Right below the surface, like the rotting body of a drowned Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, is the stinking, smug racism of Donald Trump as he attempts to remove institutionalized efforts toward Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) from governmental, educational, and corporate practice. He wants white people to feel victimized by DEI – as though five-hundred hundred years of systemic white racism toward People of Color has been eradicated from our history, and a good-hearted attempt to be less exclusionary and racist going forward is an outrage to white supremacy.

Implicit in Trump’s attack on DEI is the nasty suggestion that people of color, women, and people with disabilities are incapable of doing as good a job in critical occupations as white men. As if to say, we’ve tried DEI but BIPOC folks just can’t cut it! Decent people have hoped, even believed, that such a justification for exclusionary racism was long dead in this country. (After Obama, weren’t we a post-racial society?) What’s so disturbing about Trump’s racism is that his whistle has millions of piglets running to lap up the slops in his trough and eager to join the chorus of white superiority and grievance.

Take a look through the portrait gallery of Americans Who Tell the Truth. It’s about as DEI as I could make it, but it’s not an effort to be politically correct. Or for the sake of affirmative action. It’s because the portrait subjects are all superior at confronting and solving difficult problems of economic, environmental, racial, and gender justice – the foundational issues of a healthy democracy. These issues would not have been solved – even acknowledged! – by a host of conservative white men. Qualities of intelligence, perseverance, and courage are common to all the portrait subjects, and, particularly, faith in the ideals of equality and justice.

Ah, there’s the rub! Trump and his racist billionaire sidekicks don’t believe in equality and justice. They despise these American Ideals. The only ideal they adhere to is a corrupt version of freedom – the freedom to amass as much power and wealth as they possibly can at the expense of all other people and species on the planet. Democratic ideals inhibit greed.

Trump presents his anti-DEI crusade as an issue of merit and competence. In fact, it’s a crusade against our bothersome, inconvenient  essential values. He hates equality. He hates justice. He despises the truth of the contradiction of American ideals with his fascism.

The complexion of democracy is diversity. The complexion of democracy is equity.

The complexion of democracy is inclusion. The complexion of facism is division, inequality, and racism.