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Black America Web
16-06-2025
- Politics
- Black America Web
How To Celebrate Juneteenth While Civil Rights Are Under Threat
Source: Annika McFarlane / Getty Juneteenth, now a federally recognized holiday, commemorates June 19, 1865—the day enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas, finally learned they were free, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. It's a celebration of Black freedom, resilience, and cultural excellence. But it's also a reminder: progress is not always linear. In recent years, as some government policies and corporate agendas have shifted away from formal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, many people—especially in Black communities—are asking: How do we continue honoring our history while some of the systems meant to protect equity seem to be rolling back? It's becoming an increasingly hard question to answer since President Donald Trump took office in January. Within his first month back in office, President Donald Trump and his administration moved swiftly to dismantle key racial equity policies enacted under President Biden. One of their first actions was the rollback of Executive Order 13985, a directive designed to advance racial equity and support underserved communities by addressing systemic barriers in areas like employment, education, and housing. Trump criticized the initiative as 'public waste and shameful.' As a result, more than 20 companies stripped back vital DEI programs that would have allowed communities of color to thrive. Just four months later, the administration took another significant step by issuing a new executive order aimed at reshaping how the federal government approaches civil rights protections. The order instructed federal agencies to 'deprioritize' efforts that focus on group-based equity, emphasizing instead a return to what it called 'equality of opportunity' over 'equality of outcomes.' It argued that individuals should be treated solely based on merit and personal effort, rejecting the consideration of race or gender in policy decisions. A central target of the order was the legal framework of 'disparate impact,' which identifies discrimination in neutral policies that nonetheless produce unequal outcomes. Critics warn that this shift is dangerous, as it ignores the real and ongoing impact of systemic discrimination—such as redlining, biased hiring practices, and educational disparities—that continues to disadvantage communities of color today and is overtly discriminatory. All of this is frightening to read, but as we approach Juneteenth, it's important not to decenter the joy, freedom, and pride that came years after their powerful day in 1865. So, how do we celebrate Juneteenth this year? We celebrate louder, organize smarter, and connect deeper. Now more than ever, it's time to come together, not just in resistance, but in joy, unity, and purposeful action. Our collective strength, celebration, and determination are what will push back against harmful policies and protect the progress we've fought for. Juneteenth isn't just a day off; it's a powerful opportunity to honor Black history and reflect on the ongoing fight for justice and equality. Use the day to read books, watch documentaries, or attend local events that explore the legacy of slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and modern-day civil rights challenges. Nikole Hannah-Jones's critically acclaimed piece, The 1619 Project , and Phillip Hoose's Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice are great places to start. More importantly, make space for real conversations. Talk about what you've learned with friends, family, and coworkers. Education is a form of resistance and a foundation for meaningful change. Economic empowerment has always been central to freedom. Use Juneteenth as a day to intentionally support Black entrepreneurs, artists, and creators. Buy from local vendors, dine at Black-owned restaurants, or promote their work on social media. Make it a year-round habit, not just a one-day gesture. From parades and festivals to teach-ins and art shows, Juneteenth is celebrated in many forms. Even if large DEI programs are being scaled back, grassroots efforts continue to thrive. Show up, volunteer, or co-create an event in your own community. You can organize a neighborhood potluck with cuisine native to your culture, throw together a family-friendly history scavenger hunt, or take a museum trip. The key is getting all your friends and loved ones together for a day of fun, inspiration, and community. Even as some institutions move away from formal DEI programs, their core purpose—equality, representation, and fairness—remains vital. On Juneteenth, recommit to those values. Whether you're an employee, manager, student, or community member, look for ways to hold space for inclusion. You can start conversations in your workplace or school about inclusive practices or form peer groups or informal diversity councils within your community. Your voice and impact matter. Celebrating Juneteenth in the face of change isn't about ignoring the challenges, it's about responding with pride, power, and purpose. History has shown that progress often meets resistance. But Juneteenth reminds us that justice delayed is not justice denied— every generation must carry the torch forward. Freedom is worth celebrating. Equity is worth defending, and Juneteenth is the perfect time to do both. SEE MORE: Explaining DEI: How Trump's Crackdown Rolls Back Progress How Trump's Team Is Systematically Dismantling Civil Rights SEE ALSO How To Celebrate Juneteenth While Civil Rights Are Under Threat was originally published on Black America Web Featured Video CLOSE
Fox News
02-04-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
USDA's woke boondoggle spent taxpayer dollars on DEI insanity
