Demanding the Impossible

Why DEI cannot be Eliminated

Project 2025 Plan & Execution

The attacks on inclusion, equity, and diversity have been underway for several years. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which clearly articulated the plan, was published two years ago in April 2023, but the conflict over inclusive ideas was underway well before that.

Since his inauguration, the President and his administration have executed the Project 2025 agenda and set about an aggressive campaign against what they term DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) Programs. However, the Executive Orders (EO) and agenda to defund and eliminate DEI goes far beyond programs and departments which protect traditionally disenfranchised people from discrimination and well beyond what most people expected. 

Project 2025 suggests that Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs not just be eradicated, but be made illegal and those who practice Inclusion or Equity be prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Although most think of it as an attack on immigrants and people of color, the plan also calls for a massive roll back of women’s freedoms and rights in the workforce and in classrooms. 

The President and his advisers consider any stories, perspectives, or actions that are not focused on white, heterosexual Anglo-Saxon-protestant-males as “discrimination against white people.” This results in books or facts by or about women, Black, Hispanic, LGBTQIA+, or even neurodiverse people being removed from libraries of schools, universities, and towns. Most recently, even the Naval Academy had 381 books removed. People were shocked to find Mein Kampf stayed, but Maya Angelou was removed. 

Another example has been a national campaign against a balanced history curriculum in K-12 schools under the guise of anti-CRT (Critical Race Theory) which continues to attempt removal of non-white-hetero-male perspectives from instruction and content from pre-kinder to post-doctorate education programs.

Whether the themes in the books and programs are about personal life or are political, the administration deems them objectionable by virtue of the author’s race and gender, or sometimes by the mere presence of the ideas of equality or common humanity of all. Furthermore, the President’s EOs direct his department heads to implement the Project 2025 goal of trying to establish any non-white-male content as criminal.

Once Donald Trump took office, the festival of firing by DOGE and the Pentagon has focused heavily on firing Black, women, and transgender employees, particularly Black and women employees at higher echelons of the civil service such as NIH scientists where 38 of the 43 senior researchers fired were women or people of color. In the military, besides attacking transgender soldiers in general, the leadership purge has focused on Black, Hispanic, and women leaders who had, until that time, successfully filled their positions of responsibility.

It has been two months since the President delivered a two week ultimatum that U.S. schools had to eliminate Diversity Inclusion and Equity programs, and almost two weeks (April 3) since he specified that governors be required to certify compliance or lose all federal funding for their state’s public schools. He has not distinguished whether or how other federal funding cuts to education, such as Title 1, IDEA, or Free and Reduced Meals, which have already had substantial staff and grant and program cuts, would figure into this ultimatum. On April 8, Linda McMahon, Secretary of Education, announced a two week extension to the mandate so certifications are now due by April 24. 

Our Nation is too Diverse for DEI to Be Erased

Though the executive branch and (formerly) conservative political officials seem hell bent to reform the United States into a white-Christian-hetero-male dominated nation, and wish to declare the nation a White Christian Nation, they miss the obvious barrier: 

It is impossible to turn either the nation or its schools back to 1953, or even earlier. We are not, and can never again be a monolithic country.

The anti-DEI attacks overlook that every school district in the U.S. is different, despite ongoing efforts by the far right to portray public schools as monolithic “failing, government, schools.” Each school district has its own demographics, economic status, and cultural personality. 

I grew up in an all white small town-rural school system in a town of half farmers and half factory workers. I also lived and taught for fifteen years in a school with no ethnic majority that was proclaimed by National Geographic as one of the “most diverse high schools in America,” in an inner-suburban working class neighborhood. My children went to a similar school just a few miles away, and the third nearby school in our neighborhood was a majority Asian, gifted magnet school. I also worked in a school that out-scored most schools in the world on international test scores. All were different, and all were good schools.

Across this country there are many districts that manage one small high school, a middle school, and several elementaries that feed them. Some of those are majority white, some majority Latin, some majority Black, some very blended. 

According to Ed Week, in 2019 the average number of students in an American High school was 524. Approximately 69.5 percent of districts had fewer than 2,500 students, meaning that they likely had only one or two high schools in their system. However, in many locations, from mid-size towns to suburban county systems and cities any one of many district high schools may have thousands of students.

There are school systems whose schools are geographically far-flung, transporting students as much as 40 miles to their nearest school, and some who serve a tight geographic neighborhood where most kids can walk to school. 

