Trump's new attack on DEI: Erasing history or a needed shakeup?

Miami Herald

3 days ago

Editor's note: Welcome to Double Take, a regular conversation from opinion writers Melinda Henneberger and David Mastio tackling news with differing perspectives and respectful debate.
MELINDA: I'm calling the weekend I just spent at my Notre Dame class reunion a Mary-thon, because I got to catch up with so many Marys — Mary Virginia, Mary Ann, Mary Meg and Mary Pat, plus that outlier Kathleen Marie. But while we were closing down the dance floor, Donald Trump did not take a minute off from trying to close down free expression, distort history and put the arts in a headlock.
Oh wait, did I say that wrong? A news story I read about his possibly illegal Friday firing of the director of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery said he was 'continuing his aggressive moves to reshape the federal government's cultural institutions.' You say 'reshape,' I say 'deform.' Art that is told what to be and do isn't art anymore.
DAVID: I spent some time recently in Omaha's fabulous art museum, the Joslyn. Like the Smithsonian museums, it is free and a place of beauty and inspiration. At the same time, if you spend any of your visit reading the descriptions of the works, the monotony of the standard-issue Marxism from the artists is tedious. I've felt the same from the National Portrait Gallery and other Smithsonian art museums. It wouldn't hurt them to have some fresh blood from outside the usual suspects.
MELINDA: Fresh blood? Trump said Kim Sajet is out as director of the Portrait Gallery because she's a 'highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position.' An inappropriately partisan person is just someone who doesn't agree with him. I mean, would he ever throw out one of his own supporters on that basis? On the contrary, he makes no secret of filling positions based not on expertise but on loyalty to him and on the way they look on television.
And isn't DEI just fairness by another name? This president has got things so upside down that any job not held by a white man is now assumed to be held by a know-nothing 'DEI hire,' instead of by someone who had to work even harder to get where he or she is.
DAVID: No, DEI is not the same as fairness or equality. It is right there in the name 'diversity, equity and inclusion.' Equity is the idea that people shouldn't be treated equally because they are not equal. It is the very opposite of the imperfectly achieved American creed that so many fought to finally make a reality in the 1950s, '60s and '70s.
Today, more than 90% of Americans agree on 'equal opportunity.' DEI tears down that hard-won consensus and replaces it with a raw racial spoils system and identity politics. Equity will never enjoy that kind of support.
MELINDA: Look, the college friends I was just with and love so much are mostly white Catholic girls who are grandmas now. But we are keenly aware not only of all we were so lucky to have had, but of what a lack of diversity in our classrooms cost not just those who weren't there but us, too.
Sajet is out because she once told The New York Times that the portraits in the gallery mostly represent 'the wealthy, the pale and the male.' I would not have put it that way, but no one can say it isn't true. Why not include more portraits of those who should have been there all along but were overlooked? And do you really agree with Trump that museums are hotbeds of anti-American propaganda? A confident country is not afraid to tell its whole story. Knowing more will not make us fall apart, and concealing unpretty parts of the past is what authoritarians do. Though if he succeeds, this current moment will certainly wind up as a blank page.
The reason people flock to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture is that a lot of us know that what we learned about that history in school was subpar, to put it generously, and we are eager to change that. Unless this administration really is driven by racial animus, what's the problem?
DAVID: The DEI-mania in the years since the murder of George Floyd may have sometimes brought needed attention to the darker parts of our history, but more often than not it has turned into fact-free America hatred. The bits of The 1619 Project that turn up in the Smithsonian's generally wonderful Museum of African-American History are particularly rancid.
No, modern policing was not borne of the need to recapture escaped slaves. Policing has a history that goes back thousands of years across many cultures. No, American capitalism is not rooted in slavery. The most economically advanced parts of America rejected slavery first. No, the Revolutionary War was not fought to keep British abolitionists at bay.
MELINDA: I'd hardly call it a mania, and there have been more police shootings every year since Floyd's murder. You'd rather fact-check the 1619 Project than talk about Trump's determination to stoke white grievance — white genocide, really? You are right about those 1619 errors, which did a lot of damage. Only Trump isn't trying to correct, but to obliterate. Just like DOGE preferred counterproductive mass firings to the more targeted trims that everyone could have supported. And fact-free American hatred, huh-uh.