The billion-dollar diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) industry has infiltrated every sector of society, from corporate boardrooms to government agencies. In the public sector, it has morphed into a boondoggle, funneling taxpayer dollars into products and programs aimed at indoctrinating Americans under the guise of progress. A recent X post by Secretary Brooke Rollins at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) exemplifies this overreach, exposing how the Biden administration politicized even the most basic agricultural resources — seeds — turning them into vehicles for DEI propaganda. Rollins recently posted an image of USDA tomato seed packets found behind a door emblazoned with the words, "These seeds are for growing, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility at USDA." With the seeds were decorative note cards that stated: "If You Can Be Anything, Be Inclusive At USDA." The DEI seed initiative seems to have been an outgrowth of President Joe Biden's Executive Order 13985, signed in January 2021, which mandated equity action plans across federal agencies. Biden's EO was issued to encourage workers to seek ways of embedding DEI into their agencies. It no doubt is responsible for much government waste, and, as Rollins said, "There will be no more American taxpayer dollars spent on DEI initiatives or #WOKESEEDS at the @USDA." In the meantime, farmers dependent on USDA to focus on its mission suffered along with other Americans. According to data gleaned from the U.S. Bureau of Labor, while farmers grappled with real challenges — food inflation surged 23.5% between February 2020 and May 2023, and fertilizer prices spiked 300% in 2022 — the USDA diverted resources to ideological endeavors. The department's agenda ranged from items such as the seeds to a study with the claim, "It is also important to recognize that transgender men and people with masculine gender identities, intersex and non-binary persons may also menstruate." The result? Wasted taxpayer money and propaganda infiltrating even the seeds meant to grow America's food supply. This isn't just about a waste of taxpayer dollars; it's a betrayal of public trust. During Biden's tenure, farmers faced supply chain disruptions and regulatory burdens, yet the USDA prioritized DEI initiatives over practical support like securing food supply chains or reducing red tape. The absurdity of DEI seed packets — some users even questioned if they could be used to grow tomatoes — underscores the overreach of the previous administration's woke agenda. A 2025 White House directive, which terminated all "Equity Action Plans" and related grants, labeled such initiatives as "immense public waste" and discriminatory, aligning with Rollins' move to end this spending at the USDA. This policy shift, reinforced by the America First Investment Policy introduced in February 2025, redirects resources to agricultural innovation, not ideological agendas. The USDA's DEI seeds are a microcosm of a larger problem: the billion-dollar DEI industry has overstepped, using taxpayer dollars to push propaganda at the expense of practical governance. Rollin's approach is balanced and practical. USDA should focus on food security over symbolic gestures like DEI seeds. Rollins' decision to expose the waste and reassure Americans of her commitment to running a responsible Department of Agriculture is a healthy signal of a return to accountability that will ensure that taxpayer dollars support American farmers, not ideological indoctrination. Ferreting out wasted funds that undergirded the politicized agendas of the Biden administration sends a strong message to other federal agencies that they too need to closely examine their agencies. This should guarantee that commonsense and accountability are working together to ensure that legally prohibited, divisive DEI initiatives are being brought into alignment with civil rights laws and constitutional protections.
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
New study reveals 'staggering' scope of how much DEI was infused into government under Biden
FIRST ON FOX: A study published this week details the degree to which the Biden administration infused DEI policies into the federal government in a report the authors say can serve as a resource for the Trump administration to continue to identify and "destroy" the practice. The new study, conducted by the Functional Government Initiative and the Center for Renewing America, identified 460 programs across 24 government agencies in the Biden administration that diverted resources to DEI initiatives. At least $1 trillion of taxpayer money was infused with DEI principles, the study states. The study lays out DEI infusion across several federal agencies, including the Defense Department's plan to "integrate environmental/economic justice tools" into training, FEMA's need to "instill equity as a foundation of emergency management," and the Labor Department's push to "embed equity in a sustainable manner that recognizes the multiple and overlapping identities held by workers." Trump To Shift Away From Dei Visa Policy That 'Surged' Under Biden, Expert Says On his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed Executive Order 13985, which was aimed at carrying out the stated goal of "advancing equity and racial justice through the federal government." Read On The Fox News App "This order mandated a whole of government approach to injecting DEI philosophy into the federal budget," the study says. "In alignment with this directive, the Biden administration apparently spent trillions in DEI-related initiatives in a manner and at a speed that has shrouded public awareness of the financial burden."'Disturbing': Whistleblower Fumes At Biden-era Agency Promoting Dei Program As Department's 'Mission' The report outlines how, over the next four years, the amount spent on DEI efforts was "staggering." "The cumulative budget of these programs exceeds $1.1 trillion," the report says. "However, this figure does not encompass all DEI-related expenditures, nor does it include every program across these agencies. The findings reveal a substantial increase in DEI spending, largely attributable to policy directives under the Biden administration." "Of the programs identified, 10 are exclusively dedicated to DEI and could be considered for quick elimination; 144 allocate significant resources to DEI initiatives