Why the focus on ‘divisive concepts' in New Hampshire? Why the attacks on diversity programs?

Yahoo

21-04-2025

Why is the modern Republican Party so invested in reframing American history? (Getty Images)
Years ago, when I worked as a newspaper opinion editor, a conservative reader sent a letter to argue that 21st-century America was a post-racial society. I don't recall the details of his email except that his case was built around individual accomplishment, particularly the success of Black entertainers (including Bill Cosby) and the election and reelection of President Barack Obama.
His point, no doubt in response to something I had either published or written myself, was that structural racism — to the extent it ever existed — most certainly did not exist now.
I'm not sure how I responded exactly, but I do remember being baffled by the evidence he offered for his conclusion. To arrive at 'post-racial society' via Cosby and Obama seemed both absurd and dangerous — a reductionist presentation of recent history, yes, but also a stubborn refusal to seek out the realities of other eyes.
And I'm not even talking about empathy — that's like the advanced course. I mean just seeing through the experiences of others that there is not one America, that this nation exists differently for different people, and that opportunity is not a single, shared thread.
While we have struggled mightily as a nation to even chip away at yawning opportunity gaps — not just for Black and Indigenous people but women, immigrants, the working poor, the list goes on and on — historically there seemed to me, naively as it turns out, to at least be agreement that the gaps existed. The frequent and sometimes violent conflict over that reality and its causes could be offered as ample proof, I thought. But now, an entire political party has built its brand on denialism and erasure — and found in its followers a population more than willing to sacrifice their future if it means the relief of forgetting the past and averting their eyes from the present.
My letter writer from years ago wasn't a fringe anomaly but a harbinger.
The most obvious example nationally is the Trump administration's carpet-bombing of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and the countless ways those attacks have rippled out and laid waste to lives and livelihoods. Meanwhile, New Hampshire is mimicking the efforts and with the same toe-deep understanding of what purpose the programs actually serve. In one memorable February exchange, Auburn Republican Rep. Jess Edwards had to talk down fellow Republican Rep. Mike Belcher from his superficial hatred of the Department of Health and Human Services' 'Office of Health Equity,' which Belcher had targeted for elimination.
'The word 'health equity' has jumped out at me as well,' Edwards told Belcher sympathetically during a hearing for the since-retained bill. 'I think we've got a situation where whoever came up with the name of that department really regrets it, because they couldn't forecast how the name would basically become synonymous with actual discrimination.'
Truly, how could anyone have predicted that the Republican Party would successfully sell its supporters on the idea that 'equity' is synonymous with its antonym?
This is the same genre of illogic and enforced ignorance that has given New Hampshire its 'divisive concepts' law, the subject of a legal battle now being fought in the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston. Although part of the legal problem with the law is that it's overly (and purposely) vague — an extension of the first Trump administration's 'critical race theory' mass hallucination — the goal was and is to make teachers afraid to tackle the uglier, less 'shining city on a hill' chapters of America's past and present.
But why?
Why is the modern Republican Party so invested in reframing American history, which they are accomplishing through educator threats and a transparent effort to make 'equity' and 'inclusion' mean their opposites? What is it that links the party's stop-teaching-about-slavery Project 1776 to the implementation of its anti-democratic, pro-wealthy Project 2025.
Those are the questions you have to ask.
'History is not inert,' Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in Vanity Fair last year, 'but contains within it a story that implicates the present.'
And that, eloquently, is the answer.
Nothing is more dangerous to the powers behind a nation as historically unequal as our own than to have the citizens start asking the right questions of the right people.
But with the pitchfork mobs so blindly dedicated to the eradication of all things DEI and 'divisive concepts,' the powers needn't worry. In Donald Trump's America, we're a million miles away from the right questions.
And that, as any right-wing politician can tell you, is and always was the point.