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Underground Railroad Museum Sues Trump Administration for Canceling Grant

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2026 //
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The Trump administration began in its earliest days to try to erase what it calls DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), which, in practice, means eliminating federal grants that acknowledge the existence of race, ethnicity, or gender, except for straight white men. Straight white women are usually okay, but recognizing the history, struggles and achievements of others is unacceptable in the Age of Trump.

Trump’s concept of “Make America Great Again” apparently means erasing those who deviate from his white straight ideal of the best days of America (think John Wayne).

One grant recipient is fighting back.

NBC reported:

An Underground Railroad museum in upstate New York alleged in a lawsuit Friday that the Trump administration unlawfully terminated its federal grant on the basis of race, pointing to President Donald Trump’s efforts to dismantle diversity-focused initiatives.

The Underground Railroad Education Center in Albany, New York, alleges that the National Endowment for the Humanities’ cancelation of a $250,000 grant amounted to viewpoint and racial discrimination, violating the First and Fifth Amendments, respectively.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York, calls for the funds to be reinstated.

The suit cited Trump’s January 2025 executive orderthat required federal agencies to eliminate any operations supporting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives within 60 days. The 40-page brief outlined 1,400 grants that were terminated in early April 2025 “for their conflict with President Trump’s EOs and the new agency priorities adopted in their wake.” 

Nina Loewenstein, a lawyer for the museum, told NBC News that there is “just no legitimate basis” for the grant’s cancellation, adding that it is “just explicitly erasing things associated with the Black race.”

Loewenstein and the team of lawyers volunteering on the case through Lawyers for Good Government, an organization that provides free legal services for civil and human rights cases, argued that the Underground Railroad Education Center is just one of thousands of organizations that have been unlawfully targeted by the Trump administration.

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Categories Censorship, Democracy, Equity, Ethics, Freedom, Freedom to Learn, Funding, Race, Racism, Trump

Science Research in New England Gets a Reprieve from DEI Ban, for Now

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2025 //
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The Boston Globe reported on the resumption of science projects halted by the Trump administration because their subjects were Black, Hispanic, gay, or transgender. Trump is determined to wiped out federal recognition of these categories of people and to stop science research of all kinds.

PROVIDENCE — Four months after her large-scale research study seeking to contain the spread of HIV was canceled by the Trump administration, Dr. Amy Nunn received a letter: the grant has been reinstated.

The study, which is enrolling Black and Hispanic gay men, is set to resume after a June court order in favor of the American Public Health Association and other groups that sued the National Institutes of Health for abruptly canceling hundreds of scientific research grants. 

The NIH said in a form letter to researchers in February and March that their studies “no longer effectuate agency priorities” because they included, among other complaints, reference to gender identity or diversity, equity and inclusion.

The order from US District Judge William Young in Massachusetts was narrow, reinstating nearly 900 grants awarded to the plaintiffs, not all of the thousands of grants canceled by NIH so far this year. Young called DEI an “undefined enemy‚” and said the Trump administration’s “blacklisting” of certain topics “has absolutely nothing to do with the promotion of science or research.”

The Trump administration is appealing the ruling, and the NIH continues to say they will block diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, prompting ongoing fear from scientists that their studies could still be on the chopping block even as they restart.

“We feel like we’re tippy-toeing around,” said Nunn, who leads the Rhode Island Public Health Institute. “The backbone of the field is steadfast pursuit of the truth. People are trying to find workarounds where they don’t have to compromise the integrity of their science.”

Nunn said she renewed her membership to the American Public Health Association in order to ensure she’d be included in the lawsuit.

Despite DEI concerns, she plans to continue enrolling gay Black and Hispanic men in her study, which will include 300 patients in Rhode Island, Mississippi, and Washington, D.C. 

Black and Hispanic men who have sex with other men contract HIV at dramatically higher rates than gay white men, a statistic Nunn aims to change.

The study was just getting underway, with 20 patients enrolled, when the work was shut down by the NIH in March. While Nunn’s clinic in Providence did not do any layoffs, the clinic in Mississippi — Express Personal Health — shut down, and the D.C. clinic laid off staff.

The four-month funding flip-flop could delay the results of the study by two years, Nunn said, depending on how quickly the researchers can rehire and train new staff. The researchers will also need to find a new clinic in Mississippi.

The patients — 100 each in Rhode Island, Mississippi, and D.C. — will then be followed for a year as they take Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, or PrEP, to prevent them from contracting HIV. 

The protocol that’s being studied is the use of a patient navigator for “aggressive case management.” That person will help the patient navigate costs, insurance, transportation to the clinic, dealing with homophobia and other barriers to staying on PrEP, which can be taken as a pill or a shot.