and should be reviewed if those are to be ended; and 306 programs incorporate DEI to varying degrees, though the extent of their DEI focus is indeterminate based on the available documentation." The report goes department by department and calculates the DEI programs and provides recommendations on how they should be addressed. "DEI is deeply rooted throughout all aspects of the federal government, and it needs to be eliminated completely," Center for Renewing America senior adviser Wade Miller told Fox News Digital in a statement. "Thankfully, the Trump administration has already embarked on a vitally necessary complete audit of each and every government program. We offer, in this report, what we hope are additional resources and tools that the new administration and Congress can use to identify, destroy and permanently remove DEI from the federal government." Click To Get The Fox News App FGI spokesman Roderick Law explained to Fox News Digital that the dual study "could both expedite the elimination of DEI from the executive branch and show just how quickly pernicious ideologies can spread inside the government." "The nature of DEI is both divisive and anti-American," Law added, "so why force it onto the military or the Commerce Department or the EPA? After President Biden lavishly funded and pushed these controversial principles into every possible area of government, our hope is that raising these questions and offering Congress and responsible executive branch officials tools and suggestions can keep it from happening again." The Trump administration has made it a top priority to rid DEI from the federal bureaucracy and the president has signed multiple executive orders aimed at addressing what it argues is a practice that does more harm than good by ignoring meritocracy. Fox News Digital reached out to Biden's office for article source: New study reveals 'staggering' scope of how much DEI was infused into government under Biden
Fox News
10-03-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
New study reveals 'staggering' scope of how much DEI was infused into government under Biden
FIRST ON FOX: A study published this week details the degree to which the Biden administration infused DEI policies into the federal government in a report the authors say can serve as a resource for the Trump administration to continue to identify and "destroy" the practice. The new study, conducted by the Functional Government Initiative and the Center for Renewing America, identified 460 programs across 24 government agencies in the Biden administration that diverted resources to DEI initiatives. At least $1 trillion of taxpayer money was infused with DEI principles, the study states. The study lays out DEI infusion across several federal agencies, including the Defense Department's plan to "integrate environmental/economic justice tools" into training, FEMA's need to "instill equity as a foundation of emergency management," and the Labor Department's push to "embed equity in a sustainable manner that recognizes the multiple and overlapping identities held by workers." On his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed Executive Order 13985, which was aimed at carrying out the stated goal of "advancing equity and racial justice through the federal government." "This order mandated a whole of government approach to injecting DEI philosophy into the federal budget," the study says. "In alignment with this directive, the Biden administration apparently spent trillions in DEI-related initiatives in a manner and at a speed that has shrouded public awareness of the financial burden."'DISTURBING': WHISTLEBLOWER FUMES AT BIDEN-ERA AGENCY PROMOTING DEI PROGRAM AS DEPARTMENT'S 'MISSION' The report outlines how, over the next four years, the amount spent on DEI efforts was "staggering." "The cumulative budget of these programs exceeds $1.1 trillion," the report says. "However, this figure does not encompass all DEI-related expenditures, nor does it include every program across these agencies. The findings reveal a substantial increase in DEI spending, largely attributable to policy directives under the Biden administration." "Of the programs identified, 10 are exclusively dedicated to DEI and could be considered for quick elimination; 144 allocate significant resources to DEI initiatives and should be reviewed if those are to be ended; and 306 programs incorporate DEI to varying degrees, though the extent of their DEI focus is indeterminate based on the available documentation." The report goes department by department and calculates the DEI programs and provides recommendations on how they should be addressed. "DEI is deeply rooted throughout all aspects of the federal government, and it needs to be eliminated completely," Center for Renewing America senior adviser Wade Miller told Fox News Digital in a statement. "Thankfully, the Trump administration has already embarked on a vitally necessary complete audit of each and every government program. We offer, in this report, what we hope are additional resources and tools that the new administration and Congress can use to identify, destroy and permanently remove DEI from the federal government." FGI spokesman Roderick Law explained to Fox News Digital that the dual study "could both expedite the elimination of DEI from the executive branch and show just how quickly pernicious ideologies can spread inside the government." "The nature of DEI is both divisive and anti-American," Law added, "so why force it onto the military or the Commerce Department or the EPA? After President Biden lavishly funded and pushed these controversial principles into every possible area of government, our hope is that raising these questions and offering Congress and responsible executive branch officials tools and suggestions can keep it from happening again." The Trump administration has made it a top priority to rid DEI from the federal bureaucracy and the president has signed multiple executive orders aimed at addressing what it argues is a practice that does more harm than good by ignoring meritocracy. Fox News Digital reached out to Biden's office for comment.
