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FROM OUTSIDE | End with diversity, equity, and inclusion?

President Trump’s executive orders on border, immigration and trade issues grabbed international headlines, but they failed to overshadow more intricate and potentially serious decrees on domestic matters

FROM OUTSIDE | End with diversity, equity, and inclusion?
José Carreño. Foto: Heraldo USA.

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President Donald Trump signed 27 executive orders immediately after being sworn in on Monday, January 20. He began a process that seems to dismantle an entire political and governmental structure built over the past 75 years.

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Executive orders concerning border issues, migration, and trade—along with controversial statements about expansion into Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal—garnered international headlines. Nevertheless, they did little to overshadow the most intricate and potentially serious decrees concerning domestic affairs.

First, the decree abolishing the government’s commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) principles, along with the offices that oversee them, marks a significant setback for minorities. Additionally, the actions taken by certain appointed officials to impose loyalty tests on their subordinates send a clear warning to the American bureaucracy.

While many legal analysts question its legality, the government’s effort to establish a more just society began immediately after World War II.

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In 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt acknowledged that factories were not hiring Black workers and were reluctant to employ women, even amid a shortage of white labor. Later, in 1948, he issued an order to “desegregate” the Armed Forces.

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This resulted in challenges in turning civil rights into lawful realities, such as military intervention in Alabama to enforce school integration in the 1950s, marches for rights during the 1960s, and the fight for universal suffrage for all American citizens.

Certainly, all this happened a hundred years after the Civil War ended, which abolished slavery in 1865. In the meantime, thousands of African Americans and Latinos were lynched, but ultimately, civil rights were upheld.

Progress, however, remains slow. While it may not be as blatant as it was during the peak of the Ku Klux Klan’s influence in American politics, there is clear resistance to the perceived erosion of rights among a shrinking white majority, now reflected in Trump’s executive orders.

At the end of the twentieth century, a book titled “Confederates in the Attic” was published. The author, Tony Horwitz, explores the memories of the Civil War from 1861 to 1865 and how many people, particularly in the American South, remember, celebrate, and even perpetuate a conflict that was intended to have ended racial discrimination.

For them, the Civil War revolved around states' rights to handle their internal matters free from federal government interference.

The Confederates are not in the attic anymore.

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José Carreño Figueras

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