TIO Public Square
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Are American Values
by Robert P. Sellers
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) are in the news a lot these days. These concepts should not be mysteries to any of us in the Public Square, for all of them are American values.
HOW DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION ARE AMERICAN VALUES
These ideas have a very long history in our country. It is not exaggeration to say that each of us is a beneficiary of these national beliefs.
Diversity
American society has been diverse since its inception. When Europeans began to settle here, there were hundreds of different Native American tribes already in this land, speaking at least 375 distinct languages, each with individual societal structures and customs. Historians estimate the population of these First Peoples somewhere between 8 million and 112 million. Since that pre-Columbian era, immigrants have come to these shores from all over the world, creating one of the most diverse nations on earth. Based on data from the American Community Survey, there currently are more than 350 world languages being spoken in the United States. Diana Eck, emeritus professor of comparative religions at Harvard University, writes in her book A New Religious America: How “Christian Country has become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation that the United States is also the most religiously diverse nation on the globe.
Now, after almost 250 years since our founding, America is a nation of remarkable cultural, linguistic and religious plurality. Whatever subculture is your heritage, language is your native tongue, and religion or philosophy your ideological home, you are a part of the American Experiment. You belong here!
Equity
Photo: David Saddler, CC 2.0 CC BY
Some words are visionary and culture-shaping. They have mythic importance, the power to shape collective dreams and mold societal vision. One such utterance illustrates this claim perfectly. The United States declared its independence based upon these 35 stirring words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This sentence, which begins the Declaration of Independence, was penned by Thomas Jefferson and adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776.
But for a quarter of a millennium this acknowledgment of our divinely-conceived equality has challenged the ways we relate to one another, and to the stranger in our midst. We have not always adhered to this high standard, yet it remains our American ideal. The power of this fundament principle of our nation’s founding document means that nothing should make you less valuable than anyone else – not your race, ethnicity, language, religion, socio-economic status, job, sexuality or any other factor. We are all “equal” in America.
Inclusion
This country has traditionally welcomed immigrants onto our shores. Photographs and historical records have captured the excitement and joy of individuals or families arriving here, eager to begin a new life of opportunity, safety and promise. Except for descendants of those first Native American inhabitants of this land, every other person in the United States is the descendant of an immigrant from another country.
Photo: Pexels
The Statue of Liberty was a “birthday” gift to the United States from France on July 4, 1884. On its pedestal is the poetic inscription written by Emma Lazarus – “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” These words have summarized the spirit of welcome that made coming to live in the United States the dream of millions of people around the world. Recently, however, Raphael Glucksmann, a French member of the European Parliament, suggested – perhaps a bit in jest but with scathing judgment also – that we should return the Statue of Liberty to France because some Americans “have chosen to switch to the side of the tyrants.” The statue stands as a reminder that tyranny must not win. She represents Libertas, a Roman goddess of liberty, who carries a torch in her right hand and a tablet in her left, bearing the date of the Declaration of Independence. “Broken shackles lie underneath the statue’s drapery, to symbolize the end of all types of servitude and oppression.”
Almost all of us who now gather in the public square owe our place in America to the freedom our ancestors experienced when they immigrated to this land. Welcoming the stranger is our country’s heritage, and the Statue of Liberty our national symbol. It is the reason we all can call this place home.
DONALD TRUMP’S OPPOSITION TO DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion – these are American traditions and values. When President Trump and his administration oppose DEI in the military, government departments and agencies, law firms, schools or universities and society at large, they are acting in a way which is tacitly un-American.
Photo: Monmouth University
Executive Order 14151, titled ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,’ is an executive order signed by Donald Trump, the 47th president of the United States, on January 20, 2025. Since that first day of this president’s second term, the executive order has been used to intimidate, weaken, refocus, or eliminate public and private agencies and institutions.
Trump says he believes in a meritocracy, where hiring and advancements are based solely on merit rather than upon providing equal opportunities for racial, religious, economic or sexual minorities. This claim seems fallacious, since his own appointments depend more on loyalty to himself rather than upon merit. Nonetheless, Trump has declared, “We will terminate every diversity, equity, and inclusion program across the entire federal government.” The executive order having already been disseminated broadly throughout the government, the president is now, however, taking his anti-DEI campaign into the private sector. These actions – defended by the administration as promoting fairness – are instead driven by racial, religious, economic and sexual discriminations.
