In a recent blog post, Diane Ravitch considered the phrase, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and its acronym, DEI: “The ideas of diversity, equity, and inclusion are generally and broadly accepted by the public… They are baked into our American ideals of fairness and justice and opportunity for all. The fact is that our nation is diverse.”

President Donald Trump’s administration, however, is making every attempt to supvert these values. While Ravitch describes the three word noun phrase — “diversity, equity, and inclusion”— as a list of core values that ought to be embedded in every American social and civic institution to ensure that all are welcome and treated fairly, today the Trump far-right has transformed DEI into a slur.

Linguist John McWhorter recently devoted his NY Times column to explaining how language and the meaning of words changes over time. His topic is the transformation of the meaning of the word “woke,” but his explanation of how the meaning of words evolves in common usage also describes what has happened to DEI.  McWhorter writes that words sometimes undergo “what linguists call pejoration, by which a positive or neutral word takes on a negative meaning.” He adds that pejoration of our language has recently sped up: “(S)ocial media… propagates and even transforms terms more rapidly than broadcasting and print.” Pejoration of a word also speeds up when politicians make a concerted and widespread effort to poison its accepted meaning. Fear infected public schools and universities across the country, for example, after a vague letter went out in mid-February from the U.S. Department of Education, threatening cuts to federal funding if schools consider race or, it seemed, any instances of diversity, equity, and inclusion in hiring or programming.

President Trump’s administration is also trying to obliterate the phrase through censorship. Last Friday, the NY Times listed hundreds of words reporters have tracked the Trump administration purging from use by the federal government.  They include: accessible, DEI, disabilities, discrimination, disparity, diverse communities, equality, equal opportunity, genders, immigrants, implicit bias, inclusion, indigenous community, inequality, inequity, multicultural, Native Americans, orientation, privilege, promote diversity, race, race and ethnicity, segregation, sense of belonging, sexual preferences, social justice, tribal, unconscious bias, underprivileged, and vulnerable populations. The reporters explain: “As President Trump seeks to purge the federal government of ‘woke’ initiatives, agencies have flagged hundreds of words to limit or avoid… The above terms appeared in government memos, in official and unofficial agency guidance and in other documents… Some ordered the removal of these words from public-facing websites, or ordered the elimination of other materials (including school curricula) in which they might be included. In other cases, federal agency managers advised caution in the terms’ usage without instituting an outright ban.”

The goal, of course, is to censor language and thereby to change thinking and impose the Trump administration’s own biases. Two weeks ago, the NY Times Editorial Board attacked the attempt by the Trump White House to curtail free speech. Part of that effort certainly was demonstrated in its eviction of the Associated Press, Reuters, and Huffington Post from the White House press pool. But the NY Times editorial board also identifies the administration’s attempt to impose its own propaganda as an attack on free speech: “The Trump administration’s intention can be seen clearly by looking at the way it communicates with the public. All federal contracts, job descriptions and social media posts are being scrutinized for any hint of ‘gender ideology.’… More than 8,000 federal websites, in fact, have been taken down or altered to remove concepts derided by the MAGA movement… The government won’t even describe its own museum collections as ‘diverse.’ ”

In another attempt to narrow the definition of what it means to be an American and to make life harder for immigrants learning English, last week President Trump signed an executive order making English the official language of the United States. The Wall Street Journal‘s Meridith McGraw reminds readers: “The executive order would rescind a federal mandate issued by former President Bill Clinton that agencies and other recipients of federal funding are required to provide language assistance to non-English speakers, the officials said.” Fortunately, “Agencies will still be able to provide documents and services in languages other than English, according to a White House summary of the order….”  McGraw quotes statements Trump made during his recent political campaign: “We have languages coming into our country… These are languages—it’s the craziest thing—they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing.” Making English our official language is merely another effort to manipulate language as a tool of exclusion.

In his wonderful new book, Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy, Derek W. Black, a professor of constitutional law at the University of South Carolina, views the politics of racism and exclusion through the lens of its effect on the public schools. While his book was published in the month that Donald Trump was inaugurated, his analysis fully describes what has happened in recent weeks as the Trump administration has accelerated an attack on efforts over the past half century to make our society fairer and our public schools more inclusive: “Brown v. Board of Education and its progeny fundamentally altered the way society thinks about education, not just of Black children but of all children. Laws prohibiting discrimination against students based on sex, language status, ethnicity, alienage, disability, poverty, and homelessness all grew out of the foundation Brown laid. For the past half century, the federal legal apparatus as well as several state regimes have aimed to deliver equal educational opportunity.” (Dangerous Learning, p. 275)

Black outlines the far-right’s campaign to undermine our commitment to those values that that grew from the  Civil Rights Movement: “Something dangerously reminiscent of the pre-Civil War South is happening in education today. The rising paranoia over critical race theory, curricular transparency, ‘socialist’ teachers, and diversity, equity, and inclusion in public schools strikingly resembles the South’s paranoia over Northern textbooks, Northern teachers, Northern universities, and Northern popular literature in the decades before the Civil War. Today’s insistence that these new trends in public education make students uncomfortable and paint white people as irredeemably racist sounds a lot like John Calhoun’s Senate speeches about abolitionist literature injuring Southerners’ pride and character.” (Dangerous Learning, p. 278)

In the specific context of laws and policies that control what can be discussed in public schools, Black shows how today’s politicians have developed a strategy to poison words and school policies that we have previously understood as promoting the positive values to which we ascribe: “The ideas in question are described in vague terms, as ‘divisive concepts,’ for example, or as nebulous academic fields of study like critical race theory. ‘Vagueness,’ according to free expression advocates, ‘is the point.’ It gives those enforcing the law enormous discretion, complaining parents enormous leverage, and teachers very little clue as to what they can or cannot teach, other than they should not discuss anything perceived as or somehow related to objectionable content.” (Dangerous Learning, p. 279)

It is important to remember that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” was not always a pejorative smear.  It was a plain noun phrase that named the values of the Civil Rights Movement before those words were poisoned by politicians.