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- [00:01]
Akilah Hughes
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- [00:30]
Roy Wood Jr.
Remember building the Wall? What happened to that? We just got on.
- [00:34]
Callie Holloway
We gave up on that.
- [00:35]
Roy Wood Jr.
I ain't going to lie. I kind of miss building the wall now that we deporting people to countries they not even from, right? Like hey, about that wall. Because before all he wanted was a wall. We should just let him have the wall. Let's say that jokingly, but right. I just think that the DEI Conversation it's their latest single dei A word.
- [00:54]
Callie Holloway
That has endless definitions. If you're stupid. Pl Crash. DEI increased oil prices. DEI teenagers playing instruments. DEI happily married to an award winning comedian. You guessed it. DEI Nevermind that diversity, equity and inclusion is a correcting measure to account for this country's history of excluding everyone who isn't a man or who is darker than a paper bag from participating in what they call meritocracy. It's now wielded as a slur by cowards too chicken shit to use the hard R. But this Trump administration isn't just waging a culture war with empty dog whistle rhetoric. This is an explicit mission to boot people of color from opportunity and in several cases, public life. And that's been codified with executive orders with threats of holding funding for universities, contractors, anyone who won't knock it off with this so called woke inclusion. In the past few months, Target has suffered one of the most consequential boycotts in history for throwing black people under the bus. And we've seen the bumbling white fail sons appointed across the federal government root out diversity with all the precision of a drunk guy wielding a machete. The World War II aircraft the Enola Gay was flagged for removal because gay the first two women to pass Marine infantry training were deleted. Navy ship honoring Harvey Milk? Can't have that. And on March 19, 2025, the Department of Defense quietly deleted a webpage honoring Jackie Robinson, a man who didn't just make history as the first black player in Major League Baseball, but also served as a second lieutenant in the US army and challenged racial discrimination in the military before he ever wore a Dodgers jersey. The DoD claimed this deletion was a mistake and that an algorithm was to blame. And that would be believable if everything else they were doing wasn't just as racist as the software. Not to mention the fact that less than a week after restoring the page, a Jackie Robinson biography was nominated as a candidate for removal from the Nimitz Library at the US Naval Academy due to a directive from Secretary of Defense Pete Heath. It's discrimination o' clock in the US And I'm asking the question that applies to so much these how is this better? I'm Akilah Hughes, and this week I'm asking how is it better to scrub the history of an extraordinarily accomplished icon, Jackie Robinson?
- [03:14]
Roy Wood Jr.
Jackie smashes one into the lower left field stack. The home run parade is underway in.
- [03:29]
Jeremy Tache
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- [04:00]
Callie Holloway
In the bigoted push to rewrite history sans the contributions of any Minorities in the U.S. some 8,000 web pages and 3,000 data sets were deleted or rewritten across federal agencies, including the cdc, NASA, and the Department of Justice. I'm not sure how rotted your brain has to be to think a president deleting confirmed history due to insecurity is a good thing. But I digress. This purge has created more questions than answers, so I went searching for clarity. So what does the removal and subsequent restoration of Jackie Robinson's military profile from the DoD website signify in the context of Trump and his administration's stance on dei?
- [04:38]
Unnamed Expert
First of all, when they do something like that, I think it signals their willingness to kind of test boundaries, right? Like they're kind of dipping their toe in seeing how far they can go and what will incur outrage.
- [04:50]
Callie Holloway
This is Callie Holloway, a journalist with bylines at the Nation, the New Republic, the Daily Beast, and many more about our culture and the way things are shifting, especially in this new Trump era.
- [05:02]
Unnamed Expert
Even if they undo it, they feel like they have had a tiny bit of success, right? Because they've moved the Overton window a little bit. I mean, we're having conversations at this point that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. So for them, they have carried the football forward or backward, you know, a few yards, and I think they would count that as a win, which is why, you know, you kind of have to always be aware that the point of those actions is to fatigue you, to tire you out, and to make you less vocal and less energized the next time it happens. And also, I think it's just a signal of how incredibly important this is to them. Right. Controlling history, Rewriting history is important to every autocratic regime. But in the US there's sort of a unique way that that works that's particularly related to white supremacy supremacy. And it is an effort that means a tremendous amount to this administration very clearly.
- [06:03]
Callie Holloway
How do you sort of see this act reflecting broader attempts to reshape historical narratives within federal institutions? Because this is just one example.
- [06:13]
Unnamed Expert
Yeah. And I think we don't need to think about it just as happening within federal institutions. We can think about it as working in tandem with a whole bunch of other things that are. That are happening in and outside of the government that are aided by the government or inspired by them.
