When the New York Times reported on a tense Cabinet meeting in the White House, it became clear that one of the few members to take on the DOGE boss, Elon Musk, was Sean Duffy, Trump’s new transportation secretary. Although a number of cabinet secretaries were neither accustomed to nor happy with the scorched-earth approach to government efficiency that Musk’s fresh-faced goons were undertaking, they were reluctant to speak openly against Musk.
Duffy was an exception and may have thought he was on a sure thing by complaining that Musk was trying to fire air traffic controllers at a time when his department was dealing with a surge in aircraft crashes. That would normally hit a nerve among Trump’s billionaire cabinet cronies. Even if they only fly in private jets, they still rely on air traffic controllers employed by the federal government to avoid collisions at take-off, landing and in mid-air. It means much more to them personally than whether the chaos Musk is causing would affect support for American veterans or citizens reliant on social security and Medicare assistance.
In answer to Duffy’s defiance, Musk played a winning hand by insisting “that people hired under diversity, equity and inclusion programs were working in control towers”.
Whether there was a fragment of truth in Musk’s assertion or not, playing the DEI card was all that was needed to put an end to Duffy’s pluck. Trump moved from observer to Musk defender and issued the unwarranted demand that air traffic controllers need to be geniuses, and so Duffy’s staff must in future be hired from MIT.
It was also a performative code that meant no more women, and certainly no more black women, or black men for that matter, should be found working in an air traffic control tower.
For some years now, American far-right commentators have been taking exception to the idea of equity as expressed in the ‘E” of DEI programs. The outspoken black female conservative Candace Owens spoke on the issue during a 2022 Tennessee speech in which she claimed to be terrified of seeing a female pilot on an aircraft. Her contrarian remarks were made in response to a comment by Charlie Kirk, founder of conservative group Turning Point USA, who made said this about United Airlines DEI policies:
“I’m sorry, if I see a Black pilot, I’m gonna be like boy I hope he’s qualified…that’s not who I am, that’s not what I believe.”
Owens’ support for Kirk’s position with a gender variant was reported in a Newsweek article in January 2023:
“I would be terrified if I got onto a plane and I saw a woman flying the plane and I know that we have the United CEO saying that he just wants to fulfil a quota. He just wants there to be more women and wants there to be more black people and he’s not concerned at first with qualifications. That is something that should alarm all of us guys.”
Newsweek reported, almost as an afterthought, a United spokesperson who stood by the airline’s rigorous hiring policies by expressing pride in maintaining “the highest standards in our pilot hiring, training, and safety practices. Every aviator who joins our ranks must meet them. No exceptions”.
Equity programs focus on correcting past wrongs. One way to do that is to open up recruitment opportunities to candidates who would previously have been rejected without looking at their credentials. That has particularly applied to women and African Americans.
Kirk was an up-and-coming young conservative activist who had appeared on Fox Business as a high school student after writing an essay on text book bias. He may never have fully recovered psychologically from his unsuccessful application after leaving school for West Point military academy, making a note of that fact in a 2015 speech to a Liberty Forum in Silicon Valley. He pointedly declared that he lost to “a candidate from a different gender and a different persuasion”. His appeal to the audience was that somehow his rival’s test scores became known to him, and his were better. As a university dropout himself, there is an abundance of reasons for taking Kirk’s victimhood claim with a packet of salt.
More likely is that, as a conservative white boy from Chicago, he could not contemplate the idea of being beaten on merit for a prized West Point place by a female adversary, merit being centred less in his mind on intellectual, physical and behavioural attributes, and more on being male and white. That may help explain his supposed alarm at seeing a black airline pilot.
By 2015, when Kirk made that speech, Donald Trump was talking seriously about running for president and was offering himself as the timely repository for the smouldering resentments of mediocre white boys like Kirk. Their bitterness was real because they had been raised to think without question that their whiteness and maleness would be sufficient to open doors, but were discovering that well-educated women and black candidates with marketable skills were being offered jobs that not long ago were available exclusively to men like him.
The reluctance to come to terms with what was happening had been in the making for some time but was surfacing in a new form with the rise of Trump, who gave it a victim’s voice that included sounds designed to deny the reality of what was going on. America’s liberals had in Trump’s view weaponised the notion of equity. Unlike simplistic notions of equality, equity focused on correcting past distortions by giving prominence to the associated idea of equality of opportunity.