The study’s delay means “the science is aging on the vine,” Nunn said, as new HIV prevention drugs are rolled out. “The very thing that we’re studying might very well be obsolete by the time we’re able to reenroll all of this.”

The hundreds of reinstated grants include titles that reference race and gender, such as a study of cervical cancer screening rates in Latina women, alcohol use among transgender youth, aggressive breast cancer rates in Black and Latina women, and multiple HIV/AIDs studies involving LGBTQ patients.

“Many of these grants got swept up almost incidentally by the particular language that they used,” said Peter Lurie, the president of the Center of Science in the Public Interest, which joined the lawsuit. “There was an arbitrary quality to the whole thing.”

Lurie said blocking scientists from studying racial disparities in public health outcomes will hurt all Americans, not just the people in the affected groups.

“A very high question for American public health is why these racial disparities continue to exist,” Lurie said. “We all lose in terms of questions not asked, answers not generated, and opportunities for saving lives not implemented.”

The Trump administration is not backing down from its stance on DEI, even as it restores the funding. The reinstatement letters from the NIH sent to scientists this month include a condition that they must comply with Trump’s executive order on “biological truth,” which rescinded federal recognition of transgender identity, along with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color and national origin.

Kenneth Parreno, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said he was told by Trump administration lawyers that new letters would be sent out without those terms.

But Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, said Wednesday the administration “stands by its decision to end funding for research that prioritized ideological agendas over scientific rigor and meaningful outcomes for the American people.”

“HHS is committed to ensuring that taxpayer dollars support programs rooted in evidence-based practices and gold standard science — not driven by divisive DEI mandates or gender ideology,” Nixon said in any email to the Globe.

The Trump administration’s appeal is pending before the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston. A motion for a stay of Young’s decision was denied, and the Trump administration is appealing that ruling to the US Supreme Court.

The ongoing push to remove DEI from science has created fear in the scientific community, which relies on federal funding to conduct its research and make payroll.

“Scientific morale has taken a big hit,” Nunn said. “People are apprehensive.”

Indeed, major research institutions have faced mass funding cuts from the federal government since Trump took office. Brown University, the largest research institution in Rhode Island, had more than $500 million frozen until it reached an agreement with Trump on Wednesday.

In exchange for the research dollars to be released, Brown agreed not to engage in racial discrimination in admissions or university programming, and will provide access to admissions data to the federal government so it can assess compliance. The university also agreed not to perform any gender-affirming surgeries and to adopt Trump’s definitions of a male and female in the “biological truth” executive order.

While some have avoided speaking out, fearing further funding cuts, Nunn said she felt a “moral and ethical duty” to do so.

Categories Censorship, Equity, Ethics, Funding, Gender, Race, Research, Science

Columbia and Brown Agree to Give Trump Administration All Data on Race and Test Scores of New Admissions

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2025 //
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In recent decades, many universities have sought to increase racial and ethnic diversity in their student body and faculty. In addition to grades and test scores, they looked at many other factors, such as talents, life experiences, meeting challenges. This process meant that more students of color were admitted, while some students with higher test scores were rejected.

The Trump administration adamantly opposes this process, known as affirmative action. Its view is that scores on the SAT and ACT and grades should be the most important, if not the only criteria for admission. Those scores, to Trump officials, are synonymous with merit. Any deviation from their view will be grounds for investigating violations of civil rights laws.

Sharon Otterman and Anemona Hartocollis reported in The New York Times yesterday:

As part of the settlements struck with two Ivy League universities in recent weeks, the Trump administration will gain access to the standardized test scores and grade point averages of all applicants, including information about their race, a measure that could profoundly alter competitive college admissions.

That aspect of the agreements with Columbia and Brown, which goes well beyond the information typically provided to the government, was largely overlooked amid splashier news that the universities had promised to pay tens of millions of dollars to settle claims of violations of federal anti-discrimination laws, including accusations that they had tolerated antisemitism.

The release of such data has been on the wish list of conservatives who are searching for evidence that universities are dodging a 2023 Supreme Court decision barring the consideration of race in college admissions, and will probably be sought in the future from many more of them.

But college officials and experts who support using factors beyond test scores worry that the government — or private groups or individuals — will use the data to file new discrimination charges against universities and threaten their federal funding.

The Trump administration is using every lever it can to push elite college admissions offices toward what it regards as “merit-based” processes that more heavily weigh grades and test scores, arguing that softer measures, such as asking applicants about their life challenges or considering where they live, may be illegal proxies for considering race.

