A Judge Sees Through The Ed Department's Anti-Diversity Bad Faith
The Trump regime's effort to crush diversity in American schools is effectively dead.
Nothing in politics is academic, as James Baldwin reminded the Bad Faith Times folks this week.
That Baldwin blog – about being an optimist because you are alive – was on my mind over the weekend as I read through some coverage of the Trump regime quietly dropping its efforts to re-segregate public education in the United States, just as they seek to bring back segregation to the U.S. military, government agencies, and academia, all under the bad-faith guise of interpreting Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) as discriminatory against white Americans, on par with the racist policies of Jim Crow America.
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I wrote last April about the bone-rattling levels of bad faith deployed in the Education Department's issuance of anti-diversity directives that might have made Strom Thurmand blush. The directive from the Wrestling Lady's Education Department said in no uncertain terms that the federal government would strip funding from any public school that does not comply with the regime’s resegregation policies. If any school district in the US refused to do away with all efforts to promote diversity among its staff and students and the curriculum they teach, they would face a total loss of federal dollars, according to the regime's policy, which was (thankfully, rightly) killed in the courts on February 18.
From the ACLU of New Hampshire:
Upon the U.S.’s concession that the directive and subsequent certification requirement are vacated – meaning they are formally nullified – the district court issued a final ruling today, permanently invalidating the directive and preventing the government from enforcing, relying on, or reviving it. As a result, the challenged guidance is no longer in effect and cannot be enforced against anyone, anywhere nationwide.
The Education Department's anti-DEI policy, couched in the language of the Civil Rights movement and purportedly designed to protect white children from systemic discrimination, was outright rejected by District Court Judge Landya McCafferty, who – like almost every judge who has heard challenges to the regime's policies – was hostile to the right-wing unreality on which the policy was based.
Denny Carter
Judge McCafferty found that the directive’s “isolated characterizations of unlawful DEI” conflicted with the term’s actual meaning, since DEI is generally understood as fostering “a group culture of equitable and inclusive treatment.” McCafferty ruled that those who challenged the anti-diversity policy "were likely to succeed in showing that the directive was vague, viewpoint discriminatory, and unlawfully imposed new legal obligations for educators and schools."
McCafferty, in short, refused to play their game. It's the same way a federal judge rejected Whiskey Pete Hegseth's legal attack on Senator Mark Kelly after Kelly and a few fellow elected Democrats made a TV ad reminding members of the military that they did not have to follow illegal orders. That the regime's lawsuits are directives and executive orders are entirely based in the right wing's unreality – so carefully crafted on the X platform formerly known as Twitter – means they have no chance of succeeding in a courtroom, where a judge operates in Actual Reality.
It was so very easy last spring for good folks to doom about the Education Department's wildly racist attack on diversity efforts in American schools because it's fucking scary as shit when the federal government does something so explicitly fascist. You might have thought when first reading about this anti-DEI effort in 2025: Well, that's that. Naked racism will rule the American public school system for at least a few years, maybe forever. It's over. It's academic.
It wasn't over though. Neither was it academic. Education groups and civil liberties advocates and those trying to keep our multicultural democracy together amid this harrowing, content-centric authoritarian onslaught pushed back, and they won. And now schools aren't facing punishment for their DEI policies. That's because a judge refused to make her ruling based on the bad faith baked into a federal policy that feigns concern about racial discrimination while seeking to crush the gains of people of color.
The legal kill shot to the Education Department's assault on diversity initiatives should be another reason to be an optimist – because you are alive.
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
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