “ideological ammunition to sustain Trump’s political movement after his departure from the White House.”

It is worth noting that the administration’s war on education and empirical knowledge is an essential element of the Christian Nationalist plan to de-secularize America. The assaults on science, on research, on academic freedom are an indispensable part of the movement to substitute theocracy for a country that respects the intellectual liberties protected by the First Amendment. In service of that goal, Christian Nationalists have worked diligently to redefine “religious freedom” to mean the right of fundamentalist Christians to impose their beliefs on others, and to redefine “free speech” to mean privileging opposition to the “woke” values they abhor.

One of those “woke” values is education.

In my own Red state of Indiana, where performative “Christians” dominate the legislature and self-identified Christian Nationalists hold statewide offices, the assault on education has been unremitting. The voucher program that pretends to honor “parental choice” sends millions of Hoosier tax dollars to religious schools, in what is a dishonest work-around of the Establishment Clause while starving our public schools. More recently, steady assaults on Indiana University–a once-storied and highly respected academic institution–have ranged from political interference with its latest choice of a president–allowing the post to go to an less distinguished (but presumably more well-connected) “dark horse” candidate, to legislation threatening curriculum considered “liberal,” to the more recent and appalling substitution of far-right political operatives (including the odious Jim Bopp) for the choices of alumni on the university’s board of trustees.

Thanks to those assaults–and Indiana’s ban on abortion–Indiana University is losing many of the students who formerly enriched intellectual life on campus.

America is at an inflection point. What is at stake isn’t simply our global dominance (which Trump has already discarded), but our essential domestic identity. America hasn’t been seen as the “City on the Hill” because we embraced fundamentalist religion, but because we aspired to protect individual liberty and civic equality.

We didn’t always live up to those aspirations, but we can ill-afford to replace them with a Taliban-like theocracy.

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The Real Christians

I grew up in Anderson, Indiana, in one of a handful of Jewish families then living in that small town.  Anti-Semitic incidents were not infrequent, and when they occurred, my mother would reassure me that “a real Christian is a Jew’s best friend.” It was just too bad that there were so many faux Christians around…

In that sense, not much has changed.

Given the persistent hypocrisy and bigotry being exhibited by the Christian Nationalists who are constantly parading their faux piety, it is tempting to simply write off all people who self- identify as Christian. But that would be a mistake, because there are many Christians who take the actual words of the biblical Jesus seriously. I was reminded of their existence when I read that the Episcopal Church had refused to resettle the White Afrikaners who–alone among would-be immigrants–had been welcomed by our racist President and granted a facilitated refugee status.

According to the Religion News Service,

In a striking move that ends a nearly four-decades-old relationship between the federal government and the Episcopal Church, the denomination announced on Monday (May 12) that it is terminating its partnership with the government to resettle refugees, citing moral opposition to resettling white Afrikaners from South Africa who have been classified as refugees by President Donald Trump’s administration.

In a follow-up article, the News Service quoted an Episcopal bishop who characterized assisting with the settlement of the Afrikaners “a Faustian bargain.”

The head of Church World Service–one of several religious resettlement groups currently suing the Trump administration– was quoted as saying “We are concerned that the U.S. Government has chosen to fast-track the admission of Afrikaners, while actively fighting court orders to provide life-saving resettlement to other refugee populations who are in desperate need of resettlement.” 

By resettling this population, the Government is demonstrating that it still has the capacity to quickly screen, process, and depart refugees to the United States. It’s time for the Administration to honor our nation’s commitment to the thousands of refugee families it abandoned with its cruel and illegal executive order.

On his very first day in office, Trump suspended the U.S. refugee settlement program, stranding more than 100,000 people previously approved for resettlement. These were people who had fled war and persecution in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Afghanistan. Most such refugees are nonwhite, coming from what Trump has delicately described as “shithole countries.”

The speed with which the Trump administration facilitated the immigration of Whites, while refusing to consider refugee status for people of color with far more compelling evidence, was stark and obvious confirmation of this administration’s deep-seated racism. 

Not that we needed added evidence. Trump’s war against “woke” and DEI–diversity, equity and inclusion–is an obvious expression of the White “Christian” Nationalism that motivates his supporters. (The lengths to which Trumpers will go to eliminate any concern for equal treatment has led to some ridiculous results: in its zeal to redefine any effort to promote “equity” as an assault on White folks, the administration has suspended a digital equity program established to bring the Internet to underserved rural areas populated by Trump supporters. Evidently, broadband equity is racist.)

Support for my mother’s thesis that “good Christians” are neither racist nor anti-Semitic is emerging. One example is Christians Against Christian Nationalism, an organization that labels Christian Nationalism a “threat to both our religious communities and our democracy.”

Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. Christian nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian. It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation. We reject this damaging political ideology and invite our fellow Christians to join us in opposing this threat to our faith and to our nation.

I encourage you to visit their website, which–among other things– recognizes the overlap between Christian Nationalism’s faux Christianity and its profound and anti-American racism. 

American society has come a long way since my 1950s childhood in small-town Indiana. Trump and his supporters are frantic to reverse the substantial gains made by women and minorities in American culture; the effort by Christian Nationalists to label progress toward equity and inclusion as anti-White, anti-Christian discrimination is an effort to do just that.

It’s comforting to know that real Christians will oppose them.

 
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More Of This, Please!

If there was any lingering doubt that MAGA and Trumpism are rooted in racism, the extension of refugee status to White South Africans–at the same time Trump rescinded the similar status of vetted Afghans who had, at significant risk, worked with U.S. forces during the war–should put an end to it. That “in your face” evidence joins the administration’s barely-less-obvious measures to “protect” White folks from perceived victimhood: the dismissal of Blacks and Women from positions of authority (and their replacement with laughingly unqualified Whites), the scrubbing of websites documenting the achievements of women and minorities, and especially the disgraceful and dishonest all-out war on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

An embarrassing number of institutions have folded under that attack, but others have not. Vernon shared an entirely appropriate response to the federal government’s anti-DEI demand from one school superintendent.

Here is that letter.

___________-

To Whom It May (Unfortunately) Concern at the U.S. Department of Education:

Thank you for your April 3 memorandum, which I read several times — not because it was legally persuasive, but because I kept checking to see if it was satire. Alas, it appears you are serious.

You’ve asked me, as superintendent of a public school district, to sign a “certification” declaring that we are not violating federal civil rights law — by, apparently, acknowledging that ci1vil rights issues still exist. You cite Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, then proceed to argue that offering targeted support to historically marginalized students is somehow discriminatory.

That’s not just legally incoherent — it’s a philosophical Möbius strip of bad faith.

Let me see if I understand your logic:

If we acknowledge racial disparities, that’s racism.

If we help English learners catch up, that’s favoritism.

If we give a disabled child a reading aide, we’re denying someone else the chance to struggle equally.

And if we train teachers to understand bias, we’re indoctrinating them — but if we train them to ignore it, we’re “restoring neutrality”?

How convenient that your sudden concern for “equal treatment” seems to apply only when it’s used to silence conversations about race, identity, or inequality.

Let’s talk about our English learners. Would you like us to stop offering translation services during parent-teacher conferences? Should we cancel bilingual support staff to avoid the appearance of “special treatment”? Or would you prefer we just teach all content in English and hope for the best, since acknowledging linguistic barriers now counts as discrimination?

And while we’re at it — what’s your official stance on IEPs? Because last I checked, individualized education plans intentionally give students with disabilities extra support. Should we start removing accommodations to avoid offending the able-bodied majority? Maybe cancel occupational therapy altogether so no one feels left out?

If a student with a learning disability receives extended time on a test, should we now give everyone extended time, even if they don’t need it? Just to keep the playing field sufficiently flat and unthinking?

Your letter paints equity as a threat. But equity is not the threat. It’s the antidote to decades of failure. Equity is what ensures all students have a fair shot. Equity is what makes it possible for a child with a speech impediment to present at the science fair. It’s what helps the nonverbal kindergartner use an AAC device. It’s what gets the newcomer from Ukraine the ESL support she needs without being left behind.

And let’s not skip past the most insulting part of your directive — the ten-day deadline. A national directive sent to thousands of districts with the subtlety of a ransom note, demanding signatures within a week and a half or else you’ll cut funding that supports… wait for it… low-income students, disabled students, and English learners.

Brilliant. Just brilliant. A moral victory for bullies and bureaucrats everywhere.

So no, we will not be signing your “certification.”

We are not interested in joining your theater of compliance.

We are not interested in gutting equity programs that serve actual children in exchange for your political approval.

We are not interested in abandoning our legal, ethical, and educational responsibilities to satisfy your fear of facts.

We are interested in teaching the truth.

We are interested in honoring our students’ identities.

We are interested in building a school system where no child is invisible, and no teacher is punished for caring too much.

And yes — we are prepared to fight this. In the courts. In the press. In the community. In Congress, if need be.

Because this district will not be remembered as the one that folded under pressure.

We will be remembered as the one that stood its ground — not for politics, but for kids.

Still Teaching. Still Caring. Still Not Signing.

_________________

May that Superintendent’s tribe increase.

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