Following the Jan. 29 collision of a jet and an Army helicopter in Washington, D.C. that killed 67 people, the president blamed hiring practices at the Federal Aviation Administration for the crash. “The F.A.A. is actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative,” he said.
Responding to reporters who pointed out that the cause of the accident was not yet known and asked for facts that supported his bizarre accusation, the president cited “common sense” as his evidence.
The president accused the F.A.A. of hiring incompetent air-traffic controllers after determining that “the work force was too white,” and the vice president said that white applicants had been rejected “because of the color of their skin.” The administration’s recipe of two parts racism and three parts lies seems to produce a strangely addictive cocktail.
There’s more. In his Media Nation blog, Dan Kennedy pointed out another deranged riff that has gotten little attention. The president said it was crazy to hire air-traffic controllers with disabilities related to “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.”
This poison got Kennedy’s attention because his daughter, Becky, has achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism. “With the proper training,” Kennedy wrote, “she could, if she wanted, become an air-traffic controller — only maybe not now, I guess. Anyone who isn’t a six-foot-tall straight white man need not apply.”
The Little People of America, which represents people with dwarfism and their families, issued a statement saying that the president’s comments were “demonstrably false” and that they were “disgusted” by them.
Donna Walker, who directs Provincetown’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, still has a job. Not everyone is abandoning DEI, and Massachusetts and the Outer Cape “are in that bubble,” says Walker. But the torrent of words pouring forth from Washington has washed up on our shores, and even here some people are buying it. “Does it have a chilling effect? Yes, it does,” she says. “It’s meant to do that. Those of us doing this work understand that.”
Walker says that people in her field have already changed the language they use to describe their work. They’re dropping the words “diversity” and “equity,” though they’re still hanging onto “inclusion.”
It’s not clear where such a distinction ends up. Writing in The Emancipator, Victor Ray argues that the executive orders coming from the White House “threaten to march us back toward a segregationist society.” The anti-DEI critics, he writes, “aren’t interested in normalizing inclusivity — they are questioning the value of integration itself.”
So far, at least, not many people have been willing to speak out strongly in defense of diversity and equity. “That’s the problem,” says Walker. “There’s no one saying, ‘Don’t buy into this.’ ”