The additional scrutiny is likely to resonate in admissions offices nationwide. It could cause some universities to reconsider techniques like recruitment efforts focused on high schools whose students are predominantly people of color, or accepting students who have outstanding qualifications in some areas but subpar test scores, even if they believe such actions are legal.

“The Trump administration’s ambition here is to send a chill through admissions offices all over the country,” said Justin Driver, a Yale Law School professor who just wrote a book about the Supreme Court and affirmative action and who said he believed that the administration’s understanding of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decisionwas wrong. “They are trying to get universities to depress Black and brown enrollment.”

Categories Civil Rights, Higher Education, Inequality, Race, Trump

Trump Administration Forces Resignation of UVA President Over DEI

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2025 //
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James Ryan, the president of the University of Virginia since 2018, announced his resignation under intense pressure from the Trump administration.

The Civil Rights Division of the Trump administration pressured the Board of Governors of the university to remove Ryan because of his support for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

They said that he pretended to comply with the federal demands to eliminate DEI but merely renamed them.

For the past half century, DEI was considered a hallmark of compliance with civil rights laws. DEI programs encouraged women and nonehites to enroll in higher education and to study the history of discrimination.

Under Trump, DEI has been reinterpreted to mean favoring those groups at the expense of white men and thus discriminating against white men.

The Trump administration has cut federal grants to universities that are slow or unwilling to dismantle DEI programs.

The New York Times reported that lawyers for the Civil Rights Division demanded Ryan’s ouster.

The demand to remove Mr. Ryan was made over the past month on several occasions by Gregory Brown, the deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, to university officials and representatives, according to the three people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Brown, a University of Virginia graduate who, as a private lawyer, sued the school, is taking a major role in the investigation. He told a university representative as recently as this past week that Mr. Ryan needed to go in order for the process of resolving the investigation to begin, two of the people said.

Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Justice Department’s top civil rights lawyer, has also been involved in negotiations with the university. She received her law degree from the University of Virginia, where she was a student in the law school at the same time as Mr. Ryan…

Mr. Ryan, hired in 2018 as the university’s ninth president, has leaned into issues like making the school more diverse, increasing the number of first-generation students and encouraging students to do community service. But his approach, which he says will make the university “both great and good,” has rankled conservative alumni and Republican board members who accuse him of wanting to impose his values on students and claim he is “too woke.”

Before becoming the University of Virginia’s president, Mr. Ryan served as the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he was praised for his commitment to D.E.I. programs. Harvard has been one of the Trump administration’s chief targets since it began its assault on higher education.

The administration’s attempt to assert federal influence over state university leadership decisions is also illustrative of how Mr. Trump’s political appointees continue to wield the Justice Department’s investigative powers to achieve policy goals long sought by a top Trump adviser, Stephen Miller.

Legal experts said they could think of few other instances in which an administration had demanded that a school have its president removed in order to resolve a Justice Department investigation.

“This is a tactic you would expect the government to use when it’s playing hard ball in a criminal case involving a corporation accused of serious wrongdoing or pervasive criminal activity,” said Daniel C. Richman, who is a law professor at Columbia University and a former federal prosecutor.

Categories Academic Freedom, Civil Rights, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Higher Education, History, Injustice, Race, Racism, Trump, Virginia

Benjamin R. Cremer: Why We Celebrate Juneteenth

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2025 //
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Benjamin R. Cremer is pastor at the United Methodist Church in Boise, Idaho. I read his essays regularly. He is truly a Christian. He preaches love, not hate. He knows and tries to exemplify the Beatitudes.

He wrote about the meaning of this day:

On June 19, 1865—two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed—enslaved Black Americans in Galveston, Texas were finally informed of their freedom. This day, now known as Juneteenth, marks not just the delayed enforcement of a national promise, but the resilient hope and courage of a people who endured unspeakable injustice while still holding onto the belief that liberation would come.

As Christians, we must understand that Juneteenth is not just a historical footnote—it is a call to theological clarity and moral responsibility. Scripture consistently reveals a God who hears the cries of the oppressed (Exodus 3:7), who calls for justice to “roll on like a river” (Amos 5:24), and who sets the captives free (Luke 4:18). The story of God is a story of liberation—not just personal salvation, but also the dismantling of systems that crush the image of God in others.

Juneteenth challenges us to confront a difficult truth: that much of American Christianity was complicit in slavery, and that the legacy of that sin continues in our institutions, our policies, and yes—even in some of our pulpits. But the gospel does not shy away from hard truths. It invites us to repentance. To truth-telling. And to the costly work of reconciliation and repair.

