“When those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you.… When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in the mirror and saw nothing.”
– Adrienne Rich
When the Democrats take control of both houses in the 120th Congress on January 3, 2027, they must show their constituents (of all party affiliations) that they will use their power not simply for power’s sake – as have the Republicans – but, rather, to fulfill the promises they made during their campaigns: to make the lives of the people better, more equitable, and more affordable, and to make the public discourse more civil.
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Among their goals is to reverse some of the mean-spirited, draconian policies of the Trump era, stemming from this president’s first and current regimes in office.
Reclaiming DEI initiatives
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In September 2020, during his first term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and other institutions that held or applied for federal grants and contracts. The stated purpose of the order was to “combat offensive and anti-American race and sex stereotyping.”
In his ruthless campaign to turn Florida into the place “where WOKE goes to die,” Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) launched a frontal assault on issues of DEI initiatives in his state, attempting to place the final nail in the coffin of affirmative action in higher education stemming from the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. (SFFA) v. President & Fellows of Harvard College (Harvard) and SFFA v. University of North Carolina.
On the Fox cable network — broadcasting on location somewhere on Earth 2 — program host Laura Ingraham blasted DEI and diversity hires in particular for causing a January 2024 incident in which a door panel blew off the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines plane 16,000 feet over the state of Oregon, terrifying passengers and forcing the pilots to make an emergency landing.
Though acknowledging that she had no proof for her claim that DEI programs at Boeing, a private company, led to the near disaster, her implication was clear:
“We can’t link the diversity efforts to what happened, that would take an exhaustive investigation,” she admitted. “But it’s worth asking at this point: Is excellence what we need in airline operation, or is diversity the goal here?”
By implication, industry DEI efforts were more related to “wokeness” than to hiring talented and highly qualified employees. Ingraham and others on the political right have sent the not-so-subtle message that quality and diversity in hiring are both mutually exclusive, and that companies are prioritizing diversity over safety.
Going far beyond Ingraham’s racist dog whistle, Elon Musk, by comparison, shouted his anti-DEI disdain from the rooftops into his high-volume microphone on his X platform by promoting a Tweet arguing that graduates from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have IQs nearing “borderline intellectual impairment.” This comes on the heels of the billionaire rebroadcasting a tweet asserting that Jews push “hatred against whites.”
Musk promoted the tweet of a popular user called @eyeslasho, which argued that the United Airlines program of hiring traditionally underrepresented employees —such as people of color, women, LGBTQ people, and others (some from HBCUs) — is dangerous because graduates from HBCUs are not intelligent, and, therefore, not qualified to fly a plane.
“The mean IQ of grads from two of those United Airline HBCU ‘partners’ is about 85 to 90, based on the average SATs at those schools. (The SAT correlates reasonably well with IQ.),” @eyeslasho wrote. “The HBCU IQ averages are within 10 points of the threshold for what is considered ‘borderline intellectual impairment.’”
Musk responded: “It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE,” rearranging the letters of the DEI initialism.
What is more “pro-American” and “patriotic” than programs and people who are attempting to bring about the promise of our founding documents?
While Trump, Elon Musk, and others on the political right oppose DEI initiatives, they stand in full and unqualified support for politics, programs, initiatives, and institutions that promote what I have termed “OPK”: initiatives for the hiring of “Oligarchs, Plutocrats, and Kleptocrats.”
Simply check out Trump’s cabinet, advisors, and ambassador choices for his second term with the unprecedented number of billionaires. For the first four months, the executive branch of government was headed by a virtual joint Trump/Musk presidency.
Trump has transformed terms within the concept of DEI into accusations and epithets for “unqualified,” “low experience,” “low education,” “low expectations,” “anti-white,” and “anti-male” regarding workplace quality and performance.
But don’t be fooled. The continuing and perennial need for DEI programs in schools and industry lay bare the lie that the United States stands as a meritocratic nation built on the dream and practice that hard work, talent, and ambition alone and provide the ticket to success, regardless of one’s background and social identities.
This concept of meritocracy fails to consider the long legacy of differentials of power and privilege based on the social identities of race, socioeconomic class, gender and gender identity, sexual identity, ability, age, national origin, and others.
Let’s consider a definition of DEI:
“DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives are strategic actions taken by organizations to create a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace [and school]. These initiatives aim to address biases, promote fair treatment, and ensure that everyone feels valued and has equal opportunities. DEI initiatives encompass a wide range of activities, including training, hiring practices, policy changes, and employee resource groups.”
Subdivided into its constituent parts, “diversity” can mean bringing together people with a variety of different voices, backgrounds, and political, theological, and philosophical outlooks, who come from differing social identities.
The inverse of “diversity” are concepts such as “uniformity,” “homogeneity,” “sameness,” “segregation,” “conformity,” “injustice,” “bias,” “discrimination,” and others.
“Equity” represents the recognition that individuals do not start in life from the same place — for example, socially, physically, and economically — while acknowledging that at times, adjustments or accommodations need to be made to compensate for the imbalances.
Contrary to “equity” are “favoritism,” “bias,” “prejudgment,” “prejudice,” “one-sidedness,” “predisposition,” “predilection,” “subjectivity,” “proclivity,” “penchant,” “partisanship,” and more.
And “inclusion” means the practices or policies for ensuring equal access to opportunities and resources for individuals and groups who may traditionally have been barred or marginalized.
