Holocaust Denial: Trump's Assault on DEI Is an Affront to American History

With the erasure of 10% of Americans' retirement savings in 48 hours last week, the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination on April 4, 1968, was entirely eclipsed.

President Donald Trump, the self-professed hero of ordinary Americans, marked the evaporation of ordinary Americans' retirement plans with his customary empathy, heading to Mar-a-Lago to golf. He likely doesn't know Marie Antoinette from Marie Osmond, but he did a fine job channeling the former's derisive dismissal of the suffering of the little people, "Let them eat cake." On Saturday he put out this statement: "The President won his second round matchup of the Senior Club Championship today in Jupiter, Fl, and advances to the Championship Round tomorrow."

Those noting that this was both hilariously narcissistic and infantile missed the larger point: There was no word on whether anyone else was playing.

As for the stock market crash triggered by his launching of a global trade war, the president proclaimed "I think it's going very well. The markets are going to boom. The stock is going to boom, the country is going to boom." His supporters parroted this message on the airwaves, just the way they parroted his 2020 assurances that COVID, which killed over 1.1 million Americans, was going to miraculously disappear within days of its emergence. "Within a couple of days (it) is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done," he babbled on Feb. 26, 2020.

The country has also been preoccupied with ICE raids aimed, according to the president, at ridding us of "criminals." The quality of discernment in America has plummeted even more precipitously than the stock market, evidently, since the most prominent convicted criminal among us is Trump himself.

This comes as a Trump administration high as a kite on its ability to do as it pleases wages a war, long in the planning, to keep America from confronting a sordid but central part of its history in honest fashion. Truthfully, Germany has done a better job seeing to it that its citizens confront its genocide against the Jews than we have educating ours about a Holocaust of our own: our role in a genocide against Blacks. Our European trading partners' kidnapping of millions of Africans resulted in some 12 million Africans chained, starved, tortured, suffocated and stuffed in murderous conditions on slave ships during the passage to the American colonies, a passage which itself killed 2 million souls. The survivors arrived on our shores only to be wrenched from their families, shackled, beaten, dragged, humiliated and worked to death in slavery.

These are Holocaust-level facts and Holocaust-level numbers.

Speaking of facts, we aren't educated about them, and that's no coincidence. Nor are we educated about enslavement's modern legacy: the ongoing effects of segregation, Jim Crow, lynching, redlining, voter suppression, substandard schools, restricted economic opportunity and more, which, generation after generation, have inevitably served as a cross that the descendants of those whom we enslaved continue to bear.

It's a sad irony that among the actions that have obscured the remembrance of King's death are ones aimed at eradicating the very idea of promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. MAGA World has succeeded in turning these into dirty words, and have done so, perversely, on the pretext that addressing the legacy of enslavement amounts to a violation of white peoples' civil rights.

Last week's letter declared DEI programs "impermissible," providing for the elimination of federal funding for educational institutions which "promote" the values of diversity, equity or inclusion. It was given the Orwellian title "Reminder of Legal Obligations Undertaken in Exchange for Receiving Federal Financial Assistance," and required that state and local officials certify that they do not recognize these values.

A Jan. 29, 2025, executive order, entitled "Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling," sounds like a dictate from North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un, mandating that the purpose of American schools is "to instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation." Educators are required to teach what Trump regards as "an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring and ennobling characterization of America's founding and foundational principles."

Asked whether the teaching of Black history is still allowed, Education Secretary Linda McMahon replied, "I'm not quite certain, and I'd like to look into it further."

Don't bet on it.

Looks like our retirement savings aren't the only thing being erased.

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Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.