DEI Has Been an American Problem For Longer Than We May Realize
To its credit, the Pentagon quickly corrected its embarrassing screwup of removing Jackie Robinson’s World War II military service webpage.
But in the course of the quick retreat, a Pentagon official perhaps unintentionally called our attention to a larger point over which it is worth lingering for another moment.
The story begins with the admirable and rather benign fact that the Department of Defense website has for years featured a section highlighting the contributions of well-known athletes to the military. The page on Robinson, who in 1947 became the first black athlete to play Major League Baseball in the 20th century, was taken down Tuesday, with the letters “dei” inserted in its deactivated url.
The page was apparently flagged by the algorithm that was scouring the website for any content that promoted or endorsed DEI, the widespread movement that seeks to increase “diversity, equity & inclusion.” Judging from the fact that other removed webpages had honored Navajo code talkers, the Tuskegee Airmen and women pilots, the algorithm had pretty clearly been programmed to round up the usual suspects, that is, members of any group thought to be primary beneficiaries of DEI. Blacks, women, native Americans, etc.
The Pentagon is not alone in this campaign. President Donald Trump and his administration are in the process of attempting to eradicate DEI, which they view as a form of reverse discrimination, from all branches of the federal government.
The idea that Jackie Robinson was in the Army during World War II as part of a push for “diversity” is, of course, nonsense. The U.S. military in the early 1940s didn’t really want black soldiers at all, but since there was a war in progress that required many bodies, it took some, then tried to segregate them into separate units where they were mostly supposed to perform the support tasks which is all the military thought them capable of. That the Tuskegee Airmen and other black units proved that supposition wrong was one of the reasons President Harry Truman finally desegregated the military in July of 1948.
The Pentagon’s removal of the Robinson page drew the outrage and ridicule it deserved. Within 24 hours the page was restored, along with a number of other “dei”-flagged pages (though not Colin Powell’s).
At that point the Pentagon should probably have issued a brief statement saying, “Oops, our mistake. We’ve fixed it. Jackie was a fine American soldier. Apologies all around.”
Instead, Pentagon press secretary John Ullyot went in kind of another direction. This was his initial statement:
“As [Defense] Secretary [Pete] Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department. Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military. It Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services’ core warfighting mission. We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms. In the rare cases that content is removed — either deliberately or by mistake — that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct the components and they correct the content accordingly.”
In an administration not noted for understatement, it still seemed rather combative to use the Robinson mistake as a forum for denouncing DEI as a communist plot — without, by the way, mentioning Robinson.
Apparently Ullyot’s bosses had the same reaction, since he was soon reassigned to “special projects.” Another department spokesman, Sean Parnell, went on X Thursday with a more subdued defense of the DEI purge and a more direct acknowledgement that mistakes were made and would be fixed.
Still, let’s pause for a moment longer on Ullyot’s initial response. While he toned it down in later comments, which included “everyone loves Jackie,” that first reply was not a rookie mistake. Ullyot is a Harvard graduate, a Marine and a widely published author with decades of experience in government and think tanks.
While he isn’t the first and won’t be the last DEI critic to mock DEI as “Discriminatory Equity Ideology,” the phrase isn’t just a winning line from campaign rallies. It summarizes, with unfortunate accuracy, a defining theme of American history.
“Discriminatory Equity Ideology” was the guiding principle behind American race relations for our first 188 years. We were half a slave nation for our first century, and for the next century big chunks of the country wouldn’t let black folks eat at the same restaurants or hold the same jobs as white folks. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Right Act of the mid-1960s finally sparked some progress. So did Jackie Robinson. We’re still a long way from a level playing field.
“Diversity, Equity & Inclusion” is one of numerous initiatives designed with the hope of making the game a little fairer.
Like any policy, “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion” isn’t automatically all good or implemented in all the right ways. But as long as the effects of the original DEI remain, the concerns that led to the establishment of the new DEI are something that America will still, sooner or later, one way or another, have to address.