In our time when people are heard saying “Illegal is illegal,” Juneteenth invites us to remember that slavery was once legal. Harboring a fugitive enslaved person was illegal. Black freedom illegal. “Illegal is illegal” has always been used to defend injustice. Legality ≠ morality. Justice calls us higher.This is not about shame. It’s about grace. Grace that tells the truth. Grace that restores what has been broken. Grace that refuses to be silent in the face of injustice. 

Observing Juneteenth as Christians means celebrating the faith and dignity of Black Americans who have carried the gospel with courage even when the church failed to. It means honoring the day freedom was announced, and lamenting that it was so long withheld.

May we not be a people who forget. May we be a people who remember rightly, act justly, and walk humbly with our God (Micah 6:8).

If you are looking for a tangible way to get involved in communal justice work, I want to let you know about Be Love day, put on by the King Center. Be Love is a growing movement of courageous acts to achieve justice, which is based on these words from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.” Be Love seeks to strategically define and unleash the true power of love to unite humanity, cultivate true peace, and create the Beloved Community. The movement is holding “Be Love Day” on July 9th. Click the link above to learn more.

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Categories Bigotry, Character, Courage, Ethics, Freedom, History, Love, Race, Racism, Religion

Jan Resseger: Trump Guts Civil Rights Laws

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2025 //
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Jan Resseger reviews Trump’s vigorous crusade to eliminate civil rights laws by inverting their meaning. These laws were passed to break the monopoly held by white men in hiring and promotions. But now, any program that favors women and nonwhites is treated as a crime. Universities and corporations that once featured their efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion are now warned by the federal government that these efforts discriminate against white men and must be abolished.

Resseger writes:

When it comes to President Trump’s threatened tariffs and his foreign policy demands, we have all been reading about the phrase coined by a Financial Times reporter: “Trump always chickens out—TACO.” But when it comes to Trump’s attack on civil rights and racial justice in the nation’s public schools, the President has been doggedly persistent.

On May 22nd, The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser mused about the President’s Oval Office ambush of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa as capturing how things are going in “Washington a hundred and twenty-one days into Trump’s second term: a manufactured scene of outrage about a nonexistent ‘white genocide’ ” and “a reminder of how explicitly Trump has, in his second term, defined the goal of his Presidency as a sort of racial-justice quest for white people.” Glasser describes “a President who has terminated affirmative-action decrees that have been in place for the federal government since the nineteen-sixties, unleashed a wave of arrests and deportations aimed at illegal migrants of color, gutted federal civil-right-enforcement offices, and blamed D.E.I. for just about every evil at home and abroad.”

New York Times reporter Erica Green summarizes the Trump administration’s consistent work since the winter to attack racial justice and twist the meaning of the protection of civil rights: “In his drive to purge diversity efforts in the federal government and beyond, President Trump has expressed outright hostility to civil rights protections. He ordered federal agencies to abandon some of the core tenets of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, on the basis that they represented a ‘pernicious’ attempt to make decisions based on diversity rather than merit. But in recent weeks, Mr. Trump has turned to those same measures—not to help groups that have historically been discriminated against, but to remedy what he sees as the disenfranchisement of white men. The pattern fits into a broader trend… as Trump officials pick and choose which civil rights protections they want to enforce and for whom. Across the government, agencies that have historically worked to fight discrimination against Black people, women and other groups have pivoted to investigating institutions accused of favoring them.”

Beginning on Valentines Day,  when Trump’s Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), Craig Trainor sent all public school officials a “Dear Colleague” letter threatening their federal funding if they did not remove all diversity, equity, and inclusion from their schools, the Trump Administration turned its sights on U.S. public schools. In March, the administration closed seven of the nation’s twelve regional Office for Civil Rights locations that have traditionally investigated complaints filed by parents and families. At the same time the Office for Civil Rights abandoned its traditional practice of carefully investigating complaints and working with school districts to end discriminatory practices. Trump’s OCR turned to directed investigations aimed at punishing school districts failing to comply with the administration’s priorities and threatening loss of federal funding. In early April, the Department of Education threatened K-12 public school districts’ Title I funding unless school leaders (and statewide officials) signed a certificate that they were in full compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act as well as in compliance with the administration’s broad, and many believe mistaken, interpretation of the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which specifically banned affirmation in college admissions. The Trump administration has declared that the Students for Fair Admissions decision instead bans all DEI programming and policy.