The American Civil Liberties Union explains:
When Donald Trump’s administration left office in 2020, two-thirds of surveyed Americans agreed that Trump had increased racial tensions in the United States. The backdrop for that widespread sentiment was the Trump administration’s sustained assault on political, civic, and legal efforts to promote racial justice; Trump’s consistent use of inflammatory racist rhetoric; and his transparent pursuit of a white supremacist agenda rooted in racial grievance. …
Trump’s legacy on these issues is encapsulated by the “1776 Report,” published by the White House in the administration’s waning days. The report advanced a dystopian vision that demonized attempts at achieving racial equality. Designed to “restore patriotic education in schools,” the “1776 Report” compared progressivism to fascism … and sought to downplay the legacy of racism in U.S. history. Historians uniformly condemned the report, pointing out that it was littered with factual inaccuracies and partisanship, and lacking serious scholarship. …
Meanwhile, the administration alternated between openly vilifying and woefully neglecting communities of color. Trump used racialized, xenophobic dog whistles to attack Black, Middle Eastern, South Asian, Latine, and other immigrants of color, and to justify his exclusionary immigration policy. …
The 2024 Trump campaign has doubled down on this commitment to racial grievance. …
More broadly, however, the anti-DEI backlash is part of a larger effort by right-wing foundations, think tanks, and political operatives to dismantle civil rights gains made in recent decades.
Here are a few examples of Donald Trump’s anti-DEI activities.
The Department of State
Trump has directed Secretary of State Marco Rubio not to base any “Foreign Service recruitment, hiring, promotion, or retention decisions on an individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” The Heritage Foundation, the ultra-conservative think tank responsible for coordinating and producing Project 2025, claims:
The entrenchment of the radical leftwing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda and its growing promulgation and enforcement bureaucracy at the State Department has been to the detriment of recruitment, efficiency, and morale. Instead of continuing its obsession with artificially engineered diversity and ever-growing staff and budgets, the State Department needs to eliminate its wasteful and discriminatory DEI bureaucracy; refocus existing resources on core values and priority goals; and depoliticize the hiring and promotion process to return to merit-based principles.
The Department of Defense
Pete Hegseth, Department of Defense Secretary, has rushed to comply with the DEI policy. Following his instruction, the Defense Intelligence Agency ordered that “all activities and events related to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Black History Month, Junteenth, LGBTQ Pride Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day and other ‘special observances’” be discontinued.
Harvey and Gina Pratt — Photo: OKSTATE Magazine
Chief of the Cheyenne tribe of Oklahoma, Harvey Pratt – a designer of the Native American Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. – discovered that the Defense Department had removed references to the Navajo Code Talkers, who transmitted messages between Allied troops in World War II using their native language. Other citations that disappeared included a web page featuring Army Maj. Gen. Charles Calvin Rogers, the first Black soldier to receive the coveted medal of honor, as well as a page honoring Ira Hamilton Hayes, a Pima tribal member who helped raise the American flag at Iwo Jima. Although these deletions were quickly restored after a public protest, the racist intention of Trump and Hegseth was indisputable. This nefarious objective is further proven by the removal of Defense Department articles concerning the Tuskegee Airmen as well as the erasure of a biography of civil rights leader Medgar Evers from the Arlington National Cemetery website.
These more famous individuals have not been the only targets of DOD website scrubbing. The Associated Press has reported that “some 26,000 images featuring people and events considered ‘DEI content’ were flagged for removal from the Department of Defense websites as part of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s promise that DEI would be ‘dead’ under his leadership.”
The Department of Education
Former professional wrestling promoter and billionaire Linda McMahon, as Education Secretary, is cooperating with Donald Trump to demolish the Department of Education, despite her having no relevant experience as a teacher or educational administrator. Trump has previously claimed that the Department was infiltrated by “radicals, zealots and Marxists.” Annie Ma, national education reporter for the Associated Press, explains:
The agency’s main role is financial. Annually, it distributes billions in federal money to colleges and schools and manages the federal student loan portfolio [including the Pell Grant]. Closing the department would mean redistributing each of those duties to another agency. The Education Department also plays an important regulatory role in services for students, ranging from those with disabilities to low-income and homeless kids.
