Eugenics, DEI, and the New Racist Dystopia
One of the many, many jaw-dropping developments that were drowned out by all of the even more outrageous news items in the past 38 days came from the Musk-Trump administration's Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy (a former reality TV "personality"), who "instructed his department to prioritize families by, among other things, giving preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average when awarding grants."
Just by coincidence, this will predictably take funds that would have gone to blue states and instead give them to red states. How much of a non-coincidence was it?
The memo also calls for prohibiting governments that get Department of Transportation funds from imposing vaccine and mask mandates, and requiring their cooperation with the administration’s immigration enforcement efforts.
With hundreds of billions of dollars in transportation money still unspent from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, such changes could be a boon for projects in Republican-majority states, which on average have higher fertility rates than those leaning Democratic.
States controlled by Democrats were generally more receptive to mask and vaccine rules to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and have been more resistant to Trump’s immigration raids.
Well then. Should we wonder whether the Administration would change its tune if a state's high birth rate were to be the result of increased fertility among non-Whites, Latinos of any race, non-Christians, or LGBTQ+ people? I know I do. But what about simply letting more people into the country? If we want there to be more Americans, we can do what has always worked in the past to increase the country's population: increase immigration. There are literally millions of people who would love to move to the US, some of whom have gone through hell to try and then been turned away.
J.D. Vance was wrong when he claimed that the legally resettled Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, were not there legally. He said that Kamala Harris (who of course had nothing to do with it, but Vance attributed everything to her) had merely waved a "magic wand" by invoking the law to give people a certain legal status. He said that doing so does not "make an alien legal," when that is exactly what it does. In fact, citizenship is nothing but the result of the waving of a legal magic wand, because citizenship is a legal status. Just as a person becomes a knight when the King dubs him, say, "Sir Mix-a-Lot," a person goes from being "an illegal" to being legally present when the government invokes the right words and issues the right (magic) documents.
This is all important to recall now, because the hard right in the US has mostly stopped pretending that they care about people who "got here the right way." They simply want fewer immigrants, because ewww. So if they want "more Americans," the only acceptable strategy to them is to push up the numbers of the right kind of babies who are born to the right kind of parents in the U S of A. As Joanna Grossman and Lawrence Friedman explained in a Verdict column last summer, "The eugenics program ... had two prongs: to encourage the right people to have babies (positive eugenics); and to prevent the wrong people from having children at all (negative eugenics)."
So far, the Trumpists have focused on the positive side, but do not imagine that they are unaware of the negative approach. In any event, Vance has been particularly blunt about the sexism in all of this, including his attacks on "childless cat ladies" and his bizarre claim that the postmenopausal female's only value is in taking care of the children of still-fecund women.
Everything is starting to fit together, as Trump-emboldened Republicans have become ever more clear about their White supremacist views. Moreover, this is about more than having babies. The new eugenicists do not want the "wrong people" to have babies, but they are also making it clear that they think those wrong people are presumptively inferior in every way. After all, when Trump claimed that it was merely "common sense" to say that a plane crash was caused by DEI at the FAA, he also said this:
I changed the Obama standards [at the Federal Aviation Administration] from very mediocre at best to extraordinary. And then when I left office and [President Joe] Biden took over, he changed [the standards] back to lower than ever before. ... The FAA’s diversity push includes a focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities. That is amazing… They can be air traffic controllers.
That all of that is false matters not to the Trumpists. But as a New York Times columnist noted last July, Vance himself is a beneficiary of DEI policies. Clarence Thomas is reputedly horrified by what he sees as people's presumption that he got into Yale Law School because of affirmative action, but Vance is no less a diversity candidate than any non-White candidate ever was. Places like Yale go far, far out of their way to admit people with "lower numbers" than other candidates when the supposedly less qualified people are from unusual backgrounds, which definitely includes being a "hillbilly." But naturally, that is not what the anti-DEI crusade is all about.
We need to stop fooling ourselves about the bigotry at play here. Every time there is a nonwhite, non-Male, “abnormal” anything, the Trumpist right freaks out. Look at the hatred heaped upon the women in the 2016 reboot of "Ghostbusters," the non-White toon in 2023's update of "The Little Mermaid," and on and on. When the Key Bridge in Baltimore was destroyed, that majority-Black city's Black mayor immediately took charge and was the obvious person to put in front of the cameras. A mayor doing his job? No, a "DEI mayor." The fire chief in LA is a lesbian? DEI! Any person from a disfavored group is now deemed to be unqualified -- not even as a rebuttable presumption, but simply as a given fact of nature. That is where Trump has moved the country.
