By Cátia Malaquias
I remember a young man who used to rev up his motorcycle and race, engine roaring, down our quiet suburban street. My late father-in-law used to say, ‘He is going to kill himself on that thing’. As it turned out, one bright sunny morning the young man raced up our street, pulling a wheelie. Unfortunately, he didn’t get to land his front wheel as a haul truck crossed the intersection in front of him – the driver unable to see his bike – the dark underside of the bike’s chassis blending perfectly into the dark bitumen of the road. He didn’t die – but he suffered horrific injuries. I wonder about him sometimes.
The Trump Administration’s war on ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ policies (DEI policies) in the US federal government, the US military, US universities and US private corporations is openly being justified as necessary to restore white male privilege and to re-equalise the playing field. However, DEI policies are about giving women and minority groups, including people with disability, real opportunity to participate in all aspects of society by countering the discriminatory effect of societal prejudice and bias – DEI is about trying to level the historically unfair playing field. It’s about creating more tolerance and changing community attitudes.
While the Trump ‘MAGA base’ may delight today in the war on DEI – the trappings of white male privilege are not real for many in the MAGA base, and fragile for all. Disability visits most of us in our lifetimes. For the majority, the transition to becoming disabled is gradual – a function of the ageing process. For many, disability and neurodiversity come with their birth. And for others, like the young man who rode his motorcycle, it can come suddenly on a sunny Spring day.
DEI policies are about creating the systemic framework in society’s institutions, corporations and spaces to support the fundamental right of every individual to participate in society. Dismantling DEI, promptly and at the demand of government, is about ripping that systemic safety net and leaving unchecked – if not empowering – societal prejudice and discrimination, and ultimately devaluing those most marginalised in our society. For those with disability, State-demanded destruction of DEI policies will stoke ableism and by definition the devaluation of people with disability.
The Trump Administration’s Secretary of Health, Robert F Kennedy Jnr, recently described children with autism with unadulterated ableism: saying they ‘destroy’ families, ‘will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.’ While these comments have triggered a huge and co-ordinated backlash from the autistic community, the same outrage to the Secretary’s effective description of autistic children as ‘unworthy of life’ has been lacking from broader society – including the mainstream media and corporate America – a form of appeasing (and algorithmic) ‘silence of the lambs’.
It is the open normalisation of the devaluation of people with disability and neurodivergence that prepares the ground for eugenics and genocide. While that spectre may seem outlandish to some, the devaluation through state propaganda of the disabled during Nazi Germany, as a precursor to their systematic state-endorsed murder under the Aktion T4 program, is still in living memory for many. That Nazi program, that resulted in the murder of approximately 300,000 disabled people and provided a pilot program for the broader Holocaust that was to come, started with Hitler’s hatred of human ‘imperfection’, his politics of ‘lifters and leaners’ and his opportunistic approval of a request by a German couple to murder their disabled son – in their letter they described him as ‘this monster’.
The increasingly open devaluation of people with disability and neurodivergence and the aggressively-demanded dismantling of DEI policies by the Trump Administration, all against the relative silence of the mainstream media and corporate America, poses serious risks to the rights of people with disability worldwide. The risk to undermining the slow, hard-fought and painstaking ‘attitudinal gains’ towards people with disability achieved over the last few decades is disturbingly real – whilst any slide to more overt ableism and devaluation is likely to be relatively swift and frictionless. This risk arises not only from the mainstream media dominance of American cultural attitudes but also from the corporate modelling of American multinationals seeking to homogenise the removal of DEI policies from their foreign operations, as well as from the Trump Administration’s effective weaponisation of tariff policy, including to realise non-trade objectives, such as the repeal of the United Kingdom’s hate speech laws that the Trump Administration has been reported to be seeking as part of any tariff deal with the UK.
And if this doesn’t raise enough red flags, the Trump Administration has just announced it is harvesting government and private data sources – including data from pharmaceutical and insurance records as well as smartwatches and personal fitness devices – to establish a ‘disease registry’ to track autistic Americans, ostensibly to address a national autism ‘epidemic’. It’s impossible to ignore the parallels with the mandated registration of disabled children under the ‘racial hygiene’ policies of Nazi Germany preceding the eventual Aktion T4 program.
I, like many, am worried, including for my son Julius, who has Down syndrome, and is still to navigate the broader world. Morality and tolerance for humanity, in all its diverse forms, is under threat – more so than usual. In this rapidly declining cultural climate, would we be surprised to see a repetition of history, in the publicising of a letter, legitimate or not, to the Trump Administration from the American parents of a child with disability, seeking permission to murder their ‘unworthy’ child? The apparent dissonance of that scenario with the Trump Administration’s purported anti-abortion positioning is not the point – neither is that positioning protective or valuing of people with disability.
The late Pope Francis, while writing in the context of the Trump Administration’s plans for mass deportations, could equally have been addressing the mandated removal of DEI policies:
“What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.”
Or as my daughter Laura would say: ‘Stay woke’.