Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, established following the murder of 69 people in South Africa during protests against apartheid in 1960. With Donald Trump currently undermining progress on racial equality in America, solidarity against racism remains vitally important.
Why is DEI important?
Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives were a hugely important mechanism by which racial equality in the US could hope to be improved. Such programmes aim to promote the fair treatment and participation of all individuals irrespective of their race, colour or creed. DEI policies were introduced to counterbalance the systemic racism prevalent throughout American society and hiring procedures. These initiatives recognise that individuals who are from minority groups are likely to have had fewer opportunities due to an increased likelihood of facing prejudice and discrimination.
On the day of his inauguration, Trump signed an executive order to ‘terminate all DEI positions, plans, actions, initiatives, or programmes’, on January 23 the U.S. Department of Education announced that it had ‘taken action to eliminate harmful DEI initiatives’. So how harmful will the removal of DEI prove to be? Very. Even with DEI initiatives, considerable racial inequality still exists within the American education system and job market. Black individuals are twice as likely to be unemployed compared to their white peers and even when black individuals are employed, they earn 25% less than their white counterparts. Research by academics in America has shown that resumes with ‘a white sounding name’ received 50% more callbacks than ‘black-sounding names’. The end of DEI will only serve to deepen these structural racial prejudices.
What did USAID do?
USAID was set up in the 1960s to administer humanitarian aid as part of America's foreign policy aims to exert soft power and guard against the advances of communism in the Global South. In 2023, the department spent around $40 billion, about 0.6% of the US government’s annual budget. Before Elon and his cronies gutted the department, America was the world’s biggest spender on international development. In the past USAID has been involved in a wide range of crucial missions, from providing prosthetics to Ukrainian soldiers, to clearing landmines and containing illnesses like Ebola and HIV. At the beginning of February, thousands of USAID employees were placed on leave following a campaign of conspiracy theories peddled by Musk and Trump.
The effect of the dismantling of USAID has been most keenly felt across Africa and Asia. Health providers in Tanzania described the situation as panicked and paralyzed, fearing an increased transmission of tuberculosis, whilst the Desmond Tutu Foundation said that over 500,000 in South Africa will die from AIDS over the next decade if the cuts are maintained. The cancelling of USAID will disproportionately affect disadvantaged and vulnerable groups, making it harder to undo the centuries of exploitation stemming from colonialism and neo-colonialism.
Who needs MEDICAID?
The House Republican budget plan, supported by the Trump administration, is also planning to cut funding by $880 billion over the next ten years for a variety of programmes controlled by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Having ruled out cutting Medicare, the committee's remaining budget is mostly focused on Medicaid with 93% of their remaining budget spent on providing healthcare to low income families. In effect that means that it is impossible for the proposed budget cuts to occur without deep cuts to Medicaid.
Nationally, one in five Americans rely on Medicaid, however health coverage in the United States varies greatly dependent on race. Hispanic individuals, Native Indians, and Black individuals already have higher uninsurance rates than their white peers. Furthermore, around half of all of those enrolled in Medicaid are black and hispanic leading health care researchers to warn that racial inequalities are likely to widen in the result of the proposed budget cuts. A dramatic cut to Medicaid will leave more Americans of colour without affordable health care, saddled with debt and trapped into potential cycles of poverty.
How might Trump’s policies impact the UK?
The policies enacted in the White House have far reaching consequences, for the UK we have seen the adoption of similar rhetoric surrounding policies like DEI and deportation by British politicians.
In one example, Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick earlier this month repeated Trump-like claims that ‘DEI is a respectable Trojan Horse for anti-white discrimination’. Jenrick has also described people of Pakistani origin as ‘people from alien cultures’, comments that were defended by Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. Meanwhile, Rupert Lowe has repeated calls to sack all DEI officers across the public sector and has displayed his support for mass deportations, two policies straight from the Trump playbook.
Such policies are rooted in misguided beliefs that (whether through ignorance or malice) refuse to recognise the presence racial inequality in the UK. The reality is that Britain remains a country burdened by the stain of racism, research by Amnesty shows that;
- 47.4% of children of colour live in poverty compared to 24% of white children.
- Police are 6.5 times more likely to strip search black children than their white counterparts.
- Under joint enterprise black individuals are 16 times and Asian individuals 4 times more likely to be prosecuted for the same crimes as white individuals.
- Black individuals are at least twice as likely to be in a form of insecure work than their white peers.
Policies like DEI are imperative in a country where men and women of colour are more likely to be unemployed than their white counterparts, it is clear that our country remains one of racial inequality. It is of vital importance that British politics rejects the adoption of the divisive trends currently pervasive in American politics, that we continue to call out the fallacies of arguments made by politicians like Lowe and Jenrick, and push for a more equal society for the future.