Tag Archives: bigotry

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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The Appalling Pastor Beckwith

If I were a Christian–a real one–I would cringe every time our Christian Nationalist Lieutenant Governor claimed that affiliation. Love? Compassion? Humility? How woke!

You won’t catch this pathetic excuse for a human echoing those admonitions.

Not that it’s surprising from the guy who tried to ban books when he briefly served on a library board, but Beckwith has greeted Pride month with his usual invective and bigotry. WISH TV, among others, has reported on his Facebook post, calling Pride celebrations an “annual siege on childhood innocence” backed by “corporate America and government institutions.”

The post, published just before 10:30 a.m. on the official “Micah Beckwith For Indiana” Facebook page and “TheMicahBeckwith” on X, begins with the warning: “PRIDE MONTH ALERT: The Rainbow Beast IS Coming For Your Kids!”.

Beckwith goes on to say that schools are prioritizing “DEI indoctrination over reading, writing, or science” and accuses libraries of becoming “drag indoctrination centers.”

“Try hosting a ‘Heterosexual Heritage Hour’ and watch the mob arrive,” Beckwith continues.

Under a heading titled THE BIG PICTURE, the lieutenant governor calls Pride Month a “state-corporate-pagan alliance to reprogram society” that has exchanged “parental rights for government-sanctioned grooming.”

Beckwith closes the post by urging parents to “wake up”.

The post ends with a link to a story on the same topic published by a self-described “Christian Independent Press” website.

I’ve gone to Indianapolis’ Pride parades for twenty-plus years. I’ve watched as those celebrations have grown, not just in the number of floats, but in the number and variety of organizations and businesses and families joining the celebration. Evidently, that acceptance annoys the faux Christians and MAGA bigots waging war against “woke-ism” (not to mention that dreaded equity and inclusion), but their efforts to rally the homophobes and misogynists and racists aren’t going very well. Just ask Target–or Costco.

I always wonder what explains people like Micah Beckwith–people with a frantic need to see the world in stark shades of black and white, and a corresponding need to believe that they are on the right side of the dividing line. I know that in a lot of cases, homophobic men are unsure of their own masculinity, or desperately trying to suppress their own homosexual urges, which they’ve been taught are sinful. Many are products of the fundamentalist churches in which they grew up, and still others evidently have an overpowering need to feel morally superior to someone or some group.

I know I should pity the Micah Beckwiths of this world. They are demonstrably unhappy people; something is hollow inside them. But that pity is hard to come by, because there is something so repellant about people who actively work to hurt and demean other human beings. I can understand it when people who–for whatever reason–dislike gays or Jews or Black folks,  consequently fail to socialize with them. I think they’re missing out, but (as the saying goes) it’s a free country. You don’t like gay people, you don’t have to invite them over for dinner.

What I don’t understand–and will never understand–are the haters like Micah Beckwith, who aren’t satisfied to simply avoid folks whose lives they don’t want to accept–who want to actively hurt and humiliate people who are different. These twisted souls have some sort of primal need to see themselves as the proper arbiters of civic acceptance, and they want to use government to impose their faux Christianity on the rest of us.

It’s bad enough that we have to share the general population with stunted and mean-spirited people like Micah Beckwith, but I find it infuriating  that they currently infest Indiana’s government. It isn’t just Beckwith–although he is definitely the poster child for these theocratic misfits. Todd Rokita and Jim Banks are “out and proud” Christian Nationalists, ready and eager to jettison the Bill of Rights and spit on 200+ years of American progress. Indiana government hasn’t been this retrograde since the Klan years. It’s no wonder the state has a persistent brain drain.

What is so depressing is that a majority of Hoosiers voted for these hateful people. I can’t even blame the gerrymandering that has given us our embarrassing legislature–these dreadful people ran statewide.

For my part, I intend to embrace the “Rainbow Beast.” It’s the least I can do.

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Can Trump/Musk Take Us Back?

At the base of the Trump/Musk war on American values is the question whether the cultural progress we’ve made really can be rolled back–whether the effort to excise references to women and minorities from government websites and bully corporations and universities into abandoning “woke” DEI efforts can successfully return the country to White Christian male dominance. No matter what other excuses are offered by Trump voters, it is that goal that elected Donald Trump.

Call me Pollyanna, but I don’t think it will be successful.

I don’t want to minimize the significance of Trump’s assault on our government and our Constitution–an assault conducted by a senile, intellectually-limited and very greedy man. (His elevation to an office for which he is manifestly unfit was a result of the MAGA bigotry he very clearly shares, but it facilitated his increasingly overt corruption. Want a favor from this autocrat? Buy enough of his “meme coins” and I’m sure he’ll be favorably disposed….)

I understand that what we face is frightening.

That said, America’s culture really has moved on from the bad old days. I’ve lived through the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement and the sexual revolution, and I can attest to the fact that the social environment we inhabit today (at least in cities…and probably even in most rural precincts) is considerably different than the one I was born into.

