Advertisement

Trump’s Crackdown On Diversity Training Is Fascist. And Terrifying.

One of the president’s most dangerous attacks on civil rights and free speech is getting relatively little attention amid the firestorm of news as Election Day approaches.

In an executive order and a series of administrative actions issued over the past month and a half, the Trump administration effectively banned diversity and inclusion training in the federal workforce and at any company or entity that contracts with the government or receives federal funding, a huge swath of American businesses and universities, covering millions of workers and students.

As part of the administration’s continued efforts to effectively ban anti-racism training, the Labor Department announced Wednesday it would begin collecting information on diversity training from contractors (Verizon, which owns HuffPost, is one such company) as a way of policing the way diversity is discussed within private companies.

When a society is moving to authoritarianism, it goes after the ideas. It goes after speech. Kimberlé Crenshaw, law professor at UCLA and Columbia Law School

The president ironically claims to be doing this in the name of equality. The administration says these trainings are un-American propaganda, claiming that learning about the history of race in the United States teaches the language of hate.

But diversity training is standard corporate practice, meant to encourage workers of all backgrounds to treat each other fairly. As the Me Too movement began, there was a shift to focus on sexual harassment education. These days, companies are increasingly concentrating on racism.

In the case of diversity training, the White House is basing its opinion on the findings of one conservative activist, Christopher Rufo, who has appeared on Fox News and written for the New York Post and Wall Street Journal.

The word Orwellian is thrown around quite a bit in the Donald Trump era, but the doublespeak in this order stunned the lawyers, executives, activists and...

Continue reading on HuffPost