OPINION | Stop Calling It A ‘War on Diversity.’ It’s Racism, and It’s Past Time To Call It What It Is
The Trump administration is simply racist and white supremacist
The New York Times just published an article about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s pattern of denying well-earned promotions to military officers who are Black and women.
The newspaper’s editors gave it the headline, “Secret Vetting and Blocked Promotions: Inside Hegseth’s War on Diversity.”
They gave it the subhead, “A Black admiral fixed one of the Navy’s worst messes. Mr. Hegseth blocked his promotion anyway.”
The irony and the tragedy is that The Times published this piece on Juneteenth, a seminal holiday for Black Americans that is the nation’s oldest holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. It’s the longest-standing holiday for Black Americans and is often referred to as America’s Second Independence Day.
It was established as a federal holiday during Joe Biden’s presidency. But since he returned to the White House, Donald Trump has shunned Juneteenth.
You can’t even find the sort of pro forma presidential proclamation that would be expected.
Trump, Hegseth, and other administration officials have demonstrated themselves to be clearly racist.
Just a few generations ago, Americans like these would be proud and happy to call themselves “racist.”
But today a social stigma of being a racist exists — thin though it is, these days — that these days these people refuse to be fully honest about who they are.
Despite the clear evidence and truth, most mainstream journalists refuse to clearly acknowledge Trump and his administration as definitively racist.
It actually fell, recently, to one of the Times’ columnists, Jamelle Bouie, to properly label and describe Trump, Vice President JD Vance and the others as racist in one of his YouTube video commentaries:
The mainstream political press, Bouie noted correctly, shies away from this truth. They tend to call it “just perceptions [and] partisanship,” he said, just like his colleagues who wrote the Hegseth piece that we started with.
Bouie cited the example of the Trump administration of suing medical schools because the number of Black students admitted to the nation’s medical schools is too high.
“That’s not any kind of analysis. If you see a bunch of Black students at Yale Law School, and you say, ‘There’s no way all those Black people could be there without some kind of unfair preference — if that’s what you conclude — then you’re a racist.”
In his book, The Elements of Journalism, journalist Tom Rosenstiel defined the purpose of journalism as “to provide citizens with the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, their communities, their societies, and their governments.”
How can citizens possibly have that information if they’re denied the clear knowledge that their government is obviously racist?
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