School districts and state departments of education, along with teachers unions and civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the ACLU, have put the consequences of almost all of these threats on hold by filing injunctions, which have yielded temporary stays in most of these cases, but Education Secretary, Linda McMahon and her Department of Education keep on persisting by conducting more investigations and threatening punitive consequences for school districts persisting in efforts to help particular groups of students.

In mid-May, by executive order, President Trump banned the use of disparate impact as a standard for investigating Civil Rights investigations.  For ProPublica, Jennifer Smith Richards and Judi Cohen reported: “Remaking the Office of Civil Rights isn’t just about increasing caseloads and reordering political priorities. The Trump administration now is taking steps to roll back OCR’s previous civil rights work. Last month, Trump issued an executive order that directs all federal agencies, including the Education Department, to stop enforcing cases involving policies that disproportionately affect certain groups—for example when Black students are disciplined more harshly than white students for the same infractions or when students with disabilities are suspended more than any other group even though they represent a small percentage of student enrollment.”

Smith Richards and Cohen examine how the Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has reduced its capacity to process complaints and changed its procedures in ways that bias investigations to reflect the Trump administration’s priorities: “The OCR, historically one of the government’s largest enforcers of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, has been known for being a neutral fact-finder. Its investigators followed a process to determine whether complaints from the public met legal criteria for a civil rights claim, then carried out investigations methodically. The vast majority of investigations were based on discrimination complaints from students and families, and a large share of those were related to disability discrimination… Investigations being publicized now have largely bypassed the agency’s civil rights attorneys… McMahon and OCR head, Craig Trainor created what amounts to a shadow division. The Trump administration has ordered more than a dozen investigations in the past three months on its own, not initiated by an outside complainant. These ‘directed investigations’ are typically rare; there were none during President Joseph Biden’s administration. The investigations have targeted schools with transgender athletes, gender-neutral bathrooms and initiatives that the administration views as discriminatory to white students.”

The ProPublica reporters spoke with OCR attorneys who anonymously describe what they believe are serious violations of departmental protocol: “McMahon and Trainor created ways to divert complaints and investigations away from the OCR’s legal experts entirely. The administration made an ‘End DEI’ portal that bypasses the traditional online complaint system and seeks only grievances about diversity, equity and inclusion in schools. Unlike the regular complaint system, the diversity portal submissions are not routed to OCR staff. ‘We have no idea where that portal goes, who it goes to, how they review the cases… said the attorney who said he struggles with being unable to help families.”  In other instances, “Conservative groups with complaints about diversity or transgender students have been able to file complaints directly with Trainor and get quick results… America First Legal, a group founded by Trump deputy chief of staff, Steven Miller… emailed Trainor a few days after Trump’s… executive order… (that) directs schools to stop teaching about or supporting diversity, equity, and gender identity. ‘AFL respectfully requests that the Department of Education open investigations into the following public school districts in Northern Virginia for continuing violations of Title IX,’ the letter read, listing five districts that have policies welcoming to transgender students. Senior leadership in Washington opened the cases the following week. America First issued a press release headlined ‘VICTORY!’ “

Education Week‘s Brooke Schultz reports: “The U.S. Department of Education has announced or confirmed at least 100 investigations into school districts, colleges, and universities, and other entities as it emerges as a prime enforcer of President Donald Trump’s social agenda.” Here are some of Schultz’s examples: “(F)our school districts have drawn investigations from the department over a Black student success plan in Chicago, a students of color summit in New York, racial affinity groups in Illinois, and a selective Virginia high school’s admissions policy that the education Department says appears to be racially discriminatory… The first investigation Trump’s Education Department announced was a probe into the Denver district over a high school’s all-gender bathroom, which the agency suggested was a violation of Title IX, the federal law barring sex discrimination in schools that receive federal funds.”

Last Friday, in “Trump Administration Gives New York 10 Days to End Its Ban on Native American Mascots,” Education Week‘s Brooke Schultz reported on a Department of Education demand that clearly represents the Trump administration’s twisting and tangling the purpose and meaning of civil rights protection in public schools: an attack by the Trump Department of Education on a New York law banning Native American mascots in public schools. “The (U.S.) Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights argues that the state’s mascot policy, enacted in 2022, violates Title VI because it prohibits the use of Native American imagery but ‘allowed names, mascots, and logos that appear to have been derived from other racial or ethnic groups, such as the ‘Dutchmen’ and the ‘Huguenots.”… McMahon said in a statement Friday that the department would ‘not stand idly by as state leaders attempt to eliminate the history and culture of Native American tribes.”

Although McMahon seems to believe that the logo New York has banned in the Massapecqua School District connects with the history of American Indians in the region of the school district on Long Island, J.P. O’Hare of the New York Department of Education explained that neither the logo nor the term ‘Chief,’ was used by Native Americans in the area.