The cultural dynamic can be just as mixed, with the local economic drivers exerting huge influence over school personalities. Schools on Virginia’s Eastern Shore or Cape Cod are influenced by the waterman culture. Schools in the Hampton Roads area and North Carolina’s Ft. Bragg communities are highly impacted by proximity to the military and by proximity to one of the world’s largest shipping ports. Schools in Miami, Dade County have substantial Cuban and Caribbean cultural influences. Northern California’s largest minority populations are Asian, but not from only one Asian heritage. It would be unthinkable to deny music or film to Los Angeles or Nashville schools. Western states we normally think of as being ranching regions, also have large connections to a world tourist trade as well as environmental management, and there is a separate system for schools on native reservations managed by the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Religious practices, even in towns with relatively monolithic history can have diverse practices which influence everything from which historical events are remembered and observed to which holidays are important, to what kinds of food are served in the cafeteria. Even a traditionally Catholic or Protestant community can have wide variations in everything from student dress to holiday food choices.

In other words, the variety of diversity is huge. There is no monolithic “government school.” Each is a local school that serves the children and teens of its community, with a goal of preparing those children and adolescents to live in the world. And that world is simultaneously much smaller ( it fits in the palm of their hand, or on their watch), and much bigger for today’s generations than it was only a generation or two ago. 

Even the idea of preparing students for the work-force requires an understanding of diversity and the exercise of inclusivity. A mid-western farmer may also be a global business-person. A southwestern town may be the home of artist colonies whose artists work in a variety of media from bronze to holographic art to textile or digital art and whose artists sell to galleries world-wide. A niche business anywhere, may develop a thriving internet trade and get its supplies from several parts of the world, while it sells to multiple customers in multiple countries.

According to the 2020 Census, there are 33.9 million people in the U.S. who consider themselves multi-racial. In the U.S., Hispanics can represent a variety of racial profiles and the census counted 62.1 million in 2020. The United States is quite simply no longer as monolithic, exclusionary, or biased as the current administration presumes. 

Use Real Definitions

In their simplest definitions, 

• Diversity means a variety of people who are in some way different. 

• Inclusion means welcoming everyone, and 

• Equity is a synonym for fairness. 

So, when the Trump government dictates local schools that they cannot teach children about diversity, or inclusion, or equity, then the federal government is dictating that local schools cannot teach children about themselves, their own families, their own towns and communities…their own world. DEI is daily reality, not political ideology.

Diversity encompasses so many types of differences. 

Diversity can be ethnicity. Diversity can mean students who are not in the local majority ethnically, a white child in a black neighborhood, or an Asian child in a white neighborhood.

Diversity can be different learning or physical attributes, including: 

• A child with dyslexia, or who struggles with writing, or has an autism spectrum disorder

• A student who is hearing impaired or diabetic

• A student in a wheelchair, or with traumatic anxiety

Diversity can be economic. A kid whose family income is below the poverty level, or a homeless child, or a child whose family vacations internationally regularly and owns multiple homes. 

All of these Differences Exist in Every Community

Inclusion, means simply including that diversity, all the children of a particular town, neighborhood or community. Inclusion has been a mandate for our many faiths and our secular American culture for a very, very long time. Our moral and legal code demands we welcome children, and that we nurture them 

• Regardless of their racial, ethnic,

• Economic status, or

• Intellectual heritage and abilities. 

We must provide an open and welcoming education for our children to become their most effective and best selves. It is both what has long been legally required, and what is morally required.

Equity, means fairness. It’s that plain, and that critical to our ability to safely survive the wildly changing future. 

• Children know what fairness is from the time they are toddlers, and they are unwilling to embrace a culture which is unfair. How many times have I heard a 3 year old shout, “That’s not fair!”? 

• If we do not practice fairness to all, we will be creating schools which alienate children, not just from one another, but from their local and national communities. Many won’t be willing participants in whatever we teach or the world we create if we are not fair. Some will drop out, others will rage at the feelings of inequity.

So, DEI, or saying the other way around Inclusion, Equity, and Diversity are not something we can turn off or just stop doing. 

DEI is integral to who we are, woven into the fabric of each little burg and waystation, in whatever town or state we are from, Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity are what it means to be American, to be human, and threatening loss of funds or prosecution will not change that.