When I first heard about the executive orders regarding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), my concerns were around funding and teachers being able to openly discuss marginalized identities in schools. I worked at a Title 1 school when these orders were introduced, and the messaging that my school had around the orders was focused on funding. After more carefully reading the orders on the white house official website, I see that the bigger battle that we will need to fight in schools is an ideological one. The order uses the myth of meritocracy by omitting the context of the history of the united states and positions white people as victims, using DARVO to manipulate the narrative about the privileges and power that white people hold in the US.
According to the article “Trump’s Executive Orders on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Explained” on the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights website, Trump can’t make sweeping changes that will allow discrimination in schools. The article says, “Equal opportunity and antidiscrimination obligations are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and our federal civil rights laws. The EOs do not and cannot change that. The President’s role is to implement laws; he cannot rewrite them.” I wish that made me feel better, but laws are only as useful as those who enforce them, and these orders are propaganda aimed at reinforcing white supremacy on a massive level, especially in the minds of white people who have historically clung to white privilege at all costs.
The orders intentionally weaponize the civil rights movement and language related to liberation to pull moderate or left-leaning white people to the right. This has been part of a long game, with urban schools and special education being starved for funding and support, which has led many well-meaning white educators to internalize negative beliefs about the most oppressed people in society instead of looking at the systems that have created the oppression.
The use of typically “leftist” language in the executive orders is an intentional attempt to put back to sleep the white people whose consciousness was raised during the Black Lives Matter and other movements over the past 10 years. I am concerned about funding, hiring, and training opportunities, but I’m also concerned about the moderate/liberal white people who will use these orders as permission or an excuse to shirk their responsibilities of dismantling their privilege and instead uphold the status quo of white supremacy. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr said in Letter From Birmingham Jail, white moderates are the greatest threat to liberation:
My previous school had many teachers who were white saviors. White saviorism is as dangerous, in my opinion, as white supremacy. In fact, they are both versions of white supremacy, because they are both rooted in white people having power. White conservatives want to keep their ability to take as much as white saviors want to keep their ability to give. Neither wants to address why they have what they have in the first place. These orders are being pushed on schools in part as a way to get white liberal educators to fall in line. I’ve already seen this happening. Throughout this school year, the Head of School at my previous job would say, “If Kamala had been elected, things would be different” every time she denied something that the students needed (she had denied similar things when Biden was in office).
These executive orders were written in a way to intentionally target schools with white supremacist ideology because fascism is a long game and the education of children is a crucial part of dominant ideologies surviving. White supremacists know that white people dominate the field of education and are counting on the fear of losing unearned privileges. Sal Khan says in One World Schoolhouse, “Changing education would therefore lead to changes in other aspects of our society as well. It is my firm belief that over time this would be a very good thing; in the near term, however, such a prospect necessarily suggests disruptions and anxieties.” (p 62) White people can alleviate anxieties by reassuring ourselves that the laws haven’t actually changed, or that another politician will be elected soon and save us all, but white supremacy is the system in place regardless of who is in office, so combating whiteness has to be a principled, conscious choice for (especially white) educators at all times. That is the part that does not change regardless of what orders are in place or who is in office.
This is something I am constantly working on for myself, and over the years I have felt deeply rooted in my beliefs as a white educator who has lived and worked in Black and brown neighborhoods for most of my life. This fall, I will be working at a new school with a predominantly white group of students. I have spent the majority of my life thinking about my responsibilities as a white person working with Black and brown youth, and I will need to be just as conscious when working with white youth because, as Margalynne J. Armstrong and Stephanie M. Wildman state in their work Colorblindness Is The New Racism, “White privilege is "pervasive, structural, and generally invisible" (Law, 1999, р. 604)”. It will be essential that I not allow whiteness to be invisible. Whiteness has to be analyzed and understood, especially by the people who benefit from it, in order for it to be dismantled. I led a discussion with some of the students I’ll be working with as a part of my interview process, and the students are passionate about social justice issues, but whiteness is tricky, and progressives also uphold white supremacy, so it will be vital that I help guide youth to find their own beliefs and principles so that they can consciously and sustainably combat white supremacist ideologies.
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