I thought about how far those changes have taken us when I went with members of my (mixed religion) family to a St. Patrick’s Day celebration at Indianapolis’ Athenaeum–a magnificent edifice that once served as home for our city’s pro-Nazi German American bund. It was a mob scene of Black, White and Asian folks wearing green, and I couldn’t help thinking how far the Irish have come from the early days of Irish immigration, when native-born “real” Americans criticized Irish immigrants for  their supposed laziness and lack of discipline, their public drinking style, their religion, and their presumed capacity for criminality and violence. (Sound familiar?)

Today, Americans from a wide variety of backgrounds–including our local German establishments– don green clothes and drink green beer to celebrate St. Patrick’s day.

It isn’t just the integration of Irish and German immigrants. Over the past half-century, Blacks and women have become increasingly prominent parts of the workforce and the political world, intermarriages between people of different races and religions have soared, gay folks have come out and married…and while we’re still adjusting our attitudes about people who identify as trans, understanding and acceptance are infinitely higher than they once were.

That cultural progress has produced major changes in both law and public opinion. As the Brookings Institution has noted, it’s not 1968 anymore. “Seventy-six percent of Americans now say that discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities in the United States is a “big problem,” including 57% of conservatives, 71% of whites, and 69% of whites without college degrees. Pew Research has found that  large shares of Americans recognize the existence of discrimination against minorities. “About eight-in-ten see discrimination against Muslims and Jews, as well as against Arab, Black and Hispanic people.” That percentage is considerably higher than those who believe–with MAGA and Donald Trump– that efforts at equity  discriminate against White Christians.

The electoral successes of MAGA Republicans would have been impossible but for the frantic resistance of  White Christian Evangelicals to these cultural changes. While the rest of us have been going about our daily lives, accepting (and often applauding) the changes in the culture, White Christian Nationalists have mounted a determined resistance. They are not a majority of Americans, but the real majority–the rest of us– have large differences in ideology and political identity. The cultish coherence of MAGA’s resentments and anger have allowed them to amass far more power than their raw numbers would entitle them to.

THE question that confronts us now is whether those of us who applaud–or at least accept– America’s social and cultural changes can resist the Trump/MAGA efforts to return us to a much meaner time.

Can those of us in the majority– Black and White, Hispanic and Asian, Jew and Muslim and atheist, the civically active and the politically apathetic– come together and resist the intense rage of the White Christian Nationalists? Can we ignore our very real differences and work together toward the shared goal of protecting the American Idea and restoring constitutional government?

If we can all be Irish on St. Patrick’s day, this Pollyanna thinks we can.

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Why Economic Ignorance Matters

America’s election of Donald Trump–horrifying and destructive as it was and is–was part of a global lurch to the Right, and that lurch can be attributed to one over-riding factor: a negative reaction to immigration. There are a lot of moving parts to that reaction, but I want to focus on one inarguable element of MAGA’s hatred of (certain) immigrants–a hatred that blinds the economically-ignorant to the predictable consequences of mass deportations.

Racism has always been the central part of Trump’s appeal, and his promises to “protect” the border have, accordingly, focused on the southern border. When he talks about limiting illegal immigration, it is quite clear that he is talking about poor brown and Black people, not the rich, or the stray Canadian or Norwegian.

The promised massive deportations have yet to occur, but early reports reflect two “Trumpian” realities: his disregard for legal and constitutional niceties, and his ignorance of the way the economy works. It isn’t just his love of tariffs that illustrates that ignorance; he clearly has no comprehension of the importance of both legal and illegal immigrants in selected sectors of the economy.

In his first few weeks back in office, Trump has consistently ignored the law, so it isn’t surprising that early “roundups” have frequently crossed the constitutional line. As Paul Krugman recently noted, “if you make it clear that respecting the rights of the accused is a liberal, DEI thing, of course some ICE and Border Control agents will run wild. Basically, anyone with brown skin will be at risk of at least temporary detention.”

And speaking of risk, even though the number of immigrants arrested is small so far, Krugman and others point out that  the raids that have occurred have already inspired widespread fear.  Some workers have stayed home rather than coming to work. Others have returned to their home countries. And some businesses have even laid off valuable employees for fear that they may be raided.

In the linked essay, Krugman offers charts documenting the likely economic impact of widespread deportations, beginning with the fact that almost 1 in 5 U.S. workers is foreign-born. Most of those are here legally, but unauthorized immigrants make up around 5 percent of the work force.

Losing a large fraction of these workers would be a serious blow to the economy, especially because immigrants, legal and not, play a much bigger role in some industries and occupations than they do in the economy as a whole.

Agriculture is the most striking example: Immigrants — many of them undocumented — make up most of the farm labor force.

Push those workers out, either by actual deportation or detention or simply by creating a climate of fear, and just watch what happens to grocery prices.

About a quarter of construction industry employees are immigrants — 40 percent in Texas and California — but this number rises to 31 percent if you look only at “construction trades,” i.e., people who actually build stuff as opposed to working in offices or marketing. And the immigrant share is much higher in particular trades.