Opposing concepts include “deletion,” “exclusion,” “omission,” “elimination,” “erasure,” “skipping over,” “elision,” and so on.
“Social justice” or “education for living in a democracy”
When I was a tenured professor in a large midwestern researach university within their school of education, we dedicated several weekly faculty meetings to constructing a new mission statement for our department of teacher education.
At the initial meeting of the semester, our department chair asked us to brainstorm possible topics and concepts we might wish to include in our mission statement.
Faculty suggested some concepts, such as:
- The preparation of educators and administrators for an ever-changing world and US public school environments,
- Emphasis on remaining current in the latest innovations, pedagogical perspectives, and changing climates within US public school policies and systems
- Equipping preservice educators and administrators with prospective students’ special needs and means of accommodation,
- Providing our students with international experiences by having the voluntary option of conducting their practicum (practice teaching) in one of the many school systems we have developed abroad,
- and many other suggestions.
As the so-called “multicultural educational specialist,” I suggested that our mission statement should be undergirded on a foundation of “Social Justice.”
When a few other faculty members had curious expressions on their faces, someone asked, “What do you mean by ‘Social Justice”?
I addressed their questions by explaining what social justice is and what social justice education is.
To restore DEI and social justice initiatives within the Trump era, we cannot use the mean-spirited and freedom-killing methods of our opponents.
For Lee Anne Bell, social justice includes both a process and a goal: “The goal of social justice is full and equal participation of all groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet their needs.”
I constructed my definition of social justice as: “The concept that local, national, and global communities function where everyone has equal access to and equitable distribution of the rights, benefits, privileges, and resources, and where everyone can live freely unencumbered by social constructions of hierarchical positions of domination and subordination based on social identities and backgrounds.”
Social justice is about ensuring a better, more peaceful, and equitable society and world dedicated to the concept of fairness and justice in relationships between the individual and the nation (and between nations). Furthermore, it is devoted to obliterating the barriers of social mobility by working actively for equality of opportunity and economic justice.
Another faculty member, speaking with an urgency and a certain hostility in their voice, stated, “But if we place ‘social justice’ as our foundation, that excludes all other foundational perspectives.”
I asked the person, “What are the other perspectives we are excluding?”
When the person failed to answer my question, I listed some possible foundational perspectives, including undemocratic education, authoritarian education, the “banking system” of education in which educators deposit information into what some educators view as the students’ docile and uncritical minds, and others.
To my surprise, the entire group came alive, and a dynamic exchange transpired through the remainder of this meeting and over the course of other meetings until we finalized our updated mission statement.
Rather than using the specific term “social justice,” which some people felt was too “triggering” or “too political,” other language was used such as “student centered education” and “education for living in a democracy.” I took this as a victory.
Some of the preeminent social justice, critical multicultural, and progressive educational theorists include Paolo Freire, John Dewey, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Beverly Daniel Tatum, Bailey Jackson, Lee Ann Bell, Maurianne Adams, Kimberlé Crenshaw, John Rawls, and others.
Where did the term “social justice” come from anyway?
We can date the term “social justice” back to the 1840s when it was coined by a Jesuit priest named Luigi Taparelli (born Prospero Taparelli d’Azeglio, 1793–1862). He used the term in his multi-volume natural law treatise, Saggio teoretico di dritto naturale appoggiato sul fatto (A Theoretical Treatise on Natural Law Resting on Fact).
It became used often by activists as a social goal during the revolutions of 1848, as expressed by progressive activists and scholars thereafter.
We find the terms in several documents, for example, the preamble of the International Labour Organization, an agency of the United Nations, stating that “universal and lasting peace can be established only if it is based upon social justice.”
In addition, the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, a human rights declaration passed by consensus on June 25, 1993 by the World Congress on Human Rights, included “social justice” as the purpose and goal of human rights education.
Discarding “the master’s tools” & practicing freedom
“Education as the practice of freedom — as opposed to education as the practice of domination — denies that [humankind] is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people.” – Paolo Freire, from Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
I have never forgotten one essential point my educational psychology professor made in my class at San José State University when I was working toward my secondary education teacher’s certification in 1970. His point crystallized for me the intent of true and meaningful learning.
My professor explained that the term “education” is derived from two Latin roots: “e,” meaning “out of,” and “ducere,” meaning “to lead” or “to draw.”
“Education,” he said, “is the process of drawing knowledge out of the student or leading the student toward knowledge, rather than putting or depositing information into what some educators perceive as the student’s waiting and docile mind” is what the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Reglus Neves Freire termed “the banking system of education.”
I would ask, however, what effects do our current age of right-wing control, or standardization, corporatization, globalization, privatization, and deregulation of the educational, business, banking, and corporate sectors have on learning?
As civil rights anti-racism writer and activist has Audre Lorde reminded us: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
To restore DEI and social justice initiatives within the Trump era, we cannot use the mean-spirited and freedom-killing methods of our opponents. Instead, we must advance by taking a higher ground in responding with sincere commitment, compassion, and love — yes, love — where we maintain our integrity while accomplishing our goals.
In the final analysis, what is more “pro-American” and “patriotic” than programs and people who are attempting to bring about the promise of our founding documents? Concepts of DEI and social justice illuminate key texts such as the United States Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights.
We the People demanded change in our midterm votes, and for the Democrats to have any chance of retaking the White House after the elections of 2028, they must govern in the legislative branch to fulfil the desires and needs of their constituents for a “more perfect union.”
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