Fox News
07-02-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
How Trump is uprooting radical '60s foundations of poisonous DEI and CRT programs
President Trump has certainly undertaken a systematic demolition of Biden's diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) regime since returning to the Oval Office. But Trump is also going further. He appears intent on correcting the distortion of the original pledges of the Civil Rights Movement. In other words, Donald Trump is not only dispatching Bidenism to the dustbin of history, he is also on the warpath against the radical '60s. And this is really, really good news. Many of the things that conservatives are setting out to dismantle have their origin in that fateful decade. For DEI – which Trump with his many executive orders has now made illegal to carry out throughout the federal government, its contractors and grantees, and also wants to discourage in the private sector – is awful not just because preferences are odious. DEI is dangerous because what it really sets out to do is reprogram Americans with a new belief; to make them reject their history and culture and hate their society, and condition them to accept a new dispensation, one that includes accepting group rather than individual rights, collective action over personal initiative, and central planning rather than markets. To put one word on it, it's Marxism. DEI seeks to accomplish this indoctrination through many ways. One was its many workplace or schoolhouse trainings, which cajoled individuals to look inside themselves so they could root out "subconscious bias," or areas of "privilege," or uttered "microaggressions," and other such nonsense that suddenly became commonplace words. There were also the writings and charts that sought to instill explicitly racist and illegal beliefs such as that loving to read and write, punctuality, and linear thinking were elements of "Whiteness." There was also the toppling of statues of giants such as Washington, Jefferson and Frederick Douglass, and their constant denigration. There was much, much more, but this jogs our memory to the trance state that Trump seems intent on rescuing the country from. Joe Biden put these practices on steroids. He started on day one of his administration by signing Executive Order 13985, which called for every department and agency to make DEI a priority of their work. The EO had reverberations through Biden's four snake-bitten years in office. "The Biden Administration forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' (DEI), into virtually all aspects of the Federal Government, in areas ranging from airline safety to the military. This was a concerted effort stemming from President Biden's first day in office, when he issued Executive Order 13985… That ends today," wrote Trump in a day-one EO that set in motion his DEI demolition derby. It was in a day-two EO, also on DEI, that we first got to see how far the new administration was willing to head. It rescinded many previous executive actions, including EOs by Obama, Clinton, Nixon, and, pointedly, one by Lyndon B. Johnson. That was EO 11246, which LBJ signed in September 1965. EO 11246 was the first government action that required federal contractors to share the racial makeup of their workforce, and overtime became the touchstone for racial quotas. LBJ signed that order three months after a Howard University commencement address which became the turning point for the Civil Rights Movement's approach to race. Up to that speech, the promoters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and of civil rights in general, had sworn on stacks of Bibles that it would never degenerate into race-conscious hiring and promotion. The phrase "affirmative action," as it was contained in one of President John F. Kennedy's first EOs, explicitly promised color-blindness in contracting: "The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin." But Johnson's Howard speech was the start of reneging on that pledge and interpreting affirmative action to mean racial preferences. "But freedom is not enough," said Johnson. "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair." Thence on, affirmative action meant preferences with regard to race, the opposite of JFK's promise, and EO 11246 operationalized that, until Trump rescinded it. It was during the 1960s, too, that the culture-tearing ideas that animate DEI took hold. There had been America haters in the past, usually among the intellectual classes. But the '60s was the decade when these ideas took root. DEI applies the beliefs of critical race theory – that America is "systemically racist," that "White supremacy" is our base philosophy, and that America is an oppressive society. These falsehoods all go back to the '60s. And the radicals who trained or were mentors to the Marxist founders of Black Lives Matter, men and women like Eric Mann and Angela Davis, were also all '60s radicals. BLM almost fulfilled their dreams of radicalizing America. And it was BLM's riots in 2020, an uprising really, that instilled in Biden the urge to put DEI on a 24/7 tempo, and convinced so many Americans that the lies were true. Which is why Trump must indeed rescind the radicalism of the '60s.
