PERRY: Trump wins the racism to the bottom with lies about equity, generosity

The epiphany hit last week while I was trying to push a neighbor’s old Chevy Tahoe off the streetscape median.

I was walking home from the grocery store Saturday and I saw two guys struggling to push the hulking SUV backward off the raised median. I could see my elderly neighbor behind the wheel. I’d never met him, but I’d seen him outside his house, a few blocks from mine, for years.

Another man, and his wife and his dog, out for a stroll, crossed the street to avoid the car chaos, not making eye contact with the guys in a fuss or me.

“It won’t go in reverse,” my neighbor told me through his car window as I approached to see what was up.

The two guys pushing couldn’t heave hard enough to get the car off the median and back into the street. I couldn’t help but think what good friends my neighbor had that would help him with what was clearly an awful task. I joined the two guys, and the three of us heaved and groaned and finally got the car far enough into the street so my neighbor could drive it forward and park it.

We had our guy moment, fist-bumping our physical prowess. I’d check for soreness later, I figured.

The two guys weren’t my neighbor’s friends. They were strangers. They saw the old man and the stuck car and just came over to help. One guy spoke only Spanish. He was on a rental scooter delivering groceries when he saw the dilemma.

The other stranger was just walking out for a beer and saw what looked like trouble and stopped to help.

It was a random act of kindness.

I’m from Manzanola, in southeast Colorado. I was raised to offer help to people who needed it, without thinking, whether they were strangers or friends. People who are beset with some encumbrance or issue warrant extra or specialized help, just because they need it, because something is holding them back. 

I never dreamed I’d live in a place where that kind of compassion and tolerance would be struck down by the government and maligned as “racist” or “woke.”

During the last few decades, the United States has taken a long, hard look at who’s equal and who’s not here. Not very long ago, women couldn’t get credit cards unless their husband helped get them one.

And it is indisputable that minorities, especially people of color, have languished and even suffered hugely in this country, and they still do. If you don’t believe that, you’re either ignorant of the undeniable evidence and reality, or, as a bigot and a racist, you are the problem.

This all became critically worse in January when President Trump and his army of bigots rolled into power, undermining and even outlawing issues linked to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, which is nothing more than a new name for a decades-long push toward realizing the mercurial goal of American equality.

Trump has bastardized the grail and says his gutting anti-racism programs and policies is actually “ending racism.”

In reality, he’s ending the tools that expose it.

His executive orders banning “critical race theory,” gutting diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and reviving his sham 1776 Commission aren’t acts of progress. They’re acts of erasure. And they are as dangerous as they are dishonest.

Trump and his Republican enablers aren’t fighting racism. They’re fighting the very idea that America should confront it. They want classrooms scrubbed of uncomfortable truths, teachers silenced and marginalized students shoved back into the shadows.

It’s oppression dressed up as patriotism.

Trump calls critical race theory “inherently racist” and threatens to strip schools of federal funding if teachers so much as acknowledge systemic discrimination. He mocks gender inclusivity policies as “radical ideology.”

In states like Wisconsin, simply telling students to respect gender identity was treated as a scandal. In Virginia, a policy to call kids by the names they choose was painted as indoctrination.

In rural Colorado, we called it kindness and respect.

Those qualities are now enemies of the state in Trump’s America.

In typical Trump fashion, a man with a half-century record of racial antagonism suddenly declares himself the arbiter of what’s racist.

You don’t have to imagine or exaggerate Trump’s record. In the 1970s, the Justice Department sued him for refusing to rent his New York apartments to Black families. In the 1980s, he whipped up hysteria against the “Central Park Five,” demanding the death penalty for Black teenagers who were later exonerated. In the 1990s, he sneered at Native Americans in front of Congress, declaring they didn’t “look Indian.” He rode the racist “birther” lie against President Barack Obama straight into the White House.

Trump is not a man who just stumbled into racial controversy. He made it his brand.

So let’s stop the nonsense that Trump’s war on DEI is about protecting children. It’s about protecting the power of white people, primarily men and primarily those who are straight or in the closet. Trump’s goal isn’t to end bigotry. His goal is to end the conversation about bigotry.

That’s why the 1776 Commission is back. This committee of revisionists produced a report so laughably whitewashed that reputable historians across the spectrum shredded it. It downplayed slavery, scolded the civil rights movement, and tried to resurrect a fairy tale in which America has always lived up to its ideals. It isn’t history. It’s propaganda.

It’s caught on, even in Aurora. Here, the city council overtly and quietly squelched the city’s DEI program that provided critical information and understanding to city employees, and it worked to help make Aurora the diverse and enviable city workforce it has become. Over the past few weeks, some of the city council members have has worked feverishly to dissolve the city’s storied Human Relations Commission, which has worked successfully to help all of the city understand that underdogs really do exist, and that offering kindness, help and understanding makes for a better Aurora community for everyone. Every time.

Equity programs exist because equality doesn’t come from pretending the past never happened. These programs, councils and commissions exist because barriers remain in hiring, in education and in all kinds of American opportunities. They still exist because racism is not a relic. It’s alive in wage gaps, in school funding, in incarceration rates and even in how Aurora police handle, and mishandle, people that officers encounter.

Trump knows this. So do Republicans in Congress and state legislatures rushing to ban “divisive concepts.” Their cynicism is the point. They’d rather peddle a fantasy of colorblind America than admit the scoreboard is still rigged.

Pretending racism ended with Martin Luther King Jr. doesn’t make it true. Banning teachers from discussing discrimination won’t end it. Deporting students for protesting won’t silence them. And calling the press for equity “racist” doesn’t make it true.

The real danger is that tired parents, overwhelmed teachers, and frightened school boards and government employees will choose quiet over conflict, erasure over honesty. Children will grow up in classrooms silent about the struggle and sanitized of truth.

They will grow up in a world where kindness and a sense of non-judgmental generosity are meted out only to those who qualify for it based on their political ideology, not because they just need the help.

Trump has waged a war on truth and kindness itself. And the only way to stop it is to call it what it is — loudly, relentlessly, and without apology.

Follow @EditorDavePerry on BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com