- [06:29]
Callie Holloway
Cali is right. The federal purge of DEI is just the latest in all of the backlash to 2020 and social progress. There have been anti CRT bills, the 1776 Project, in reaction to the 1619 Project, book bans, calling everything woke and more. This is not just a political issue, but fully a cultural one in recognizing the long game of rewriting history is crucial.
- [06:52]
Unnamed Expert
We know that Pan America, which. Which keeps tabs on this, roughly 16,000 titles, have been banned since 2021. I mean, that is an insane number of books. Right. The vast majority of those, roughly 60%, I think, is a figure that I saw relate to the discussions of race. And then there's, you know, a whole other number of books that are related to LGBTQ issues. And then this builds on things that happened during Trump's first administration. Right. In response to the 1619 project he created, the 1776 Project, which historians, you know, real historians said was flawed and pointed out that it was just, you know, this kind of ridiculous attempt at a patriotic spin. Yeah, yeah. Of our real understanding of history. There were two House bills that were an attempt to ban what they were calling crt, which was a mislabeling. CRT is critical race theory, which is a. At least until 2021, a pretty obscure framework for understanding racism within the law. But then we saw Everything be branded as that. Right. And there was a number of bills that were passed, not just at that level, but also there's a group at UCLA that tracked anti CRT measures, and there were more than 800 that were initiated around the country, I think in something like 43 states. So this builds on all of that, this attempt to purge anyone who would discuss history to. And basically to have a chilling effect on the way that we talk about America's history.
- [08:26]
Callie Holloway
So let's talk about history, because in a time when the government is replacing inconvenient truths with brazen lies, it's important to remind people where we come from. And who better to illustrate that point than DEI hire Jackie Robinson? Little background on Jackie. Born in 1919, aka the US was still very much Jim Crow central. This was a time when being black in Americ meant you could fight in a war for freedom abroad, but not drink from the same water fountain at home. The KKK was an incredibly public potluck circuit. Lynchings were happening in broad daylight. And separate but equal was the law of the land. Emphasis on the separate, not so much the equal. By the time Jackie was old enough to swing a bat, he'd already survived the Great Depression, seen black veterans come home from war only to be denied basic rights, and understood that liberty and justice for all came with an asterisk. So when he integrated Major League Baseball, 1947, he wasn't just breaking a sports record. He was shattering the country's favorite illusion that it had ever actually been fair. When the DoD erased Jackie that day, a million TikToks were posted and went viral.
- [09:33]
Roy Wood Jr.
I thought we all agreed that Jackie.
- [09:36]
Callie Holloway
Robinson's an American hero.
- [09:37]
Roy Wood Jr.
I thought that was a settled point.
- [09:40]
Callie Holloway
Why was Jackie Robinson's military history removed from that website?
- [09:44]
Akilah Hughes
Famous DEI hire.
- [09:45]
Roy Wood Jr.
Yeah.
- [09:46]
Akilah Hughes
Which, funny is like Jackie Robinson proves.
- [09:49]
Roy Wood Jr.
That hiring outside candidates can be good. That's kind of the whole point, was that black people said that, not me.
- [09:55]
Callie Holloway
They said they were removing it because.
- [09:56]
Roy Wood Jr.
It was a part of a D thing and because they didn't want any association with race. But Jackie Robinson's entire legend is built.
- [10:02]
Callie Holloway
On breaking the color line. That's what Donald Trump does.
- [10:04]
Akilah Hughes
If it doesn't fit his narrative, if it doesn't give him credit for it, then it doesn't matter and it should.
- [10:09]
Callie Holloway
Be wiped from history.
- [10:10]
Akilah Hughes
He is one of the greatest players of all time. So those who are who want to derisively call him a DEI hire, as if, by the way, that's a bad thing, and as if he was Only included because he was black. You just flatly don't know ball. You people want to side with these dorks that don't know ball, these nerds that don't know ball, that don't know anything about the history of our game, our American pastime. You want to be racist and not know ball. I just can't believe.
- [10:41]
Callie Holloway
That. Last one was from Jeremy Tache, Miami based sports reporter and on air producer of the Dan LeBatard Show. Millions of people watched and shared that video. And so I wanted to talk to him about why he felt compelled to make it.
- [10:53]
Akilah Hughes
Diversity, equity and inclusion are good things. They're things that make us stronger as a country. They make every business better, they make every school better. Hearing from a more diverse group of people and hearing their voices, that is something inherently that only makes things better. And Jackie Robinson is a wonderful example of that.