Schultz lets the president of the National Congress of American Indians, “the largest nonprofit representing Native nations which has long tracked and challenged the use of Native American mascots, Mark Macarro” correct Education Secretary McMahon’s bizarre misconception of racial justice and civil rights law: “Native people are not mascots… We have our own languages, cultures, and governments—our identities are not anyone’s mascot or costume.  No political endorsement or misguided notion of ‘honoring’ us will change the fact that these mascots demean our people, diminish the enduring vibrancy of our unique cultures, and have no place in our country.”

Schultz adds: “Research has found that, for Native students, exposure to Native American mascots reduces self-esteem, their ability to imagine future accomplishments, and their belief that Native American communities can make a difference. For non-Native people, research shows that mascots are associated with negative thoughts and stereotypes about Native Americans… The portrayals are often outdated, whitewashed stereotypes, and aren’t grounded in realistic portrayals of Native people.”

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Democracy, Education Reform, Evil, Extremism, Gender, Race, Racism, Trump

U.S. Navy Restores Almost All of the DEI Banned Books

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2025 //
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The U.S. Navy and the other branches of the military were told by order of Trump and Hegseth to remove all books on the subjects of diversity, equity, and inclusion. In practice, this meant elimination of books about race, racism, and sexual orientation.

These were the search terms used to identify offending titles:

The 20 official search terms included in the May 9 memo included: affirmative action; allyship; anti-racism; critical race theory; discrimination; diversity in the workplace; diversity, equity, and inclusion; gender affirming care; gender dysphoria; gender expression; gender identity; gender nonconformity; gender transition; transgender military personnel; transgender people; transsexualism; transsexuals; and white privilege.

Using these identifiers, the Navy took 381 books out of circulation and off its shelves.

However, a second review restored all but about 20 of the titles.

In a major reversal, almost all the 381 books that the U.S. Naval Academy removed from the school’s libraries have been returned to the bookshelves after a new review using the Pentagon’s standardized search terms for diversity, equity and inclusion titles found about 20 books that need to be removed pending a future review by a Department of Defense panel, according to a defense official.

The reversal comes after a May 9 Pentagon memo set Wednesday as the date by which the military services were to submit and remove book titles from the libraries of their military educational institutions that touch on diversity, race, and gender issues using the Pentagon’s specific search terms.

Prior to the Pentagon memo standardizing search terms, the Navy used its own terms that identified 381 titles, including titles like “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou, “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi, “Bodies in Doubt” by Elizabeth Reis, and “White Rage” by Carol Anderson.

Frankly, I have no idea why the list of banned books was pared down from 381 to only 20. The news story doesn’t explain.

Here is the original list of banned books. Most are about race and racism. The others are about gender and sexuality.

If the military is strong enough to fight, aren’t they strong enough to read about challenging topics?

Categories Censorship, Gender, Race, Racism, Trump

Federal Judge Partially Blocks Trump DEI Ban

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2025 //
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The Trump administration claims that it wants to reduce federal intervention into the nation’s public and private institutions. But it intervenes forcefully in both public and private sectors to punish anyone with different views. It has threatened to withhold federal funding for research from universities unless the targeted universities allow the federal government to supervise its curriculum, its hiring policies, and its admissions policies. And he threatened to stop the funding of any K12 school that continues DEI programs.

The Trump regime has created a nanny state.

From Day 1, Trump made clear that he would ban practices and policies intended to diversity, equity, and inclusion. He threatened to withhold federal funding of schools that ignored his order to eliminate DEI. He has taken complete control of the Kennedy Center, so as to block DEI programming, and he has appointed a woman with no credentials to remove DEI from the Smithsonian museums.

Who knows how the African American Museum will survive Trump’s DEI purge.

ABC News reported that a federal district judge has halted the DEI ban, at least in schools associated with one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, the NEA.

ABC News reported:

The Trump administration’s attempt to make federal funding to schools conditional on them eliminating any DEI policies erodes the “foundational principles” that separates the United States from totalitarian regimes, a federal judge said on Thursday.

In an 82-page order, U.S. District Judge Landya McCafferty partially blocked the Department of Education from enforcing a memo issued earlier this year that directed any institution that receives federal funding to end discrimination on the basis of race or face funding cuts.

“Ours is a nation deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned,” Judge McCafferty wrote, adding the “right to speak freely and to promote diversity of ideas and programs is…one of the chief distinctions that sets us apart from totalitarian regimes.”