Indeed, federal education money is central to Trump’s plans for colleges and schools. Trump has vowed to cut off federal money for schools and colleges that push “critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content” and to reward states and schools that end teacher tenure and enact universal school choice programs.
Formed in 1979 by Congress, encouraged by President Carter, the Department of Education also “enforces federal education laws pertaining to nondiscrimination and civil rights.”
Universities, both public and private, are now being given two weeks by the Department to eliminate DEI from their faculty, staff and student considerations or lose federal funding. Additionally, $600m in grant money to organizations that train teachers was eliminated, because the administration says they “promoted ‘divisive’ concepts like DEI, critical race theory and social justice activism.” Deadlines have been given to Ivy League universities such as Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton to bend the knee to Trump’s demands or else forfeit their federal grants.
The Department of Justice
Attorney General Pam Bondi has continued Trump’s attack on America’s judicial system by censuring lawyers and firms that participated in “frivolous” legal cases against him. Trump’s anti-DEI pressure through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and his executive orders has sent some law firms into a state of paralysis and driven others to adopt a defensive mode. Aria Branch, from the Elias Law Group, said “You will see fewer numbers of black and brown lawyers, and lawyers from disadvantaged backgrounds, in this country” because of these “scare tactics,” adding “This could impact the profession for years to come.”
One powerful law firm, Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison, has “caved,” agreeing to provide $40m worth of free legal assistance to further the president’s pet causes – and to get rid of its DEI policies – in order to avoid Trump’s retribution against them, which the partners felt could have cost them significant business. This firm’s quick submission has caused great consternation and shock to the legal community.
Women in the Work Force
Lauren Sugerman was the beneficiary of a 1965 executive order from President Lyndon Johnson which obligated public and private companies to try to recruit women of color. So, in 1980, she was accepted into a vocational program which led to her employment at a steel mill. She has been grateful for her opportunity, as a woman of color, to get that steady job – which she has kept for four decades. But now, she is mourning the probability that women, especially women of color, will have a more difficult time being hired. This new reality exists because Trump revoked Johnson’s executive order on his second day in office, desiring to end what he sees as “widespread and illegal use of ‘dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race-and sex-based preferences’ under the guise of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.”
The LGBTQ Community
While campaigning before the election, Donald Trump claimed DEI policies “discriminated against white people – men in particular.” He “demonized any recognition of gender diversity, attacking transgender people – notably transgender women in sports – and gender-affirming care for children.” Remember his ridiculous accusation that sex-change operations were being performed on children at schools during the day! Some of Trump’s executive orders have intentionally reversed DEI protections for the LGBTQ community that President Joe Biden had signed into law.
A SIMPLE RATIONALE FOR DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION
Former Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, sat down with a group – advertised as “regular folks” – to explain why DEI was necessary. He said:
First of all, DEI stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion. … We start by thinking of ‘what’s the opposite of those things?’ The opposite of diversity is uniformity. The opposite of equity is inequity. And, the opposite of inclusion is exclusion.
And I don’t know a lot of people who think our lives would be better off if we had more uniformity, inequity and exclusion. …
But I think that the part of why people have questions about [DEI] that I respect is … they’re worried about fairness. So, to me, when you talk about some of these policies, the idea is to make sure that everyone gets a seat at the table. Especially if you know there have been systematic ways of keeping people from getting a seat at the table, over the years. Sometimes based on their race, on their religion, on their income, on their background, on their sexuality, any number of reasons. And, it’s about making sure, going forward, that everything is fair.
This explanation, because I am a “regular folk,” makes perfect sense to me. Since abiding by these concepts makes life better for all of us, I feel it is important to join the host of those who oppose the president’s anti-DEI efforts. Diversity, equity and inclusion are American values, and they are part of the reason why America is a country that has long been the desired destination of so many people around the world.
Header Photo: NAHB