- [11:12]
Callie Holloway
Yes.
- [11:13]
Akilah Hughes
And I think the thing that frustrated me was to watch so many people immediately jump to, no, Jackie Robinson wasn't a DEI hire. How dare you insult him that way. It's not an insult.
- [11:26]
Callie Holloway
Right.
- [11:26]
Akilah Hughes
Jackie Robinson is the textbook DEI hire. He was hired specifically to bring a new level of diversity, equity and inclusion to Major League Baseball. Jackie was a all time great baseball player. This is not to discount the skill that he had on the field, a Hall of Famer, through and through, whether he was the man who broke the color barrier or if he had existed 25 years later. So now that that part's out of the way, the reason that Jackie Robinson was the first black player in the major leagues had almost nothing to do with how good he was at baseball. He was one of the 10 to 15 best players in the Negro leagues. But the reason that he was selected by Branch Rickey, who ran the Dodgers at the time, to be that first player is because of the person that he was.
- [12:12]
Callie Holloway
Right?
- [12:13]
Akilah Hughes
It was because he was someone who went to ucla, where he was at the time that he went there, one of very few black students, and dealt with racism at that time and, and, and publicly. So he's someone who served in the military. And Branch knew the, the education that he had, the experience that he had, but also knew that he was honorably discharged from the military. It's because following his college career, Robinson was drafted for service during World War II, but was court martialed. Why? For refusing to sit in the back of a segregated army bus. I mean, and this was in the 40s, 20 years before we're having conversations about Rosa Parks, who also, by the way, is constantly played off as, as this helpless character in this story, as opposed to the incredible leader and activist that she was. And Jackie has some of the same things happen to him because of those experiences. Branch Rickey brought him in and what he said was, look, I need you to be able to withstand all of this without fighting back. And I think that that specific story, that specific part of the story is all we end up talking about in Jackie Robinson's story in history, as if he wasn't this truly progressive fighter for equality. He spent the rest of his life speaking at court hearings, speaking to major organizations, getting himself on the board of major civil rights organizations because he was a fighter. It's the specific reason why this DEI conversation became so insulting to me. Not only are you minimizing the impact of what DEI is and Jackie's specific role in that, as one of the first DEI hires, he desegregated baseball, America's pastime. Yeah, he is literally the greatest American example of a DEI hire. We celebrate him because of that. But because of the corruption of this term, the corruption of what diversity, equity, inclusion are supposed to stand for, that now becomes a negative slight on him. And white folks love the idea that Jackie was just there taking it, not fighting back and not speaking up, and was just a soldier through it.
- [14:30]
Callie Holloway
All right, we loved that he never said anything about it.
- [14:33]
Akilah Hughes
It's like, that's not true. It's just simply not true.
- [14:36]
Callie Holloway
Fact check. Yeah.
- [14:37]
Akilah Hughes
I mean, look, Jackie Robinson is one of the great players of all time. Like he's brought in because of the human being that he is. But then he continues to excel. He won a Rookie of the Year, he's a World Series champion, He won a batting title, he won an mvp. He was a seven time all Star. He's a Hall of Famer. All of those things are notches in his belt that would be irrelevant. But just prove again why DEI hires matter.
- [15:04]
Callie Holloway
Exactly.
- [15:05]
Akilah Hughes
This isn't about elevating people who are undeserving. This is about lifting up people from underserved communities who might not have a shot otherwise.
- [15:16]
Callie Holloway
And I think that that's an important point because the B storyline to all of this that they don't want to talk about, and I would say they as like the people who are happy to scrub that legacy off of the Internet and out of our history books, is that this was an answer to legislated racism and discrimination. And that is what DEI and civil rights was always about. The thing that irks me is that there's this conversation about meritocracy. And you've already proven and Jackie Robinson already proved through his life and work he had merit. Like there's that. Like that conversation is the beginning and end of it. Up next, a comedian and baseball fan who has some thoughts on all of this.
- [15:56]
Jeremy Tache
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- [16:57]
Roy Wood Jr.
Administration has done a good job of using racism and fear of other things as a manipulating tool to get people to ignore the fact that they are robbing the country and just running scams. Yeah, I just think these are scammers that do a good job of using buzzwords to get people all excited about stuff 100%. Remember building the wall? What happened to that? We just got on.
- [17:17]
Callie Holloway
Right. We gave up on that.
- [17:19]
Roy Wood Jr.
I'm a lot I kind of miss building the wall now that we deporting people to countries they not even from.
