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President Donald Trump honored Black History Month with a reception at the White House on Thursday where he talked about all of the statues of Black American heroes he plans to put in a planned sculpture garden celebrating American history.
But the celebration itself, featuring a cameo by Tiger Woods, was at odds with much of what Trump and his government have done in one month of his second term.
As the event took place, CNN was reporting that CQ Brown, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and a Black man, is on a list of generals the Trump administration could soon fire – in part for their advocacy of diversity in the ranks.
“Diversity” is now a dirty word in the US government, Civil Rights-era equal employment opportunity initiatives have been rescinded, and some of the first of thousands of federal workers to be fired were those working to make the government look like the rest of the country.
There are questions about how Trump’s effort to ban “radical indoctrination” in American schools will affect instruction on subjects like African American history. At Thursday’s Black History reception, he dissed the 1619 Project, the New York Times’ effort to reframe US history around the stain of slavery.
Trump’s administration has embraced claims of “reverse racism” to try to purge diversity initiatives on US campuses that receive federal dollars.
Cue a chilling effect on how Americans celebrate the contributions of African Americans and other racial minorities and how the government, schools or businesses go about hiring.
But more to the point, while Trump is celebrating Black History Month with an event at the White House, much of the rest of his government banned such observances.
On January 31, Trump issued a proclamation declaring February to be Black History Month, as it has been since the American bicentennial in 1976.
The same day Trump made his proclamation, The Department of Defense declared “Identity Months Dead.”
Then in February, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth tried to rewire the nation’s armed forces.
“I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength,’” Hegseth said at a town hall for employees at the Pentagon.
That’s a new take since integration of the military after World War II under President Harry Truman was a major step on the road toward the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.
Hegseth has derisively referred to the qualifications of top military brass, including Brown.
On February 1, the first day of Black History Month, Treasury Secretary Sean Duffy tweeted his own ban on “celebrations based on immutable traits or any other identity-based observances,” which he said “do nothing to keep planes in the air, trains on the tracks or ports and highways secure.”
It read like an affirmation of Trump’s argument in the immediate aftermath of the deadly collision of American Airlines Flight 5342 and a US Army Blackhawk helicopter over the Potomac, that somehow diversity programs had something to do with the crash. There’s no evidence that was the case, but Trump cited his own “common sense” to make the claim.
The Department of Education on February 14 sent a letter to American schools accusing them of violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and discriminating against White and Asian students with “pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination have have emanated throughout every facet of academia.”
The letter suggests that diversity programs place “unique moral burdens” on and “stigmatize students who belong to particular racial groups based on crude racial stereotypes.” That seems like a tortured allusion to White students who do not want to hear about the history of slavery in the US, for instance.
Schools have “toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism.’” The letter tries to expand upon a 2023 Supreme Court decision that banned the practice of affirmative action and threatens to condition federal funding at schools from preschools through universities within 14 days, or the last day of Black History Month, if schools do not end all diversity programs.
Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, who made her fortune as a pro wrestling executive, had no answer when Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut asked her if his own child’s public school African American history class would fall into the diversity category and thus be outlawed.
“I’m not quite certain and I’d like to look into it further and get back to you on that,” McMahon said.
Murphy noted that Department of Defense schools have cancelled programming related to Black History Month.
McMahon said her view is that Black History Month should be “celebrated throughout all of our schools.”
There’s some carryover from Trump’s first term with all of this. When he was president, the first time Trump stood in the way of a plan to put Harriet Tubman on the $20, arguing it was just “pure political correctness” to replace the slave-owning President Andrew Jackson with the icon of the Underground Railroad. In the closing days of his first term he chose Martin Luther King Jr., Day to issue a report from his 1776 Commission, a refutation of the 1619 Project, which recommended downplaying the institution of slavery as a unique stain on American history and argued that acknowledging the hypocrisy of slave holding Founding Fathers has “a devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric.”
In an executive action issued on January 29 meant to end “radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling,” Trump ordered that the Education Department reestablish the 1776 Commission and promote its recommendations.
“To err is human, to forgive divine,” wrote Elon Musk, the special government employee running Trump’s campaign to quickly shrink the federal government by firing thousands of employees and freezing funding.
He was talking about Marko Elez, the employee of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, who was reported to have shared messages on social media favoring the false and racist concept of eugenics, or racially selective breeding.
Vice President JD Vance said the posts shared by Elez were “stupid,” but Elez should be brought back because to do otherwise would, somehow, reward The Wall Street Journal, which uncovered the old posts, although it’s hard to understand why it would be better not to know that such comments existed.
This story has been updated with additional information.