Mara Gay: ‘I Wish We Would Stop Saying DEI,’ It Reminds Americans of ‘Annoying Trainings that You Have at Work’

Wallace: “Pete Hegseth also ushered in book purges at DoD military schools. This is the HuffPost reporting on that. ‘DoDEA runs 161 schools worldwide. They provide K-12 education to more than 67,000 children of people in the U.S. Military. It, too, has to comply with Donald Trump’s executive orders to federal agencies to eradicate programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion. After DoDEA last month directed at schools to pull lessons from its curriculum related to immigration, gender and sexuality, the schools responded with things like book bans, a portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama being removed, a Harriet Tubman poster being pulled down, rainbows being taken down in kindergarten classrooms, and bans on school clubs for LGBTQ plus students and girls in STEM. Ironically. J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy was also banned.’”

GAY: “Well, Pete Hegseth is a man who advocated for the firing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Brown, who Hegseth said was unqualified simply essentially based on the fact that he was African American, and has replaced him with somebody of a lower rank, by the way, who’s a white man. And so, I think we should take these individuals, the president and his team, at their word. We saw already from Project 2025, as Basil said, that what they promised, they are delivering, specifically to the Heritage Foundation. I also think it’s an important moment. I wish we would stop saying DEI because every American hears DEI, and you think about the annoying trainings that you have at work, you know, that’s very easy to kind of poke holes at that. Some of them are fine, some of them are just, you know, a hassle for Americans. What we’re actually talking about coming from the White House is an anti-civil rights agenda, it’s an anti-black agenda, it’s an anti-feminist agenda, it’s anti-LGBTQ agenda, and it’s an attack on the idea that America is a multicultural and multiracial democracy. And I think we should be very specific with our language. DEI kind of can be anything. And so, I think we should call them out for this. I mean, this is not happening in a vacuum at the Pentagon either. There’s a good reason to talk about that. But also this week we saw the rescinding of a decades-old order that required and mandated equal opportunity in government contracts. So, yes, it’s still true that those contractors have to abide by the Civil Rights Act. But to me, that’s a clear and extremely disturbing signal that the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice has absolutely no intention on enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That is what I take from that. I don’t believe that’s alarmist. I also just think that it’s, you know, when people are erasing history, the accomplishments of people of various backgrounds who made this country what it is, from the code talkers, to women in the military, to the African Americans who fought for this country even though they didn’t have equal rights at home, we should be extremely skeptical of that narrative. They’re not telling the truth. They want to keep the truth from America. Why is that? What are they so afraid of? All of this is about a return, I believe, to an America in which specifically white men were able to exclude from — exclude competition from anyone else. And I think we should be extremely skeptical not only of that effort, but we should be asking questions, well, what was America like? What was hiring like in government and in the private sector before the Civil Rights Act? Before these executive orders? Because it wasn’t a meritocracy. What it was was an exclusive hold that specifically white men had on America. And so, undergirding this is a very dark idea that to be competent is to be a white man and to be a straight, heterosexual white man. I mean, this is extremely dark. And I just have to say, too, on a personal note, I mean, it’s painful to see the erasure of, of course, Jackie Robinson, and everybody whose histories are being pulled down from these government sites, not just at the Pentagon, but — you know, my uncles were Marines. They served in Vietnam. They are buried in Arlington Cemetery. One of them died in 2013 from a cancer he got from Agent Orange while in the jungles of Vietnam. And I have, you know, ancestors who were literally drum majors in the Union Army. So, to Basil’s point, black Americans and others have been part of this country since before it was a country. And we need to talk about history, I think. You know, there needs to be an effort to talk about what they are actually asking and calling for. We don’t need to use their language.”