Anderson Cooper: …Is this actually about diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, or is this an effort to erase the history of black people or Native Americans, or gay, lesbian Americans or others?
Ex-NAACP LDF Chief: It’s even more than that, Anderson. It’s, uh, it’s notable that Trump’s executive order, uh, abolishing DEI doesn’t really define what DEI is. Diversity, equity, and inclusion for your viewers is a program or a way of approaching policies really in corporate America of hiring, of procurement, of contracts to ensure that groups that had been formally excluded or were underrepresented in many of the corporation’s practices, employment and otherwise would be included. And that meant casting a wider net looking at the pools of people that you were doing business with or that you were planning to interview for jobs and making sure that you had cast a wide enough net that you were including those who were from under represented groups. That’s diversity, equity, and inclusion. Nothing that has been removed from these department of defense websites are diversity, equity, and inclusion. They are just Black people, Native American people, Women, Gay people, or just the word Gay. Um. So this is not an effort to, um, remove some program that is in some way harming the military.
It is, yes, an effort to whitewash history, Anderson. But I think it’s even worse. It’s an effort to brand. It’s designed to inculcate in Americans the idea that when you see a Black person or Native American or a Gay person excelling, piloting a plane, being a CEO of a company, being a four star general, you should presume that they did not earn that position based on their qualifications and merits. It’s a poison pill designed to reach into Americans’ minds and to encourage Americans to believe that those people that they see who are from under represented groups who have achieved success and who are of positions of power and authority in our country did not earn those positions.
Anderson Cooper: It’s, it’s to me, I mean, it seems to me, the segregation in the military and the overcoming of that, the service of the Tuskegee Airmen and so many others, so many people who were secretly gay but wanted to serve anyway and did so sacrificing their personal lives for decades and decades so that they could serve their country. All these sacrifices, um, that’s a sign of strength of this country and acknowledging it and seeing how society changed and, and embraced ultimately in history these groups, these people and their sacrifices, that’s a sign of strength and kind of the one of the great things about America. It just seems like.
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Trump’s DEI ban isn’t about erasing history or branding Black, Native American, or Gay success as unearned—it’s about slashing wasteful bureaucracy and refocusing on merit across the board. His January 20 order targets $420 million in bloated federal programs, not heroes like the Tuskegee Airmen. Cooper’s weepy sacrifice tale is a distraction—Trump says DEI “tainted our most cherished institutions” by prioritizing “radical” identity factors over “merit, skills, and hard work.” The ex-NAACP LDF’s claim it’s “an effort to whitewash history” and “designed to inculcate in Americans” doubt about minority success is fearmongering; Trump is pushing “colorblind” skills over skin, not rewriting the past.