Trump misses the point in banning ‘DEI’

By Pius Kamau

Discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin in the U.S. Armed Forces was abolished by Harry Truman’s 1948 Executive order 9981. Much happened to grant more rights to Black American citizens after 1948. In 1957 Lyndon Johnson — the Senate majority leader then — shepherded passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first such act since the Civil Rights act of 1875. On its way to its signature by President Eisenhower, it saw a record breaking filibuster by the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. It was soon followed by President Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, making it illegal to discriminate based on race or gender.

Legal segregation of races had survived in America’s South until then. With the exception of Donald Trump, every American president since Lyndon Johnson has worked toward some improvement in African-Americans’ living conditions. Trump’s words and actions bend toward rejection of minorities’ access to better living standards and diminution of what they have achieved as a result of the 1964 Act.

From his second presidential inauguration, Trump declared a war on DEI. The word “diversity” stands as a lonely outlaw. In the new Trump era, DEI, like the word “woke” before it, are negative concepts, words that must be extirpated from the federal lexicon. In a MAGA world, minorities clamoring for diversity or fighting for more opportunities might be harshly punished. I say this imagining a MAGA century in the same way George Orwell must have imagined 1984; a book from which we each day seem to be borrowing more and more chapters.

I am keenly aware of the many disparities that exist in various segments of our society. I am aware, but don’t quite understand the lived experience of transgender people. I find myself agreeing with those who feel that our few transgender “women” athletes should not compete against female athletes.

As a Black surgeon in Aurora ER, a small number of White patients refused to be taken care of by me. I understand their requesting a White physician. Similarly, a few White patients requested my care after refusing my White colleagues. Diversity makes us a stronger health-care system; a healthier nation.

I have appealed for an increase in the training of more minority physicians. Statistically many more Black Americans died in the COVID pandemic, a reflection of the few numbers of Black physicians. While 65.6% of U.S. physicians are white, 18% Asian, and 9% Hispanic, only 5% of physicians are Black. Data show that Black patients under Black doctors’ care fare much better. Sadly, many Black and Hispanic patients don’t regularly see a physician; when they fall ill many end up in ERs where White and Asian doctors manage them.

The reason why America has so few Black physicians can be traced back to their K-12 education. Here again, Black kids excel when they are taught by Black teachers — in particular Black male teachers who are only 2% of U.S. teachers. Proportionally few of them are proficient teaching STEM subjects. Without a good scientific and mathematical grounding, students of all colors cannot excel in college science studies.

Two more health-care factoids. Today there are more female than male doctors in the United States. Sadly women earn 84% of what men make.

Above are issues of disparities among races and genders of American health-care givers. Those of us who have been clamoring to see an equalizing in opportunities and outcomes, cannot be silenced by the MAGA noise. The numbers of students not attaining their potential, call upon all of us, who may have the ability to change the life of even one child, not to stop working toward a better health-care future for America.

If there’s one thing that Donald Trump has taught those who pay him attention it is that repeating your intention or objective over and over again will make others listen and probably believe you. Those who work for educational equality, or racial justice, must not pay Trump heed but recall Martin Luther King’s saying: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Black slaves fought for their freedom and human rights. Blacks’ war against injustice and discrimination is borne in the DNA of each new birth — a light that can never be extinguished. If an executive order in 1948 could integrate the U.S. Army, very little can undo that integration 77 years later. Least of all an order from Donald Trump.

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Article was first published in The Denver Gazette. 

Pius Kamau, M.D., a retired general surgeon, is president of the Aurora-based Africa America Higher Education Partnerships; co-founder of the Africa Enterprise Group and an activist for minority students ‘STEM education.