“In this case, the court reviews action by the executive branch that threatens to erode these foundational principles,” she wrote.

The judge stopped short of issuing the nationwide injunction, instead limiting the relief to any entity that employs or contacts with the groups that filed the lawsuit, including the National Education Association and the Center for Black Educator Development.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Equity, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Race, Racism, Trump

Arlington National Cemetery Censors Links and Study Guides to “Notable Graves” of Blacks, Hispanics, Women

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2025 //
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Matt White, writing in “Task & Purpose” describes the censorship that has been imposed on Arlington National Cemetery by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, implementing the Trump policy of removing all references to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. In practice, this policy seems to mean that all people should be described without reference to race, gender, or ethnic origin.

TOMBSTONE OF HUMBERT ROQUE VERSACE AT ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY, A SPECIAL FORCES OFFICER AND MEDAL OF HONOR RECIPIENT KILLED IN ACTION IN VIETNAM. THE CEMETERY RECENTLY REMOVED LINKS AND REFERENCE TO A PAGE OF “NOTABLE GRAVES” OF HISPANIC SERVICE MEMBERS WHICH INCLUDED THE PHOTO OF VERSACE’S GRAVE. 

ARMY PHOTO

White writes:

Arlington National Cemetery is the most venerated final resting ground in the nation, overseen by silent soldiers in immaculate uniforms with ramrod-straight discipline. Across its hundreds of acres in Virginia, they watch over 400,000 graves of U.S. service members dating back to the Civil War, including two presidents, and more than 400 Medal of Honor recipients.

But in recent weeks, the cemetery’s public website has scrubbed dozens of pages on gravesites and educational materials that include histories of prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members buried in the cemetery, along with educational material on dozens of Medal of Honor recipients and maps of prominent gravesites of Marine Corps veterans and other services.

Cemetery officials confirmed to Task & Purpose that the pages were “unpublished” to meet recent orders by President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth targeting race and gender-related language and policies in the military.

Gone from public view are links to lists of dozens of “Notable Graves” at Arlington of women and Black and Hispanic service members who are buried in the cemetery. About a dozen other “Notable Graves” lists remain highlighted on the website, including lists of politicians, athletes and even foreign nationals. 

Also gone are dozens of academic lesson plans — some built for classroom use, others as self-guided walking tours — on Arlington’s history and those interred there. Among the documents removed or hidden from the cemetery’s “Education” section are maps and notes for self-guided walking tours to the graves of dozens of Medal of Honor recipients and other maps to notable gravesites for war heroes from each military service. Why information on recipients of the Medal of Honor — the nation’s highest award for combat valor — would be removed is unclear, but three of the service members whose graves were noted in the lessons were awarded the Medal of Honor decades after their combat actions following formal Pentagon reviews that determined they had been denied the award on racial grounds.

Like the “Notable Graves” lists, some of the lesson plans remain live but ‘walled-off’ on the cemetery’s website, with no way to reach them through links on the site. Task & Purpose located the de-linked pages by copying the original URL addresses from archived pages at Archive.org or by searching specifically for the pages on Google, which still lists them.

On at least one page that can still be accessed on search engines, language referring to civil rights or racial issues in the military appears to have been altered. A page on Black soldiers in World War II read in December that they had “served their country and fought for racial justice” but now only notes that memorials in the cemetery “honor their dedication and service.”

Altered language on a since-hidden page on African American History at Arlngton National Cemetery. In December, the page was home to over a dozen lesson plans, maps and fact-sheets intended for school groups and visitors. All of those documents have been “unpublished,” according to an Army spokesperson, but will be reposted after they are “updated.” 

A spokesperson at Arlington National Cemetery — which is operated by the Army under the Army Office of Cemeteries — confirmed that the pages had been delisted or “unpublished” but insisted that the academic modules would be republished after they are “reviewed and updated.” The spokesperson said no schedule for their return could be provided.

“The Army has taken immediate steps to comply with all executive orders related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) personnel, programs, and policies,” an Army spokesperson at Arlington told Task & Purpose. “The Army will continue to review its personnel, policies, and programs to ensure it remains in compliance with law and presidential orders. Social media and web pages were removed, archived, or changed to avoid noncompliance with executive orders….”

The removal of the academic lessons hit hard for Civil War historian Kevin Levin, who first noted that Arlington had removed the pages on his substack newsletter. Levin lectures and writes on Civil War history and each year leads trips of history teachers — mostly high school and middle school teachers — through Arlington, so they can better teach students about the cemetery.

