Latest news with #ExecutiveOrder14151
Black America Web
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Black America Web
Diversity Efforts Once Deemed Essential Now Rejected By CIA
Source: MarioGuti / Getty The CIA is undergoing its biggest internal shakeup since the Cold War—gutting its diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) initiatives under the directive of Executive Order 14151 from the Trump administration. According to reports, these once-prioritized programs, designed to reflect America's evolving demographic and give our intelligence efforts a strategic edge, are now being cast aside in the false new mission of increasing 'merit-based' hiring. Let's be clear, the CIA's commitment to diversity wasn't born out of a social justice movement. After the Cold War and again post-9/11, multiple directors and bipartisan congressional leaders pushed to diversify the agency for one key reason—national security. They believed, with good reason, that officers from varied racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds brought insights that a homogenous workforce simply couldn't. Whether it was spotting patterns others missed, blending in abroad, or building better human intel networks, representation was a matter of strategy, not sentiment. 'If there is one place that there is a clear business case for diversity, it is at the CIA,' Senator Mark Warner, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee told the New York Times . 'You have to have spies around the world in all countries. They can't all be white men, or our intelligence collection will suffer.' Despite this logic, that strategic lens has been thrown out of focus. The Trump administration has ordered federal agencies—including the CIA, to dismantle DEIA programs across the board. The agency has shuttered its Office of Diversity and Inclusion and halted targeted recruitment efforts that were helping build a more representative intelligence force. As part of this overhaul, the CIA has begun notifying officers involved in recruitment and diversity-related roles during the Biden administration that they must resign or face termination . Legal challenges have arisen, with a federal court temporarily halting dismissals until a hearing can take place. Former Director William Burns championed diversity as critical to mission effectiveness. And he wasn't alone. For decades, agency heads—regardless of party—saw diversity not as a handout, but as a national advantage. That era appears to be over. Current Director John Ratcliffe says the agency's goal now is to be 'colorblind,' focusing purely on qualifications. But what does 'colorblind' mean in a field that thrives on seeing what others overlook? Intelligence isn't just about facts—it's about context and context comes from lived experience. The fallout is already sparking a broader debate about what it means to lead a global intelligence effort in 2025. Critics of the rollback warn that the agency is putting itself at risk, weakening its cultural fluency and ability to adapt in an increasingly complex global environment. The move could also damage morale, making it harder to recruit and retain the kind of talent the agency needs. At the end of the day, diversity at the CIA was never about checking a box. It was about sharpening the agency's ability to do its job to protect the country using every tool available. Rolling back those tools for political optics isn't just shortsighted, it's a threat to our national safety, security, and intelligence. As legal battles loom and political rhetoric heats up, the future of DEIA in national security hangs in the balance. One thing is certain: if we want to outsmart our adversaries, we can't afford to ignore the power of perspective. SEE ALSO: We Hear You, Ancestors: Fire Decimates Nottoway Plantation In Louisiana Adriana Smith: Pregnant Brain-Dead Woman To Remain Alive To Give Birth SEE ALSO Diversity Efforts Once Deemed Essential Now Rejected By CIA was originally published on Black America Web Featured Video CLOSE
Black America Web
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Black America Web
Curator Dr. Ashley James Is In The Business Of Preserving Black Art
Source: Grant Faint / Getty Art, in any form, should speak to the people and for the people. Art can be a rally cry from the canvas, an expression of beauty, struggle, love, and admiration, or a time capsule captured with a stroke. Nina Simone said it best, 'An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times .' For Black curators like Dr. Ashley James, the Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim Museum, 'the role of a curator is to research, preserve, and exhibit works of art for the enrichment of the public. It means playing close attention to artists, what and why they make work – and then determining how to best communicate the meaning of these works.' The NYC native and daughter of Jamaican parents knows what it's like to navigate the curator space as a Black woman. She is the first Black curator to work at the Guggenheim full-time. 'I think the art world reflects the very same racial, gender, national, etc. biases that determine other institutional formations,' said James. 