It’s still all about racial hatred, ignoring the Rule of Law, and dragging the U.S. Constitution back to the era of Apartheid America & burning crosses.
(The site of the once beautiful Oak Park, Montgomery, Alabama, Public swimming pool, filled in with cement and planted over by the all-white Montgomery City Council rather than allow Black children to swim in it with White children, despite a court-order to do so.)
There’s a new “N” word being spit out of the mouths of hate-filled fanatics, and it’s “DEI.”
Most of the people using the term—which is shorthand for “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion”—slime it in a derogatory fashion, the way beer-bellied Southern Sheriffs in Mississippi and Alabama used to shout out the “N” word, every time they brought down a billy club on the head of John Lewis, or Fannie Lou Hamer, or some other black or white person peacefully marching for freedom.
Using it as a harpoon of hate, the Stephen Millers, Elon Musks, Pete Hegseths, Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s—all smug, inhumane White men of privilege peddling poison like the Sacklers selling Oxycontin—smirk when they spread the slur, knowing it will color a dark face over the concept of “favoritism,” crowding out the real life images of Trump & Musk’s Apartheid-loving wealthy fathers, and of Vance’s owner, the anti-democratic, tyrannical techy immigrant Peter Thiel, just enough to boil the bile of their vile followers, conditioned to believe that it’s poor Black folks and women who are stepping on their throats, when it’s the billionaires and bigots skillfully slitting them.
“IDEA”—for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Acceptance—would have been a far better term for the fair offering of opportunity, started by LBJ 60 years ago to expand the possibility of getting a government contract to people who were not part of rigged rich men’s network-–the kind that produced $40 billion in federal contracts for a wealthy South African white man named Musk—whose family made its money on the backs of an Apartheid-driven economic system, one small step above slavery.
No matter. Whether it’s the N-word, the C-word, “DEI” or any good IDEA, Trump’s troglodytes would have gleefully trashed it to ramp up racial-hatred and keep all but the very wealthy down-trodden and dumb. It’s just like the maniacal, methodical weaponization of the word “woke”, the opposite of which is to be asleep, blissfully ignorant, of what’s being done by racist Right-Wing ideologues.
We’ve heard and felt this kind of blind hatred many times before in this country, nationally and in the smallest of communities.
In her brilliant book The Sum of US: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, Heather McGee documents how public swimming pools became spiteful graveyards of racial equality:
“The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time. . . By World War II, the country’s 2,000 pools were glittering symbols of a new commitment by local officials to the quality of life of their residents, allowing hundreds of thousands of people to socialize together for free.”
Except, of course, if your skin was darker than Barbie’s
McGee writes:
“ By the 1950’s the fight to integrate America’s prized swimming pools would demonstrate the limits of white commitment to public good”.
In Baltimore, in 1956, after a 3-year court fight and the drowning death of a 13-year-old Black child in a public river, the NAACP won the right for “all Baltimore children to have the chance to swim with other children, regardless of skin color.”
However, what ended up happening, as McGee writes is that “instead of sharing the pool, white children stopped going to the pools that Black children could easily access, and white adults policed (through intimidation and violence) the public pools in white neighborhoods.”
There was no need for “No Blacks Allowed,” signs; Black kids were just kicked out, in violation of the law, which no one enforced.
A few years later at the old Oak Park pool in Montgomery, Alabama, attempts at offering Black children the chance to escape Alabama’s oppressive summer heat—as the local Parks Department envisioned after a federal court ordered it—was shamefully drowned in the shallow end. The Montgomery City Council swiftly voted to eliminate the Parks Department.
McGee writes, astonishingly that:
“The Council decided to drain the pool rather than share it with their Black neighbors. Of course that decision meant that White families (non-wealthy white families) lost a public resource as well…Uncomprehending white children cried as the City contractors poured cement into the pool, paved it over, and seeded it with grass that was green by the time the summer came along again.”
The spite-filled insanity of the all-white Montgomery City Council’s decision to fill the glorious Oak Park public swimming pool with cement, rather than allow Black children (or white kids, for that matter) to swim in it, was, of course, blamed on the Federal court and the Black community, by the KKK and other local White Supremacists, just as the racists running the Trump Administration are doing today toward DEI.
The “N” word of that time, however, was not “DEI,” but the actual “N” word. Now it comes in the form of vicious, vituperative attacks on diversity programs in the public and private sectors, made at screeching Stephen Miller decibel levels, and are the burning crosses of our time.