In short, we are no longer supposed to think that there are "some good ones" who advanced through merit, because even before we know anything else about a person from an out group, they are being disparaged as having been hired "for diversity." The default definition of who is qualified is determined by the revivified racists, and the presence of anyone else anywhere -- such as in the elite media (including Fox, by the way) -- is taken to be proof of unearned advantage. Trump engages in projection by calling other people stupid, but he is especially prone to doing so when the other person is non-White, a woman, or (God forbid) both.
Consider how far we have moved away from the "objectively determinable qualifications" pretext. The holding in Bakke said simply that quotas in medical school admissions were impermissible, a holding that was at least arguably tied to the idea that there might not be enough qualified people to fill one of the categories and thus that the school might fill that category with people who fall below safe standards. Even that was a bit of a stretch, of course, because the context was a training program, not the final life-and-death job, and med schools and licensing boards could still wash out people who could not make the grade.
Even so, we then moved as a country to affirmative action, which was supposed to be entirely about finding and encouraging qualified candidates to apply and then stick with it in any of a number of areas. The "action" that was to be taken affirmatively was to look for people who are very likely to make the cut but who might not have applied or would have had a more difficult time due to economic circumstances or other non-merit-based factors. That was soon attacked by people who said that "more qualified" White men were being "punished" for the sake of racial guilt, or something. That was all based on the often unstated belief that there is an objective method to measure qualifications and potential and that we have already discovered that method, which is clearly not true.
What about simply asking people to be aware of possible racial or other bias? The National Football League in 2003 adopted the so-called Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview at least two minority or female candidates for coaching and senior organizational positions. The idea was that team owners had a "usual suspects" mindset that resulted in the same White guys being recycled through the ranks, with the hope being that simply having them talk to minority candidates might turn up an unexpected surprise or ten. An unintended negative impact of that rule was that minority candidates have been put through pro forma interviews that wasted their time, but it did lead to a small but meaningful increase in the number of Black coaches in the league.
So the idea there is to say to decision makers: "Hey, there's a bunch of people who might be very good, but you've been overlooking them for some reason. To be part of this league, you need to at least talk to them, and we hope (but won't require) that you will do so in good faith." Even so, the Wikipedia page for the Rooney Rule describes it as both "affirmative action" and "hiring quotas," even though the rule is not at all an affirmative action program and the only quota is in the number of interviewees, not actual hiring.
That is the same league, of course, that ended Colin Kaepernick's career because he quietly protested against racist policing -- a backlash amplified by Trump (and Mike Pence). It is no longer a matter of saying that anyone other than straight White men can prove themselves, or that protesting injustice is acceptable so long as it is done respectfully and passively. The right's reaction to any race-conscious wrongthink makes clear that Trumpists are aiming for racial re-segregation, putting women back in the kitchen and the nursery, and reasserting extreme gender normativity.
In addition to what I have written here, I commend to readers' attention yesterday's Dorf on Law column by Professor Segall, which included this powerful paragraph (among many):
But the Trump Administration is not trying to lessen the effects of American racism because it either does not believe it exists or because it supports racism or both. Whatever the true agenda, instead of trying to design policies to address the problem, the GOP today denies the problem exists and, to the extent it concedes it does, claims that the fault lies in DEI programs and affirmative action, not our racist past.
Along similar lines, Professor Dorf's column on Tuesday describes the Trump Administration's "Dear Colleague" letter that threatens the funding of any university that "toxically indoctrinate[s] students with the false premise that the United States is built upon 'systemic and structural racism' and advance[s] discriminatory policies and practices.
We are a long way from the claim that there are talented people of all backgrounds whose possibilities can be fully realized if we take steps to fix what needs to be fixed. Now, Republicans are not even bothering to pretend that they believe any of that.
Earlier this week, New Jersey Congressman Jeff Van Drew (who used to be a Democrat) said this: "Don't touch seniors' Medicare, and don't cut Medicaid, because it isn't just for lazy welfare people. It's for real people. That's the new Republican Party, a populist party, a party of working people, a party of blue-collar people."
Yikes. The congressperson might as well have talked about Ronald Reagan's "welfare queens" and "strapping young bucks," but the point is that "real people," "working people," and "blue-collar people" are simply code for "non-DEI." In turn, DEI is code for slurs that are quite likely to make a comeback any day now. We might, in other words, soon consider comments like Van Drew's to be positively genteel, given that he is still bothering with dog whistles. In a world where people are excusing Nazi salutes, how soon will using the n-word become another opportunity for the right to prove that they are non-woke?