'So, of course as a Black woman I've had to navigate imposed expectations and deliberate occlusions. That being said, I've been fortunate to find great collaborators across all the demographic spectrum — especially alongside the colleagues with whom I've been able to co-curate shows and co-lead groups.' With an administration built on diminishing the Black existence, Black art is in a state of attack. At the beginning of this year, President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 14151, titled 'Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing.' It was a haymaker to the face of Black artists and creatives who depend on key funding and programs to exist. As written by Kelli Morgan in a piece called, Trump's Executive Orders Are a Direct Threat to Black Art, History, and Truth,' 'By imposing federal control over the Smithsonian museums—specifically targeting the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC)—this order seeks to rewrite history through a white supremacist lens.' The Black Art Movement of the 60s and 70s was instrumental in establishing the Black identity, reclaiming Black expression, and rebelling against the status quo. It challenged Eurocentric norms, making it a target for oppressors. Recently, a Black Lives Matter mural, painted in 2020 during the pandemic, on a street a jog away from the White House, has been removed. It's one of many acts to silence our history. At the intersection of Black art and politics, there is a government eager to dismantle the institutions that protect sacred work. Despite the danger that lurks under the guise of misused political power, Black people are resilient. All of which is why James' passion for curating runs deep through her veins. 'I've loved many exhibitions but perhaps a show that very clearly changed my life would Soul of A Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power . Curated by Zoe Whitley and Mark Godfrey for the Tate Modern, Soul of A Nation toured the U.S. including a stop in Brooklyn. I organized the Brooklyn Museum iteration — my first task upon starting at the museum in fact — and it was a wonderful experience in terms of the organizational process and the exhibition itself. I learned so much about making shows and the artists in that show continue to inform my thinking about contemporary art more broadly.' SEE ALSO Curator Dr. Ashley James Is In The Business Of Preserving Black Art was originally published on Black America Web Featured Video CLOSE
Forbes
28-04-2025
- Politics
- Forbes
The Trump Administration Is Rolling Back Environmental Justice Efforts. Here's How That Affects Public Health.
BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA - OCTOBER 12: Smoke billows from one of many chemical plants in the area ... More October 12, 2013. 'Cancer Alley' is one of the most polluted areas of the United States and lies along the once pristine Mississippi River that stretches some 80 miles from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where a dense concentration of oil refineries, petrochemical plants, and other chemical industries reside alongside suburban homes. (Photo by.) Amidst the flurry of directives emerging from the Trump administration, there have been several sweeping steps to dismantle efforts at environmental justice. Last month, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, announced '31 historic actions in the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history,' including 'terminating Biden's Environmental Justice and DEI arms of the agency.' Practically speaking, this move targets ten regional offices and the central environmental justice division of the EPA. The decision is in line with President Trump's Executive Order 14151, titled 'Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing,' which was issued on his first day in office. Couched within the text is a call for the termination of all 'environmental justice offices and positions' as well as an examination of whether these environmental justice roles 'have been misleadingly relabeled in an attempt to preserve their pre-November 4, 2024 function.' That the Trump administration would seek to erode much of President Biden's legacy on environmental justice is unsurprising. During the 2024 presidential campaign, President Trump repeatedly flouted concerns around climate change, terming the issue 'one of the greatest scams of all time.' In line with this ethos, his return to office has catalyzed the U.S.'s rapid retreat from multiple key climate efforts, including the Paris Agreement and a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. However, the Trump administration's decision to undo domestic environmental justice initiatives may prove damaging to an extent that could take time to fully appreciate. The American Public Health Association characterizes environmental justice as 'the idea that all people and communities have the right to live and thrive in safe, healthy environments with equal environmental protections and meaningful involvement in these actions.' Central to understanding this idea is acknowledging that communities across the country have historically