I love this country, which is why a year ago right now I was in Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day, as proud of all of those veterans who saved the world from the Nazis, and especially of our local recipient of the French Legion of Honor Medal — France's highest honor, civil or military — as I could have been without having my heart burst out of my chest.
I also love our people who come from everywhere, and who look and think differently from me, too. Unlike the president, who on every holiday posts pretty much the identical festive message about what scum half of all Americans are. I just want us to tell our whole story, like you'd want for the health of your family. To airbrush is to propagandize, and what does that get us?
What's so scary about a museum director trying to make the portraits hanging in our national portrait gallery better represent the whole American story? I can't wait to see what kind of 'improper ideology' JD Vance will uncover at the National Zoo, as he's supposed to be doing across all of the Smithsonian. Maybe he will find that the new pandas or some other immigrant animals are up to no good.
DAVID: I love the National Zoo, but it is not the place to go if you want to learn the nuances of environmental policy. You don't get delicate shades of green — you get hit with a moss sledgehammer. We might agree that Trump is not going to add subtlety, but the place is in need of a shakeup.
The Smithsonian doesn't do nuance well, but nuance is what we need to showcase our common humanity and common problems. You are right that there have been more police shootings since Floyd's death, but it might be wise to dwell on the fact that every year police kill more unarmed white people than Black people. The police killings are best addressed in ways that bring us together as equality already does. The DEI approach of only looking at Black killings leaves us divided.
MELINDA: I took my kids to that zoo all the time and noticed very little environmental policy, nuanced or otherwise, but then I was just trying to keep my son from jumping in with the cheetahs.
You'd expect police shootings to kill more white than Black people since the latter make up only about 15% of the population. Trump's DOJ is not even going to look at police misconduct, which is a good way to get more of what you have decided not to see. But it isn't only the abuse of Black people that he wants to ignore. He also mothballed a federal database tracking all misconduct by federal law enforcement officers. How turning a blind eye to wrongdoing might bring us together I don't know.
That's never been his goal. And this Portrait Gallery director's firing is only one example of this administration's non-stop efforts to disappear all but MAGA-approved history. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just ordered the Navy to review the names of vessels honoring civil rights icons, starting with assassinated San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, a Navy vet himself, and one of the country's first openly gay elected officials. Happy Pride Month! Others on the list include Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Harriet Tubman, Medgar Evers, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. You can call all of this anti-DEI, or you can hear Trump raving about 'dead white farmers' in South Africa and realize that the man's racial views, and our willingness to accept them, are exactly what 1619 was talking about. When only the pale and the male and the straight are acceptable, then that's in-your-face white supremacy.
When Trump replaced those who ran the Smithsonian's Kennedy Center, which he sometimes mistakenly calls the Lincoln Center — I sense a cognitive cover-up in the making here — they were replaced by folks who were not at all partisan. You know, because the new KenCen board he put in place had the nonpartisan good taste to immediately elect Trump as chairman.
After installing himself to run this cultural gem, he according to The New York Times told his new team that as a kid, he could pick out notes on a piano and impressed someone his father had hired to assess his potential strengths with his inate musicality. 'I have a high aptitude for music. Can you believe that?' Yes!
White House communications director Steven Cheung answered a question about this revelation by calling his boss a 'virtuoso' whose musical choices 'represent a brilliant palette of vibrant colors when others often paint in pale pastels.' Sadly, the president said, he was never encouraged to develop his talent. But I say it's never too late to pursue a gift like that on a full-time basis. C'mon, Juilliard, help us out here.
DAVID: If you keep talking Trump, all we're going to do is agree. Let me just say this: As offensive as the blatherings of the sycophants around Trump obviously are, so is the uniform liberalism of the Smithsonian. It paints America through red-colored glasses when there are so many other colors to see. A few years of Trumpy chaos might just inject some needed diversity of thinking to the place. That's part of DEI, too, right?