Virginia Candidates Show You Can Try to Kill DEI, But You’ll Fail
Talk about a Lost Cause.
VIRGINIANS HAVE CHOSEN THEIR CANDIDATES for this fall’s election—and if you are trying to murder DEI, they are your worst nightmare. The demographic diversity is spectacular in both parties.
In a state whose first two governors were Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, two women will face off for the top job: former congresswoman and CIA officer Abigail Spanberger, a white Democrat, and Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, a black Republican, Jamaican immigrant, and Marine Corps veteran.
In the lieutenant governor race, it’s conservative talk-radio host John Reid, a Republican who recently came out as gay, vs. Democratic state Sen. Ghazala F. Hashmi, an Indian immigrant. As for attorney general, Democrat Jerrauld “Jay” Jones, a black former state legislator, will challenge the Hispanic Republican incumbent, Jason Miyares.
Is this (still) a great country or what?
When I read off those candidate demographics out loud, one straight white male in my vicinity joked that “this just proves everything’s turned to shit for white men.” And we all burst out laughing.
Don’t get me wrong, the Donald Trump–MAGA war on diversity, equity, and inclusion is deadly serious. The truth is that if those half-dozen people were Pentagon leaders instead of politicians running in a general election, they’d be ousted by now or, at the least, apprehensive about their career futures. If they were historic figures celebrated on federal websites, those pages would likely be wiped. If they were researchers in neglected health fields, their grants would be gone. Project leaders in “shithole” countries and continents, gone—them, their projects, and their web presence.
The same day the Virginia results were finalized last week, the Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming treatment for transgender minors. The straight-up ideological 6–3 majority said the ban did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. And the Trump administration said it was canceling specialized guidance for LGBTQ callers on a national suicide hotline.
And yet, a couple of days earlier, federal judge William Young ruled that the Trump administration must immediately restore some eight hundred grants awarded by the National Institutes for Health to study topics such as racial disparities and transgender health. “I’ve sat on this bench now for forty years, and I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this. Is it true of our society as a whole, have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?” the Boston-based district judge asked in announcing his decision.
Young is 84. He was appointed by conservative hero Ronald Reagan. And in those remarks, Young was paraphrasing the line that finally brought down Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his “Red Scare” conspiracy hunts and blacklists that ruined so many lives and careers.
BACK IN THE SUMMER OF 2016, when Trump was the newly crowned Republican nominee, a federal appeals court struck down a North Carolina voting law that was written expressly, and with astonishingly open intent, to suppress black votes. I wrote a column about it, and a colleague put the word “racism” in the headline. I was squeamish but didn’t say no.
I still hesitate to use “racism,” or “racist,” and yet what else could it have been in that case? North Carolina lawmakers requested a study of racial voting patterns and then killed or restricted IDs, time periods, registration methods, and anything else black people relied on disproportionately to cast votes. You can argue that it was a partisan move, designed to ensure victory. But zeroing in on one race—ensuring that it’s hard for black people to vote—is racism on its face.
That was before the 2016 election, and at the time, I believed and wrote that Republicans had been “accelerating their march to demographic suicide since Trump blared his hostility toward Muslims, Hispanics and immigrants on the first day of his campaign.” Though Trump won the Electoral College and the presidency, Hillary Clinton beat him by nearly 3 million votes that year.
It’s embarrassing to read that line now, especially after Trump grew his appeal to minority voters last year. Lots of people have sought to understand why that happened, and I won’t try to explain it here. I can only hope that it will fade as Trump continually overreaches on every front.
The disruptions and dangers to health care, immigrants, tariffs, corruption, war and peace, higher education, libraries, museums, and the entire system of checks and balances are manifest. There’s hating on science while crushing on dictators, the abuse of pardon power, and obnoxious favoritism toward red states, political allies, anyone who adores him and/or pays him off.
And, of course, Trump’s travel bans and restrictions against countries that are mostly black and brown, in contrast with the several dozen poor, pitiful white people of South Africa, ceremonially invited and welcomed into the United States to escape their oppression, indeed their genocide (both thoroughly discredited).
I’m getting less squeamish all the time about the words “racism” and “racist.” The labels “white supremacist” and “white nationalist.” And the bald truths about attacks on DEI called out by a Reagan judge born 84 years ago.
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