not enjoyed equal environmental protections. Take, for instance, Cancer Alley. Tracing the Mississippi River, this 85-mile region is home to numerous petrochemical plants, which have sullied the air. This resulting pollution has had deleterious effects on the area's residents, with some pockets of the region being estimated to confer a 700-times greater cancer risk relative to the national average. Residents of the region have long sought resolutions and recourse to this toxic calamity, especially after the EPA's risk assessment tools underscored the links between nearby chemical exposure and poor health outcomes. One EPA report, titled 'Waiting to Die,' borrows its name from the haunting words of a resident who succumbed to cancer, underscoring the profound environmental injustices that locals have endured. These lasting effects require a strong, coordinated public health response, rooted in recognition that communities have faced these environmental harms unevenly. Meaningfully righting these wrongs starts with a thorough investigation of their roots, a strategic deployment of resources, and robust community partnerships to gather feedback and prevent recurrence. This series of essential, corrective measures are essentially precluded by a political climate that buries the topic of environmental injustice in the first place. To take another example of how recognizing environmental injustices is critical for improving public health, consider the emerging research on urban heat islands. According to the EPA, heat islands can arise 'when areas experience hotter temperatures within a city.' In cities that have an uneven distribution of foliage, neighborhoods featuring more greenery can offer a relative cooling effect, enabling residents to better withstand dangerously hot summers. This natural effect is especially important when considering that not all residents may have access to air conditioning or cooling centers. Even when that access exists, periods of extreme heat can often contribute to power outages, amplifying the danger to public health. All things considered, it's thus vital to continue to work towards environmental justice solutions, even as the discipline faces mounting pressure in the new political era. The future of healthy communities depends on it.
New York Times
19-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The Naval Academy Thinks Midshipmen Can't Handle the Truth
For the past four years, I have been delivering a series of lectures on the virtues of Stoicism to midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and I was supposed to continue this on April 14 to the entire sophomore class on the theme of wisdom. Roughly an hour before my talk was to begin, I received a call: Would I refrain from any mention in my remarks of the recent removal of 381 supposedly controversial books from the Nimitz library on campus? My slides had been sent up the chain of command at the school, which was now, as it was explained to me, extremely worried about reprisals if my talk appeared to flout Executive Order 14151 ('Ending Radical and Wasteful Government D.E.I. Programs and Preferencing.') When I declined, my lecture — as well as a planned speech before the Navy football team, with whom my books on Stoicism are popular was canceled. (The academy 'made a schedule change that aligns with its mission of preparing midshipmen for careers of service,' a Navy spokesperson told Times Opinion. 'The Naval Academy is an apolitical institution.') Had I been allowed to go ahead, this is the story I was going to tell the class: In the fall of 1961, a young naval officer named James Stockdale, a graduate of the Naval Academy and future Medal of Honor recipient who went on to be a vice admiral, began a course at Stanford he had eagerly anticipated on Marxist theory. 'We read no criticisms of Marxism,' he recounted later, 'only primary sources. All year we read the works of Marx and Lenin.' It might seem unusual that the Navy would send Stockdale, then a 36-year-old fighter pilot, to get a master's degree in the social sciences, but he knew why he was there. Writing home to his parents that year, he reminded them of a lesson they had instilled in him, 'You really can't do well competing against something you don't understand as well as something you can.' At the time, Marxism was not just an abstract academic subject, but the ideological foundation of America's greatest geopolitical enemy. The stakes were high. The Soviets were pushing a vision of global Communism and the conflict in Vietnam was flashing hot, the North Vietnamese fueled by a ruthless mix of dogma and revolutionary zeal. 'Marxism' was, like today, also a culture war boogeyman used by politicians and demagogues. Just a few short years after completing his studies, in September 1965, Stockdale was shot down over Thanh Hoa in North Vietnam, and as he parachuted into what he knew would be imprisonment and possibly death, his mind turned to the philosophy of Epictetus, which he had been introduced to by a professor at Stanford. He would spend the next seven years in various states of solitary confinement and enduring brutal torture. His captors, sensing perhaps his knowledge as a pilot of the 'Gulf of Tonkin incident,' a manufactured confrontation with North Vietnamese forces that led to greater U.S. involvement in Vietnam, sought desperately to break him. Stockdale drew on the Stoicism of Epictetus, but he also leveraged his knowledge of the practices and the mind-set of his oppressors. 