[ad_1]
The military tale of Jackie Robinson, who broke the colour barrier in major league baseball after serving as the second-in-chief EU in the Army, has ceased to exist on the Department of Defense website as part of the Trump administration’s wiping out diversity, equity and inclusion within the federal government.
The Department of Defense has been ordered by Trump to scan federal websites with articles, social media posts, photos, news articles and videos to remove web pages that “promote diversity, equity and inclusion.”
DEI stands for diversity, equity and inclusion, and focuses in particular on fostering an equitable environment for businesses and schools in historically marginalized communities.
Several websites under the jurisdiction of the Pentagon have removed thousands of pages documenting the history of people of color, LGBTQ people, women and more. Several pages about Robinson have been deleted. This includes pages about Black League players talking about service in the military. However, as of Wednesday afternoon, at least one page on Robinson had revived in a series about military athletes.
“As Secretary Hegses said, Day is dead in the Department of Defense,” Pentagon spokesman John Uriott said in a statement Wednesday in an NBC News statement. “The discriminatory fairness ideology is a kind of awakened cultural Marxism that has no place in our military. It divides power, erodes unit cohesion, and disrupts the core warfighting missions of the service. We are pleased with rapid compliance across the department with directives that remove DEI content from all platforms. We modify the components and the content accordingly.”
Although Robinson was trained as an officer and assigned to the tank regiment, he still had to deal with the overall policies of harassment and separation in the US military. According to Military.com, he faced a court battle for refusing to sit behind a bus while in Fort Hood, Texas. He turns out to be no crime of six counts including disobedience, but the court’s military prevented him from deploying to fight the battalion in Europe.
Brooklyn Dodgers and Jackie Robinson. Bettmann Archive / Getty Images
Robinson is one black icon included in a purge of websites overseen by the department. A webpage about Medgar Evers, a civil rights activist and World War II veteran, has been erased from the Arlington Cemetery website.
Trump called out Evers. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom last year and was awarded “Great American Hero” at the opening of the Mississippi Museum of Civil Rights in 2017.
“In Arlington, he is by the side of men and women of all races, backgrounds and paths of life that he served and sacrificed for our nation,” Trump said. “Their gravestones do not mark their skin colour, they immortalize the courage of their actions.”
Similarly, last month, Trump announced that Robinson and other black figures will be respected in the planned National Garden Heroes Garden.
Thousands of approvals by women and minority groups have been removed since Trump’s executive order on DEI last month.
“I think the president and the secretary were very clear about this. Those at the Department of Defense who say diversity is our strength are frankly wrong,” Parnell said. “Our shared purpose and unity are our strengths. And I would say this as someone who led a combat platoon in Afghanistan, perhaps the most diverse platoon you could imagine.”
This story first appeared on nbcnews.com. More from NBC News:
[ad_2]Source link
