"Common Sense"
Last week, President Trump fired the heads of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Coast Guard, and the Aviation Security Advisory Committee after issuing an executive order aimed at “Ending DEI Madness and Restoring Excellence and Safety within the Federal Aviation Administration.” This week, the country had its first fatal plane crash involving a U.S. commercial aircraft since 2009. An American Airlines passenger jet collided with a U.S. Army helicopter. 67 people died.
Shortly thereafter, Trump went on national television to blame the crash on diversity in the workplace. He said that, during the Obama Administration, a group within the FAA determined that the workforce was “too White and had concerted efforts to get the Administration to change it immediately,” which resulted in hiring “psychologically disabled” people. When a reporter asked Trump how he came to the conclusion that diversity had something to do with the plane crash, he responded, “Because I have common sense.” Vice President JD Vance also took to the podium to emphasize that, “when you don’t have the best standards in who you’re hiring, it means that, on the one hand, you’re not getting the best people in government; and, on the other hand, it puts stresses on the people who are already there.” Come to find out, all of the pilots involved were White men. But, under this formula, diversity is the problem whether or not the diversity is actually present.
As lazy and ridiculous as all this sounds, it is an unambiguous articulation of White nationalist logics. Conservatives have made clear that their project is about restoring how we make sense of the world even if it’s non-sense. It is supposed to automatically cohere - both intellectually and psychologically - that the only way to avoid catastrophic events is if Whiteness is at the helm. And if something goes wrong while Whiteness is at the helm? Well, then, that’s an excuse to double-down on ridding the others from the earth. Casting Blackness (and its alleged allies) as enemies of civil society is the traditional structural arrangement that is being conserved at every turn of conservatism regardless of the outcome.
The irony, of course, is that the necessity of DEI and other affirmative action programs has always been a tacit confession about the inalienable violence of the civic order. The fact that Black people have to be authorized as employable in order to enforce “equality” demonstrates that “equality” only exists as a truce between Blackness and anti-Blackness. And a truce only exists if no one wakes up one day and decides they want war. The constant repositioning of Black people as “in” then “out” then “in” then “out,” in a cycle of consume and discard depending on the administration, is the essence of what it means to be objectified. Blackness is a vessel for whoever’s version of democracy governs the historical moment.
There was a genuine problem that could have been addressed here. The New York Times reported that, in recent years, there have been attempts to ring the alarm about staffing shortages in air traffic control. Particularly, after a notable near-miss happened in 2021 when a plane’s pilot reported a helicopter only 200 feet away, saying it never should have been that close. It would have been incredibly easy to at least demonstrate a real awareness of what’s been going on and publicly documented. But that would have meant admitting that abruptly laying off even more people in order to pursue a racist fantasy was absurd. So, instead, we got “common sense.”