'In Hanoi, I understood more about Marxist theory than my interrogator did,' Stockdale explained. 'I was able to say to that interrogator, 'That's not what Lenin said; you're a deviationist.''' In his writings and speeches after his return from the prison known as the Hanoi Hilton, Stockdale often referred to what he called 'extortion environments,' which he used to describe his experience as a captive. He and his fellow P.O.W.s were asked to answer simple questions or perform seemingly innocuous tasks, like appear in videos, and if they declined, there would be consequences. No one at the Naval Academy intimated any consequences for me, of course, but it felt extortionary all the same. I had to choose between my message or my continued welcome at an institution it has been one of the honors of my life with which to speak at. As an author, I believe deeply in the power of books. As a bookstore owner in Texas, I have spoken up about book banning many times already. More important was the topic of my address: the virtue of wisdom. As I explained repeatedly to my hosts, I had no interest in embarrassing anyone or discussing politics directly. I understand the immense pressures they are under, especially the military employees, and I did not want to cause them trouble. I did, however, feel it was essential to make the point that the pursuit of wisdom is impossible without engaging with (and challenging) uncomfortable ideas. Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, used a military metaphor to make this very argument. We ought to read, he said, 'like a spy in the enemy's camp.' This is what Stockdale was doing when he studied Marxism on the Navy's dime. It is what Seneca was doing when he read and liberally quoted from Epicurus, the head of a rival philosophical school. The current administration is by no means unique in its desire to suppress ideas it doesn't like or thinks dangerous. As I intended to explain to the midshipmen, there was considerable political pressure in the 1950s over what books were carried in the libraries of federal installations. Asked if he would ban communist books from American embassies, Eisenhower resisted. 'Generally speaking,' he told a reporter from The New York Herald Tribune at a news conference shortly after his inauguration, 'my idea is that censorship and hiding solves nothing.' He explained that he wished more Americans had read Hitler and Stalin in the previous years, because it might have helped anticipate the oncoming threats. He concluded, 'Let's educate ourselves if we are going to run a free government.' The men and women at the Naval Academy will go on to lead combat missions, to command aircraft carriers, to pilot nuclear-armed submarines and run enormous organizations. We will soon entrust them with incredible responsibilities and power. But we fear they'll be hoodwinked or brainwashed by certain books? Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' was not one of the books removed from the Naval Academy library, and as heinous as that book is, it should be accessible to scholars and students of history. However, this makes the removal of Maya Angelou's 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings' inexplicable. Whatever one thinks of D.E.I., we are not talking about the writings of external enemies here, but in many cases, art, serious scholarship and legitimate criticism of America's past. One of the removed books is about Black soldiers in World War II, another is about how women killed in the Holocaust are portrayed, another is a reimagining of Kafka called 'The Last White Man.' No one at any public institution should have to fear losing their job for pushing back on such an obvious overreach, let alone those tasked with defending our freedom. Yet here we are. The decision by the academy's leaders to not protest the original order — which I believe flies in the face of basic academic freedoms and common sense — has put them in the now even stickier position of trying to suppress criticism of that decision. 'Compromises pile up when you're in a pressure situation in the hands of a skilled extortionist,' Stockdale reminds us. I felt I could not, in good conscience, lecture these future leaders and warriors on the virtue of courage and doing the right thing, as I did in 2023 and 2024, and fold when asked not to mention such an egregious and fundamentally anti-wisdom course of action. In many moments, many understandable moments, Stockdale had an opportunity to do the expedient thing as a P.O.W. He could have compromised. He could have obeyed. It would have saved him considerable pain, prevented the injuries that deprived him of full use of his leg for the rest of his life and perhaps even returned him home sooner to his family. He chose not to do that. He rejected the extortionary choice and stood on principle.
