{"id":3515,"date":"2025-02-04T07:33:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-04T07:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=3515"},"modified":"2025-02-04T07:33:00","modified_gmt":"2025-02-04T07:33:00","slug":"dei-is-now-a-four-letter-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=3515","title":{"rendered":"DEI Is Now a Four Letter Word"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n<\/div>\n

By KIM BELLARD<\/p>\n

I\u2019d love to be writing about something fun. Something that makes us think about things in a new way, or something exciting that will take us into the future. There are lots of such things happening, but there\u2019s too many Orwellian actions happening that I can\u2019t be silent about.<\/p>\n

Diversity, we\u2019re told, is actually a pretext for racism \u2013 against white people. Equity is foolhardy at best and pernicious at worst. Inclusion only matters if you are the \u201cright\u201d kind of person. \u201cMeritocracy\u201d is the new buzzword; we want only the \u201cbest and brightest,\u201d with none of the lowering of standards that we\u2019re being told comes with trying to ensure that everyone has a fair chance to prove their merits.<\/p>\n

The Trump Administration has declared war on DEI. It has fired<\/a> scores of workers whose jobs involve DEI, has asked<\/a> other workers to inform on people they think may be involved in DEI, and is searching out<\/a> even workers who attended diversity training (mandated or not). All that would be horrifying enough but it isn\u2019t ending there.<\/p>\n

Federal websites are being cleansed<\/a> of any references to anything that might be construed as DEI. Pages are being edited, or taken down entirely. The NIH has ground to a halt<\/a> until the appropriate authorities can ensure that no grants are being even to anything that might possibly be related to DEI. The CDC has been forced to pull papers<\/a> from its researchers that are up for publication for similar review.<\/p>\n

The Atlantic<\/em> reports<\/a>: \u201cthe government was, as of yesterday evening, intending to target and replace, at a minimum, several \u201csuggested keywords\u201d\u2014including \u201cpregnant people, transgender, binary, non-binary, gender, assigned at birth, binary [sic<\/em>], non-binary [sic<\/em>], cisgender, queer, gender identity, gender minority, anything with pronouns\u201d\u2014in CDC content.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thousands of pages of data from the CDC and Census Bureau have \u201cdisappeared<\/a>,\u201d and the same from other agencies. Health data is prominent among the missing<\/a>. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, told Science<\/em><\/a>: \u201c\u201cI knew it was going to be bad, but I didn\u2019t know it was going to be this bad. It\u2019s like a data apocalypse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elon Musk, who has no official power yet seems to have control over government IT and the data it contains, is shutting down U.S.A.I.D<\/a>., who provides almost $40b annually in health services, disaster relief, anti-poverty, and other social mission programs. Previously the Administration had shutdown, then reinstated<\/a>, PEPFAR, a vital international HIV program that has been credited with saving millions of lives.<\/p>\n

The President and his team even tried to blame<\/a> last week\u2019s Washington D.C. plane-helicopter collision on DEI.\u00a0 That\u2019s just \u201ccommon sense, ok,\u201d according to President Trump.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

As if all that wasn\u2019t enough, The Washington Post<\/em> reported<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Late Friday, newly confirmed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the agency to stop commemorating cultural celebrations such as Black History Month. The message to staff was headlined: \u201cIdentity Months Dead at DoD.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Thursday, the FBI directed janitorial staff at Quantico to paint over a multicolored mural that once featured the words \u201cFAIRNESS,\u201d \u201cLEADERSHIP,\u201d \u201cINTEGRITY,\u201d \u201cCOMPASSION\u201d and \u201cDIVERSITY.\u201d<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t even\u2026<\/p>\n

The breadth and depth of the changes caught many off guard, but people are starting to respond. Stat<\/em> reports<\/a> that CDC\u2019s advisory board has demanded to be told why information has gone missing from CDC websites, and when it will be restored. \u201cSilence is not an option right now,\u201d said one advisory board member, Daniel Dawes. \u201cI try to use the term unprecedented sparingly, but I believe this is an unprecedented moment. There will be dire consequences if they do not restore this information and it may not come back if we do not speak out.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/em> reports<\/a> that a union representing 5,000 NIH researchers filed a legally binding demand to bargain over the sweeping changes. Marjorie Levinstein, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse and a union bargaining committee member, told The Guardian<\/em>: \u201cWe cannot do our research effectively, and this is putting into question delaying research on cancer and diabetes, on drug addiction, on heart disease. And this is going to delay medical breakthroughs that the American people deserve.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alexander Jordan Lara, a postbaccalaureate fellow at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research and also a member of the union\u2019s bargaining committee, added: \u201cWe were anticipating changes, and that it would be a new relationship we would have to manage but I don\u2019t think anyone expected this firehose.\u201d<\/p>\n

We should have expected it.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s be clear what all this is. \u201cHis attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion aren\u2019t about a particular program or some acronym \u2014 they\u2019re just a sanitized substitute for the racist comments that can no longer be spoken openly,\u201d Margaret Huang, the Southern Poverty Law Center\u2019s president and chief executive said<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When I heard \u201cmeritocracy,\u201d I think of an exchange in the TV adaption of Celeste Ng\u2019s Little Fires Everywhere<\/em>. When the rich employer criticizes her minority employee about her life choices, the latter responds: \u201cYou didn\u2019t make good choices. You had good choices. Options that being rich, and white, and entitled gave you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Somehow the meritocracy never see that.<\/p>\n

And let\u2019s be clear where this is all going.\u00a0 As George Orwell\u2019s 1984<\/em> said:<\/p>\n

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.<\/p>\n

Sadly, we\u2019re only beginning to understand.<\/p>\n

As Professor Dawes said, silence is not an option now. Make yourself heard.<\/p>\n

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented\u00a0<\/em>Tincture.io<\/em><\/a>, and now regular THCB contributor<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By KIM BELLARD I\u2019d love to be writing about something fun. Something that makes us think about things in a new way, or something exciting that will take us into the future. There are lots of such things happening, but there\u2019s too many Orwellian actions happening that I can\u2019t be silent about. Diversity, we\u2019re told,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3514,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3515"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3515\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}