So at a time when Americans are still angry about the price of groceries and, with more justification, about the unaffordability of housing, Trump’s immigrant crackdown seems set to hobble food production and home construction.

Krugman notes that Trump can probably call off most of his threatened tariffs, granting exemptions in return for concessions benefitting him personally, but his constant, ugly screeds against (certain) immigrants have played into racial hatreds that can’t easily be reined in.

I have previously posted about the gap between immigration facts and the fallacies that allow MAGA bigots to use migrants as a handy wedge issue. As I said then, if anyone harbors doubts about the GOP’s entirely political approach to what the media routinely calls the “border crisis,” it should have been dispelled when Republicans abruptly walked away from a bipartisan proposal that–after difficult negotiations–had given them pretty much everything they’d been demanding, so they could use the “border crisis” as a campaign issue.

And speaking of the border–most of the 11 million immigrants who are here illegally flew in and overstayed their visas.

America’s anti-immigrant hysteria is central to today’s White Christian Nationalism. Of course, there has always been a nativist streak in America; Ellis Island was first established to keep “undesirables” from entering the country. “Give me your tired, your poor, your masses yearning to breathe free” was Emma Lazarus’ response to the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Know-Nothing Party was formed largely by people who feared that Irish Catholic immigrants would take jobs from God-fearing Protestant “real Americans.”

We haven’t come very far, and MAGA wants to take us back……

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What It Was All About

Those of us who have taken the American Idea seriously have to face what has previously been unthinkable: the racism, anti-Semitism and misogyny weren’t bugs–they were features. As sick as it makes me to confront that truth, it’s inescapable: the bigotry (and the accompanying ignorance) were what most Trump voters were endorsing. 

In case there is any doubt, Project 2025 will be the roadmap to a second Trump administration. In addition to what that will mean for women’s rights, for LGBTQ+ people and people of color, let me remind readers of its major “promises”–promises that will affect the entire world, not just the United States.

A  Trump administration will ” Restore warfighting as the military’s sole mission” and end what it calls “the Left’s social experimentation in the military” by halting the admission of transgender individuals. It will increase the Army by 50,000, bring overseas troops home, grow the Navy and Air Force, and triple the number of nuclear weapons—while withdrawing America from all arms reduction treaties, and from NATO.

In other words, Trump will make the entire world unsafe (except, of course, for Putin and other autocrats).

 USAID will defund women’s rights provisions in foreign aid initiatives, withdraw from all multi-lateral trade agreements, and stop providing financial aid to Ukraine, which will be gift-wrapped for Putin.

Trump wants to institute 60% tariffs on Chinese goods and 10% on all other imports. (Every reputable economist—conservative and liberal—has pointed out that tariffs are a tax on Americans, and that imposing them would cost American families thousands of dollars a year and throw the country into recession. The economy that President Biden has made the envy of the world will tank.

In order to destroy America’s fidelity to the rule of law, Trump plans to replace 50 thousand civil service employees with Trump loyalists. The Heritage Foundation is currently “vetting” individuals in order to facilitate that replacement. 

The media has reported on the proposal to eliminate the Department of Education, Head Start, Title 1, & school lunch programs. The less-reported portions of their “education” policies are equally regressive: they would eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, post the Ten Commandments in all school classrooms and eliminate any books addressing race or gender from the nation’s classrooms.

RNK, Jr isn’t the only medical moron likely to be dictating “health” measures; Project 2025 proposes to withdraw federal funding from any school requiring vaccinations. (Not sure how they’re going to remove flouride from the nation’s water supply, but reality hasn’t been a big part of Rightwing ideology.)

Kiss goodby to Medicare (they’d privatize it), the EPA, OSHA, the EEOC and the FDIC.

But it’s with the bigotries that we really see the animating message of the worldview. 

Trump has echoed the Project’s promise of immediate mass deportation of (dark-skinned) undocumented persons, a massive effort that would wreak havoc with the economy. (Think groceries are high now? Watch what happens when there’s no one to pick crops.) The Project proposes internment camps and limiting lawful immigration to 20,000 annually. They’d also deport all the Dreamers (who came as children with their parents, and most of whom have never known another country. They want to ban Muslims and Haitians from entering the country, roll back gay rights, invalidate same-sex marriages, and outlaw both transgender rights and no-fault divorce.

Then there’s the effect on the already precarious environment.

Authors of the Project say—and I quote– the “climate is not changing and schools are not to teach that it is.” Since climate change is just a liberal myth, they would eliminate climate and environmental protections, eliminate the regulation of greenhouse gases, and defund FEMA. They’d dismantle the National Hurricane Center and the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, halt all climate research, revoke the Global Change Research Act of 1990, withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Accords, halt research into electrical vehicles and revoke tax incentives for clean energy.

That’s just a small part of what the bigots have voted for. Of course, courts would once have declared much of that roadmap blatantly unconstitutional, but Trump’s appointment of rogue Justices has removed that pesky impediment.

And of course, his election will allow the first convicted felon to be elected President to escape accountability for his crimes.

Welcome to the new Dark Ages.

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