- [17:23]
Callie Holloway
Right.
- [17:24]
Roy Wood Jr.
Like hey, about that wall. Because before all he wanted was a wall. We should just let him have the wall. Maybe you should focus on that. That was a good idea.
- [17:31]
Callie Holloway
Everyone who's in here can stay and just like put a wall.
- [17:34]
Roy Wood Jr.
Let's say. I just think that the DEI Conversation. It's their latest single to keep their fans appeased.
- [17:42]
Callie Holloway
This is Roy Wood Jr. He needs no introduction, but I'll tell you anyway. He's a prolific comedian, host of CNN's have I Got News for you and author of the upcoming book the man of Many Fathers from Penguin Random House. I wanted to talk to him because he's an outspoken baseball fan and hosted the Road to Rickwood podcast from NPR about the Negro league baseball players in the history of the game.
- [18:04]
Roy Wood Jr.
Before I start rambling, I'm 46, so he wasn't my era of baseball yeah, but I also grew up in Birmingham, where you learn every black fact there is to learn. Birmingham proper is like 70% black. Everything I ever did was predominantly black, from the churches to the boys club to the schools I attended, my neighbor, every job I had. Black, black, black, black, black. So you learn all of this black history and you understand how much Jackie Robinson was able to help. I don't want to say humanize black people or the black experience, but, you know, he was the first arrow into the armor of, you know, oppression and sports being a tool to help create some degree of. I don't even want to say equality, but maybe understanding. And like, when you look at Jackie Story and the idea that they were looking specifically for, if I can speak for. They needed this. The right type of.
- [19:03]
Callie Holloway
Yes.
- [19:03]
Roy Wood Jr.
They need the right type of Negro to be the first Negro because of the first negro coming there swinging and punching these white folks back. It's gonna be 20 years before we know.
- [19:12]
Callie Holloway
Yeah, like we. We're not trying that again.
- [19:14]
Roy Wood Jr.
Yeah. And it's messed up, but that's. That was part of the ideology. It's. It's the same thing with Rosa Parks. We were like, no, we need a certain type of black because that's how they're gonna get the sympathy.
- [19:24]
Callie Holloway
Right.
- [19:25]
Roy Wood Jr.
It's messed up, but psychologically, that's what you had to do. I'm doing two pieces right now for MLB Network, and one of them is going to come out on Roku a little later this month. Well, in June and July of this year, about the history of the Home Run Derby. In it, we talk a little bit about the history of the home run itself, and we talk about Hank Aaron's home run, which broke Babe Ruth's record, and the idea that this was a black man in the south in the 70s and white folks was clapping for him. There's an iconic shot of Aaron rounding second base, and these two white boys from the stands just come running with them just to pat him on the back. Those two white dudes got arrested for running onto the field. Hank Aaron paid their bail, and it's one of the little known stupid. But just the idea of sports and accomplishment being this thing where for a split second, none of the stuff that's happening in the rest of the world really matters here, if only for a split second, made you forget about racism. Just didn't even think about it for a quick minute. And then that began. The era of black baseball player that I came up watching, who was charismatic, who was flamboyant, who could be aggressive. Bo Jackson had a bit of seriousness and focus to him, whereas Deion Sanders had a little bit of more flair. Yeah, he'd high step around the bases a little bit. You know, baseball doesn't give you as many opportunities as football to showboat in the moment, but still, Deion's fashion and his style and his approach to the game, you know, this was swag. This was the beginning of cross training era. This is when shoes and sneakers started to matter. I feel like what Jackie Robinson did was open up the floodgates for so many of the different types of blackness to be possible within the sport facts.
- [21:11]
Callie Holloway
I'm from near Cincinnati. Ken Griffey Jr. Means the world to us.
- [21:15]
Roy Wood Jr.
Y' all love him more than Barry Larkin. And Barry Larkin got you a trophy, right?
- [21:19]
Callie Holloway
Well, you know who they love the most is Pete Rose.
- [21:22]
Roy Wood Jr.
Classic white man.
- [21:24]
Callie Holloway
That's somebody's grandpa. Up next, the brass tacks of what this is all about.
- [21:32]
Unnamed Expert
Hablas espanol spries to dioech.
- [21:35]
Jeremy Tache
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- [22:33]
Callie Holloway
So we know who Jackie Robinson is, why he was important, and how his ability to endure endless racism opened doors for black people integrating every sector of society. But I kinda want to know why conservatives, and specifically the Trump administration, are so scared of that truth being easily accessible. There's the obvious trajectory of Obama's election ushering the backlash era of Trump, which led to the George Floyd Black Lives matter uprisings of 2020 to the now White lash at all racial progress in those demonstrations wake. But could it also maybe have something to do with the Census Bureau's estimates that non Hispanic white people will make up less than half the country by 2045?
