The U.S. needs more DEI, not less Time to teach Trump a lesson

OPINION |

By Royal Calkins

It was a long time ago, like 40 years. I was working at the Fresno Bee newspaper and the editors announced they were starting a minority reporting internship. The existing reporting staff, mostly not minority, was pleased because we knew it would improve our coverage of a community built upon layers and layers of communities. We also liked it because it was a sign of progressivism by a management that hadn’t previously shown much of that.

We were disappointed, of course, when management posted a “never mind” notice on the bulletin board. It seemed that they hadn’t been able to find any minority reporting candidates. So that was that. Like the U.S. media of the last century and so far this century, representation of minorities was sadly low at the good-ol’ Fresno Bee.

But another reporter, Rick Rodriguez, walked away from the bulletin board and over to me, the newsroom agitator, and said one word. “Bullshit.” I knew exactly what he meant. One or both of us politely asked the bosses to hold on. Don’t cancel the program. We’ll find some people.

They gave us a week. We didn’t need that long.

What the well-intended bosses had done was go through the applications on file, the resumes that had been sent to various Bee editors and our personnel department. Not surprisingly, few or none were obviously from minorities. And many were from years before. Those candidates were long gone. So that was that.

But Rick and I took a different path. We called people we knew at smaller papers where we used to work. We called our old journalism professors. I don’t think there was a National Association of Black Journalists then or a National Association of Hispanic Journalists, but if there were, we called them. We called the handful of minority journalists we knew and asked if they knew anybody who might know somebody.

However we did it, we did it. In less than a week we had a list of strong candidates. Memory tells me the Bee hired five that summer and that they all worked out well.

My old-guy memory today only lets me remember one of them clearly. I won’t name him here for fear of embarrassing him somehow. I have a history of doing that to people despite fine intentions. But I can tell you that he went from Fresno to the Sacramento Bee to the New York Times and Sports Illustrated. 

I can also tell you that he and the others made us a better newspaper, and not for just that summer. And that all the other Latino, Black and Asian journalists I have worked with over the last few decades made our various publications better, objectively and quantifiably better. Whether it was part of their actual assignment or not, they gave us inroads to various ethnic and cultural communities and expanded our view of what makes news. They helped provide paths for other journalists of color to join us. They helped the editors not make stupid mistakes. 

Were all of them standouts? Of course not. But I can tell you about many more white journalists who didn’t belong anywhere near a keyboard. (One white guy didn’t want to bother driving all the way to the rodeo one Sunday so he made up a story and declared So-And-So the grand champ. Of course So-And-So hadn’t competed that day, and for some reason management didn’t fire the reporter. Really.)

And here’s something white boys Donnie Trump and Petey Hegseth will never understand. Many of those journalists of color made the rest of the staffs better in matters of journalism and matters of the human spirit. All sorts of studies have shown that racism blossoms in all-white workplaces, that without something or someone whose presence subdues racist declarations, racist talk and attitudes spread like warm peanut butter.

Before I went to Fresno, I worked in Indiana, where the Indianapolis Star had become notorious as a racist rag, largely because it managed to populate its front page whenever possible with mugshots of Black people arrested for just about anything. Shoplifting? Page One! Many days it was a checkerboard of black and white. (It was owned then by Dan Quayle’s family.) I think today’s president would have liked it.

Such blatant examples were harder to find in most other media outlets but even a marginally talented reporter could uncover them with only a little effort.

Clearly it is relatively easy to see the benefits of affirmative action, or whatever you want to call it, in a newsroom. Marginalized pockets of the community receive the attention they deserve. Racist or classist policies in government, education, housing, etc., are more likely to see the light. The benefits of a diverse staff may be less apparent in other workplaces, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t just as important or real elsewhere. It just means I don’t know as much about making cars or generating electricity or teaching or counseling or creating music.

I am writing here, of course, because of what Trump is doing with his attempt to wipe out diversity, equity and inclusion in our society. Some will argue that he’s only doing it in the federal workplace but it’s spreading almost as fast as an arson fire in an Alabama church.

Some congressman said the Super Bowl halftime show was a DEI event. Trump says he wants to keep transgender athletes off the playing fields because of “fairness.” Do you think fairness figures into many of his calculations? Do you think he thinks about fairness when he dreams of building shopping malls in Gaza or letting Elon Musk loose in the treasury?

Private corporations, even those without government contracts, are cancelling DEI programs, just so they don’t offend the president or his information-deficient fans. It’s true — but nobody is saying it — that in much of industry, what the administration condemns as wokeness is little more than lawyer-driven behavioral classes intended to reduce the amount of discrimination and harassment litigation. Once a year you have to watch a film reminding you to report inappropriate or offensive behavior in the workplace. How dare they!?

While Musk is indiscriminately starving the hungry, is he also increasing budgets for the legal staffs the government will need to fight the discrimination lawsuits, the reckless indifference litigation? 

Hegseth, the new dangerously underqualified defense secretary, was booed when he showed up at a U.S. military base middle school in Germany. The kids there have a better grip on reality than Major Sixpack. 

For decades now, the U.S. military has been praised as a model of tolerance, a place where bigotry once divided soldiers but that eventually learned that inclusion and familiarity can actually help brotherhood and sisterhood thrive, a reality that has been proved on the battlefield. Don’t let the racists tell you otherwise. Don’t let the racists tell you anything. Is there racism in the military? Of course. Will it subside under the new regime? Hell no.

“I’m the least racist person you’ve ever met,” president whathisname once told an interviewer on TV. I can’t say for a fact that he’s the most racist person I’m aware of, but he is a candidate. Ending wokeness doesn’t mean what he says it means. It is not merely a way to give that nice white boy a fair chance. It’s a way to turn the calendar back decades and Make America A Shithole Again.

We are not up in arms about this yet but we’d better stand up soon.

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