Equity turned out to be a frightening idea to American white men who had always assumed that the application of equality based on merit would always work in their favour. It was simply obvious: a relatively healthy white male would always be superior to a female or a person of either sex whose skin colour was black.
By creating systems that resulted in opening up opportunities for women and African Americans to compete in fields that had been exclusively occupied by white men for generations, it became apparent that what had been regarded as natural was being subverted by DEI policies.
As a highly articulate black woman positioning herself on the counterintuitive side of the DEI discussion, Owens has hit on a clever business model. To get attention in a noisy space, she does not need to compete with squads of progressive black liberal women arguing in favour of diversity and equity programs from which they may be beneficiaries. Anything said to the contrary by Owens as a conservative commentator will always be the prominent part of a media story because that is how the media works. On the “man bites dog” principle of media storytelling, she will always lead the story as an eloquent and quotable dog-biting man.
For very different reasons, Owens’ namesake led all the stories during the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, despite the Chancellor of Germany doing his best to reconcile his multiple victories with the Nazi Party theory of a white Aryan master race.
The theory was taking a battering as the African American Owens swept all before him in the prestigious 100 and 200 metres sprint dashes, the relays, and the long jump. Hitler had commenced day one of the games congratulating German event winners, but the head of the games put to him the ultimatum that he needed to either congratulate everyone or no one at all. The Fuehrer chose the latter which avoided accepting the reality that was being played out for all the world to see at his event.
Despite Hitler’s unhappiness about the black man’s astounding performances in Berlin, Owens himself enjoyed the luxury in Germany of travelling and staying in the same nice hotels as whites, something that would not have been allowed back home in the US. When he returned home to a triumphant ticker-tape welcome in New York City, he was quickly reminded that he was an African American when the parade was over. Officials denied him entry through the main doors of the Waldorf Astoria, insisting he use a feright elevator to make his way to the reception in his honour.
Owens had trouble before and after the Olympics in making his way in the world. Prior to the games, he was not eligible as a black man for college scholarships, so had to hold down jobs to fit in training. And after the games, despite his notoriety, his skin colour was a bar to offers of attractive endorsements.
Perhaps Nazi Armaments Minister Albert Speer best crystalised the enigma that Owens represented when he was reported as saying that Hitler “was highly annoyed by the series of triumphs by the marvellous coloured American runner, Jesse Owens. People whose antecedents came from the jungle were primitive, Hitler said with a shrug; their physiques were stronger than those of civilised whites and hence should be excluded from future games”.
One of the few educated Nazis in Hitler’s circle (Speer was an architect) was effectively calling Owens a DEI recruit as early as 1936. Despite all the systemic obstacles that stood in the way of Owens making it into the United States Olympic team, he not only circumvented them but became the star performer on the track and on the field. He was, in effect, an accidental departure from a political and social fabric that was designed to make sure he knew his place.
The answer to ensure it doesn’t keep happening is to look back to a golden past when women and African Americans had little choice other than to know which lane was theirs, and to stay in it. Who better than Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk, Albert Speer and Donald Trump to contribute to the resetting of boundary lanes, and, in so doing, contribute to Making America Great Again?
Because Jesse Owens and his successors failed to stay in their lane, present day African Americans with powerful primitive physiques from the jungle should respect the wiser sensitivities of civilised white men and abandon the woke DEI principle of inclusion in favour of the MAGA principle of exclusion. Curiously, a similar logic was employed to appeal to the “weaker” female sex. They should submit to their physically stronger white male masters by not attempting to compete with them.
Trump set out his DEI credentials in January when a Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines passenger jet collided and crashed into the Potomac River, killing all 67 people involved. Without citing any evidence, Trump’s answer to sceptical media questions about the crash being caused by DEI policies was to simply insist that “it’s just common sense”. Trump and his devoted MAGA followers see the situation so clearly that it doesn’t require substantiation by the furnishing of evidence or by a credible narrative.
Trump’s political disciples in other parts of the world, including our own Peter Dutton in Australia, are reciting the DEI mantra as red meat to their white male base.
Paul Begley
Paul Begley has worked in public affairs roles for three decades, the most recent being 18 years as general manager of government and media relations with the Australian HR Institute.