DIRTY WHITE BOYS

Why racist Republicans made dismantling DEI initiatives their No. 1 target ...

“This is beyond horrid.”

Those four words were spoken from an old colleague of mine who now works under constant threat inside the Department of Interior. They illustrate better than I can in 1,000 words what we are watching right now as a racist, America-attacking, convicted felon puffs out his blubbery chest and takes a sledgehammer to our government to appease the billionaire oligarchy who are leading him around by his stuffy nose.

The tough guy from the yacht clubs of New York, is going full Mussolini while he saves America from all the pain he and his white collar gangs on Wall Street have inflicted on the working class for decades.

Let’s not confuse what is really going on here, people …

End of the day, this is nothing but a grotesque attack on the poor, and many of the programs that have been put in place to help, shelter, feed, and just give them a little hope that is there is something better. Because if you can take a person’s hope and dignity away, you can hope they’ll just go away, too.

That’s how losers win, and democracies crumble.

Defenseless human beings in Red and Blue States are being scapegoated and blamed for what allegedly ails us, so the broken-heartless in America can feel superior about themselves after coming home from a job each day that never loves or pays them near enough. But, hey, at least while they’re groveling for an extra 50 cents an hour, and a few days of paid vacation, they can crack open a cold one, crank up Fox News, and look down on the “lesser” from their perch in some gutter.

President Lyndon Johnson described it best to then-White House staffer Bill Moyers after encountering overt racism during a trip to Tennessee after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964:

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

"And because Trump, who banged a porn star just weeks after his third wife gave birth to their only child, knows a thing or two about hurting people — I mean REALLY hurting them — he’s going hard after DEI programs that help good people and hurt complete lowlifes like him."

You see, by their rancid telling, long before we were ever a country, people of color have always been the problem here …

There’s absolutely nothing new in this repulsive, political play, because by definition the orange, little-fingered thug represents the Grand Old Party.

So let’s slam everything into reverse, and drill, baby, drill …

I typed all of this as a warning and a pretext for what’s coming next: A defense of DEI, and why it is absolutely vital we carry on with its worthy mission.

There’s a reason it is No. 1 on the mad king’s chopping block: Nothing threatens him more than an engaged, motivated, informed and diverse electorate.

There was a time I wasn’t fully convinced of the absolute need for DEI initiatives. I wrote about some of this a couple of years ago, so I apologize if you’ve come across it before.

The year was 2000. Bill Clinton was wrapping up his last year of the presidency, and looking back, it seems like we were in the final months of what passed for normalcy in America. The contentious Gore-Bush election was just around the corner (which was ironically and tragically decided by a Conservative Supreme Court), to be closely followed by 9/11, the Iraq War, the Great Recession, unhinged vitriol by the Right over President Obama’s tan suit, and finally ending with the election (and reelection) of a stone-cold traitor …

In the spring of that year, I was privileged to represent Stars & Stripes newspaper at American Society of Newspaper Editors Annual Managing Editors Conference in Reston, Virginia.

I had been with Stripes for nearly two years and had recently been promoted to managing editor of the important, editorially independent newspaper that serves our troops and their families overseas.

I was surrounded by my peers representing daily newspapers from Minneapolis to St. Louis, and from San Antonio to Denver. I reckon there were about 35 or 40 of us MEs at this thing, but it’s been long enough now that I can’t remember for sure.

For some reason I can, however, vividly recall looking at the schedule they handed us for the week while battling with a coffee and donut that first morning. On the afternoon of the fourth day we’d be talking about “Diversity in the Newsroom.”

“Uh-oh,” I mumbled to myself. “This is when we’re gonna catch hell from some well-paid, uninformed “expert” for failing to have enough diversity in our newsrooms. Can’t wait ...”

Before I tell you what happened in that session, and how it radically changed my thinking on the subject, I want to stop right here very quickly and pat myself on the back just a tiny bit.

At the time of this conference, I had 10 assistant managers reporting to me in the newsroom. Here was the makeup of these managers:

• Four white women

• Three white men

• Two African-American women

• One Asian-American man

I’m not saying that I was staffing up the United Nations, but I am saying I worked with real intention to make sure my newsroom didn’t look like White Man’s Appreciation Day at the country club.

The overall makeup of our newsroom admittedly wasn’t as diverse, because getting and then keeping diverse journalists was a real challenge.

Because we were located in the National Press Building in downtown Washington, D.C., we were surrounded by two huge national newspapers: The Washington Post and USA Today.

Just as quickly as we were hiring and training up diverse talent, those papers were poaching them away from us. They, too, had diversity initiatives in place, and far bigger budgets at their disposal to lure away ambitious newspaper people from mid-sized papers like Stripes.

While it was a backhanded compliment that these newspapers were interested in our journalists, the constant churn presented a real challenge for us as we tirelessly pumped out seven editions of the paper to our readers all around the world 365 days a year.

By the time the Thursday afternoon diversity session of that conference rolled around I was feeling noble, haughty, and ready for what was coming at me.

The session was led by David Yarnold, the Managing Editor of the San Jose Mercury News. Turns out, I’d heard of Yarnold and his innovative initiatives to make diversity a key pillar in building a successful newsroom, but like any ornery journalist, I was skeptical as hell he really knew what he was talking about.

I was about to be schooled.

Yarnold opened by making light of the skepticism that wafted over the auditorium concerning this diabolical subject. He’d obviously done this a time or two, and slowly began winning us over, before he positively blew my mind.

Yarnold asked us what a good newspaper must do to be successful. There was some mumbling in the audience, before somebody finally piped up and said, “Accuracy! We must be accurate!”

“Good, good,” said Yarnold, “What else??”

Once again there was a murmuring, before somebody shouted, “Credibility! We must be credible!”

“Here, here,” we all shouted in agreement.

“OK, OK,” said Yarnold. “So … If a good newspaper has to be accurate … and a good newspaper has to be credible … Can a newspaper hope to be accurate and credible if the readers in its circulation area are comprised of 35 percent white people, 25 percent Hispanic people, 25 percent Black people, and 15 percent Asian people, while 85 percent of the newsroom is staffed with white people???????”

That’s when I said, “Whoa …”

I never looked at diversity in the newsroom, or any workplace, the same way again.

Look, all people are created equal in America, but not all people are treated equally. This has everything to do with gender, sexual orientation, the color of their skin and/or what station they started at in life.

Systematic and institutional racism abounds, and still holds far too many people down. If the majority of this reprehensible Supreme Court would rather ignore this undeniable fact, they can go straight to hell.

If a hardcore racist who sees “fine people on both sides” of a KKK rally wants to use that obscene ruling to inflict as much pain on people as possible, then he can most assuredly join them there.

How can we we claim to be a credible, caring country, if we won’t do everything in our power to lift all our citizens up to make sure everybody has a chance to shine and contribute to the American Experiment?

How can we claim that we are addressing this seismic issue accurately and get the results all of us deserve, if we can’t even have the decency and awareness to admit there is a problem in the first place?

If we are prepared to surrender this moral high ground, and what is most certainly good and right to the racist, authoritarian tyrants who are stepping on our necks without a fight, we will most assuredly join them in the low places they hide.

There will be no coming back from this, my friends, and it will be beyond horrid.

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.)

(That’s an NBC-News photo of the despicable Speaker Mike Johnson and the America-attacking Donald Trump, Republicans’ dirtiest white boys …)