Embracing DEI honors America’s founding ideals rather than betraying them | Opinion

I can recall as a child spending summers at my widowed grandmother’s house on the Eastern Shore, accessible at that time via a ferry across the Chesapeake Bay.

This was around 1950, and the region was not yet celebrated as the home of Harriet Tubman; nor had the Supreme Court yet ruled in Brown v. the Board of Education. The affluent folk had windmills while the impoverished had handpump.

I well remember my grandmother’s Baptist church, a small wooden building. The needs of the congregation were served by an outhouse and a small building that served as a Sunday school for the children. What I recall vividly was that a pair of elderly women led the children in singing “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world; red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight.”

In the year 1950, these were radical sentiments indeed. I would not encounter anything similar until I entered the U.S. Army in 1965. Today when I compare President Harry Truman’s actions to those of the current residents of the White House, I wonder whose idea it was to take our nation backward. Was it the American electorate? Surely not.

I read recently that President Donald Trump’s administration had demanded that the University of Virginia president resign over DEI issues. Surely, Thomas Jefferson (“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”) is bewildered. Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and the founder of the University of Virginia, graduated previously from the College of Willam and Mary, the home of the Honor system that gives great testament to honesty above all else.

Decades ago, Alvin and Heidi Toffler chronicled the increasing speed by which our culture moved from the agricultural age, then on to the industrial age and then to the digital age, after which change starts to occur with blinding speed. This rapidity is discussed with considerable clarity in “That Used To Be Us” by Friedman and Mandelbaum.

The title is wonderful, but not in the manner the authors intended. The U.S. has long been acknowledged for both its military strength as well as its widespread compassion and generosity, but recently has acquired a reputation for bullying. And as in the case of UVA, it has earned a reputation for opposing those virtues that once were a source of pride. I speak, of course, of DEI.

If Trump and his cohorts fail to see the immense value of these characteristics, they are overlooking the very factors that once made American education the standard of the world.

Today, many areas of our public education systems are not distinguishing themselves. Remedial efforts are much needed. Reading essential texts will not just improve reading skills but help students comprehend the concepts that make America great, many of which are under attack today.

America was founded during the so-called Enlightenment, itself a product of humanism, the Reformation and the Renaissance. Visitors to Williamsburg today see examples in the gardens of the Governor’s Palace of the era’s embrace of empiricism.

They can also see the Williamsburg Bray School, the recently discovered remains of the Early American school that educated Black children – both enslaved and free. The restored structure was opened to the public on Juneteenth. It should be noted that the children who were educated here were taught to accept their lot in life. In depicting this, the College of William & Mary and Colonial Williamsburg have been accused of going “woke.”

Yes, indeed, and I suspect Thomas Jefferson would be proud.

Larry Fennelly can be contacted at larney_f@hotmail.com