- [23:12]
Unnamed Expert
I think that's a lot of why we're seeing such a fierce backlash happening right now. We dubois wrote about the wages of whiteness, this idea that whiteness would have its own sort of benefit. And I think that there are a tremendous, a surprising number of people in the US who are concerned about the diminishment of that. And so I expect that we will continue to see that. And the way that that works most effectively and the way that it has always worked is to rewrite history and create a very selective history that paints the US As a place where the arc of justice has always been, you know, forward, a forward motion where it's been a sort of linear march toward racial equality and multiracial democracy. And that's just never true. So we've always had to deal with this. But the kind of talk we hear now, the sort of paranoia around white genocide or, you know, replacement theory, there's pieces of what we've seen in the past coming together with this overarching fear of not being the dominant group. It's been incredibly forceful in terms of how it looks backwards and demands that we pretend that the US does not have the history that it does.
- [24:23]
Callie Holloway
I mean, you bring up a really good point. And something that I keep coming back to now is this idea of meritocracy, who is of merit and what that means, especially when you have, you know, the president and others in the administration repeatedly saying, you know, merits back, we're now people are going to be hired based on their ability. And then we see a bunch of people who have never held jobs, much less jobs that are relevant in these positions.
- [24:49]
Unnamed Expert
I think there's two things that work there. I've been really fascinated to watch who has been hired. And obviously Donald Trump is someone who autocrats always, you know, staff their cabinets with loyalists. That's a pretty standard thing. We don't have to be surprised by that. But. But I do think there's kind of this middle finger. I think it's almost a white supremacist flex. I really do believe that because not only is he staffing it with people who are ultimately loyal to him in the way that mob boss would, but it. It's so flagrant in the way that we're seeing these people who are incredibly unqualified and incompetent at their jobs. But also the other thing you mentioned, colorblind meritocracy. I feel like we heard a lot of that in the run up to the election. And when people say that we' back to a colorblind meritocracy. That was also a lot of the rhetoric around the affirmative action case. I always want to ask when that was, was it. Was it during slavery when black folks were literally in bondage? Was it after the Civil War when black codes were being enacted and folks were being essentially re enslaved? Was it when black folks were being banned from voting and there was rampant lynching? Was it when black folks were essentially southern legislators were making sure they wouldn't be part of the New Deal that created, you know, the suburbs and the white middle class? Like, I can go and on, right?
- [26:07]
Callie Holloway
And all of the times that it's had to be legislated actively, it's like, huh, that's interesting. Why did we have to legislate in that direction if it was the case? Like, I don't understand.
- [26:16]
Unnamed Expert
It's a performative amnesia. I think that is part of this larger kind of erasure of real history, which I can only consider as a part of a larger project of, you know, white supremacists creating this kind of white, if not an ethnic state, one in which the idea of white supremacy goes unquestioned. Because if we talked about what the past really looked like, we would have to acknowledge that the US at every turn, when it has had the opportunity to move toward equality, has fought tooth and nail against that. And I think that's something that we have a difficult time acknowledging. And right now we're seeing even more retrenchment from that.
- [26:53]
Callie Holloway
Speaking with Callie, Jeremy and Roy pretty quickly answered my question, because it's shockingly not better to backslide from social progress into small minded, spineless bigotry. Jackie Robinson was pretty much unanimously viewed as an American hero. Even if the story we hear about him gets sanitized to alleviate any guilt a white person might feel for the abuse he faced by integrating Major League Baseball. We could all, at the very least say it was good that someone was brave enough to hire someone outside their small white bubble to elevate the game and change the course of history. But now we're in a worse era where anybody willing to kiss the ring with the right complexion will be given power in a corrupt administration that's slow walking us back to segregated lunch counters. It's a no from me. It's not better, and we all deserve a lot better. How is this Better is written and hosted by me, Akilah Hughes. It's produced by Devin Maroney and edited by Shane Verkhest. Courier's national managing director and executive producer is Kevin Dreyfus. RC Demezzo is their VP of Brand and Social and Charlotte Robertson is the deputy director of Brand and Social. Tracy Kaplan is senior vice president of sales and distribution and Marianne Kuga is director of marketing. Show artwork by Danielle Del Plato and original theme music is by Used People.