The New York Post's Smear of VP Kamala Harris as being a "DEI Hire" is what Racism looks like

This is more of what Trump unleashed

Donald Trump did not make anyone a bigot. He just made bigots feel more embolden to expose their true selves to the public. The latest example of came Saturday with the New York Post.

The headline of the article said it all, “America may soon be subjected to the country’s first DEI president: Kamala Harris.”

That was the point of an op-ed penned by Fox Business senior correspondent, Charles Gasparino. The long-time media figure began by slamming Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs as “literally destroying businesses.” Gasparino then took aim at Vice President Harris writing, “the American public may soon be subjected to DEI writ large in the next president of the United States, if Kamala Harris finds her way to the top of the Democratic ticket.”

Gasparino’s suggestion that Harris only got to where she is because of diversity programs –not because she earned it—is despicable. It reeks of the white supremacist myth that people of color are inherently inferior to white people, hence, we can only achieve success and visible positions with the help of a program. (I was called a “quota hire” years ago on social media by a Fox News frequent guest because at the time I was the first Muslim hired to host a national radio show.)

Gasparino--who in the past had claimed to be a “Pulitzer Prize nominee” but NBC News found that not to be accurate—use of “DEI hire” to attempt to demean the achievements of a person of color is far from the first time we’ve seen this.  In fact, just last week, the always horrible GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert dealt right from this vile playbook in a post on social media calling White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre—who is Black—a “discredited DEI hire.” Boebert—who in the past suggested that Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is Muslim, was a terrorist—was apparently upset with Jean-Pierre’s comments about Biden’s workday being many hours longer than she believed to be true so she smeared her as a “DEI hire.”

Earlier this year, the same “DEI hire” line was used to attack the Black Mayor of Baltimore, Brandon Scott, after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed. Johnson responded to the smears by stating, “We know what these folks really want to say when they say DEI mayor,” adding bluntly, “They really want to say the N-word.” Mayor Johnson later gloriously trolled the bigots, saying on MSNBC that “DEI,” actually means “duly elected incumbent.”

In February, we even saw the DEI slur used by a Republican against a fellow party member. That was after the congressional special election in New York where Democrat Tom Suozzi defeated the GOP candidate who had been born in Ethiopia. In response, Trump ally GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz declared on Newsmax, “It turns out DEI isn’t a real good strategy for Republican candidate recruitment.”

There’s no hiding what the intent is with this type of attack. In fact, Gasparino was not shy on this point, writing Harris was only picked by Biden as his running mate in 2020 because she “checked all the boxes” of being a Black woman.  Forget the fact that Harris had been a public servant for more than 16 years at the time, first elected as a district attorney of San Francisco in 2004 and later elected Attorney General for the state of California where she oversaw the largest state justice department in the country and successfully secured billions in damages from unscrupulous businesses that had preyed on people of the state.

Nor does it matter to Gasparino that Harris was elected to the US Senate in 2016, where she made a name for herself with her service on the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees.  Nope, Gasparino gave those accomplishments all of this line after noting Harris’s race and gender got her the VP job, “Harris was a California state attorney general and a US senator.”

Gasparino then added if President Biden ended up staying on the 2024 ticket and won, it’s unlikely he would physically be able to serve four years.  The result per Gasparino would be that, “Harris becomes the nation’s first DEI president by default.”

Again, none of what Gasparino wrote is in a vacuum. It’s part of a bigger movement marked in the past year by GOP-led legislatures enacting laws to restrict and bar DEI programs in education, state government, contracting and pension investments.

Taking a step back, this is an outgrowth of Donald Trump as president who signed an executive order in the fall of 2020--after the streets were filled with Black Lives Matter protesters in response to the murder of George Floyd--that banned the federal government, as well as its contractors, subcontractors and grantees, from offering diversity training on racial issues.  Trump—who in the summer of 2020 called “Black Lives Matter” a “symbol of hate”—dubbed these diversity programs as “anti-American propaganda.”  

More recently, Trump in an April interview with Time magazine added his support for ending DEI programs.  He explained about rolling back these diversity initiatives, “I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country and that can’t be allowed.” Adding, “there’s absolutely a bias against white [people] and that’s a problem.”

But the point of what Gasparino, Boebert, Gaetz and others meant when using “DEI hire” was not to prompt a debate about DEI policies. It was to demean the triumphs of Black Americans because they simply don’t believe a Black person could’ve attained that level of success on their own merit. This is despicable. Yet it’s also so much of what fuels today’s GOP.

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