Levin noticed that the lessons were missing, he told Task & Purpose, when a teacher he works with tried to prepare a lesson for her students…

“I know the historians and the educators at Arlington, because they meet with our staff every year, and they’ve done a great job of creating lesson plans, they go out of their way to meet with teachers. And I know for a fact that a lot of our teachers are using these lesson plans,” Levin said. “I get the sense that this is being carried out in the sloppiest manner. I get the sense that we’re talking about people who are setting up algorithms and are looking for certain things. I don’t know if this is the end of it. I don’t think it is, I just don’t think these people, whoever is responsible, really knows what they’re doing.”

Levin said he hesitated to post about the missing documents because public exposure could reflect poorly on the professional historians who work at the cemetery and who are “exactly what you want from a federal agency that is responsible for interpreting the past….”

But the slash-and-burn approach to the website, he said, was too much.

“I’ll put it bluntly, this is a shitshow,” he said. “And this one hit home, so I did what I did.”

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Race, Trump

Trump Removes Human Resource Officers, Will Replace Them with Loyalists

By dianeravitch
March 10, 2025 //
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Trump often complained that the Biden administration had “weaponized” the Justice Department to persecute him. He has terminated everyone who had a role in the prosecution of federal charges against him. The boxes of classified documents that he took to Mar-a-Lago were returned to him.

So now he is actively politicizing the HR departments across the government. Most of those jobs were held by nonpartisan civil servants. They will be ousted and replaced with people loyal to Trump. The current occupants of these jobs are being punished for implementing the Biden administration’s DEI policies.

Government Executive reports:

The Trump administration continued its efforts to politicize the upper echelons of the federal civil service Thursday, instructing agencies to reclassify chief human capital officer positions to allow political appointees to fill those roles.

The Office of Personnel Management sent a memo to agency heads Thursday recommending that all agencies where CHCOs are career-reserved positions—meaning only a career member of the Senior Executive Service can fill the post—request to change that designation to “SES general,” which allows either career executives or political appointees to assume the job. The federal government’s HR agency set a deadline of March 24 for agencies to comply.

In the memo, Acting OPM Director Charles Ezell argued that CHCO jobs have “become intensely politicized in recent years,” referring to the Biden administration’s efforts to boost diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.

“It is hard to imagine a more vivid example of advocacy of the ‘major controversial policies of the administration’ than an HR leader and policymaker implementing and embedding DEIA policies throughout their agency and the government more broadly,” Ezell wrote. “By contrast, President Trump campaigned vehemently against government DEI programs.”

Although only a portion of CHCO positions are actually career-reserved, federal agencies have moved toward employing nonpartisan civil servants in those roles over the last two decades because of the technical expertise required. The move to re-politicize the CHCO corps comes just weeks after the Trump administration took similar action regarding chief information officers across government.

The memo’s publication comes just days after Traci DiMartini, human capital officer for the Internal Revenue Service, was put on leave Monday for alleged “ineffective management” of the administration’s implementation of the deferred resignation program and purge of recently hired, transferred or promoted employees, as well as “insubordination” toward DOGE operatives.

“That they’re accusing human capital officers of being partisan because we implemented DEIA under the Biden administration is so counterproductive to their own argument,” DiMartini said. “Our job is to follow the law and help implement the policies and programs of whoever is in charge.”

To DiMartini and other CHCOs, the memo reads as a pretext to getting rid of officials who refuse to circumvent laws governing the civil service.

“They’re trying to politicize human capital,” DiMartini said. “They want to be able to hire only loyalists, ignore Title 5 [of the U.S. Code] and commit flagrant prohibited personnel practices. When you look at the Merit Systems Protections Board and what the civil protections are, we’re supposed to have a nonpartisan civil service, and we have been completely whipsawed.”

“I think I just got a reverse two-week notice,” one currently serving CHCO told Government Executive.

DiMartini said that she believes her impending termination—the agency has indicated that it will not allow her to retire—stems from two incidents. The first was a refusal to call employees, who she said were already putting in “60-70 hour” work weeks—into the office over the weekend to onboard a DOGE operative.

And the second was mentioning that OPM had directed the probationary purge across government in a meeting intended to calm IRS workers. Unbeknownst to her, an employee had recorded the conversation, and her comments appeared in filings of a lawsuit seeking to overturn the probationary firings.

DiMartini said that although she doesn’t plan to return to government, she will challenge her firing. She said she has never been disciplined in her 21 years of service, and wants to preserve her professional reputation.

“As an SES-er, it’s my job to stand up and be the buffer between politicals and career employees, and I’m just trying to do my goddamn job,” she said. “They have no idea who they picked a f***ing fight with.”

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Injustice, Race, Trump
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