When President Donald J. Trump calls an entire community “garbage” and tells them to “go back to where they came from”—as he did with Somali Americans at the beginning of December—he reveals the spirit animating his administration’s approach to diversity, equity and inclusion (D.E.I.).
Mr. Trump’s dehumanizing rhetoric targeting a Black immigrant community also lays bare his blindness to and dismissal of other forms of racial injustice. In turn, this calls into question his characterization of all D.E.I. programs as “illegal and immoral discrimination,” his administration’s elimination of D.E.I. offices across the federal government and his attacks on universities’ D.E.I. efforts.
While Mr. Trump’s executive orders claim to defend civil rights through “colorblind” neutrality, his rhetoric exposes what this supposed neutrality protects: not equality, but an unjust racial status quo.
The question is not whether racial injustice must be opposed; nearly everyone will agree that it must, and Catholic teaching makes that responsibility crystal clear. The question is whether doing so requires confronting the injustice or merely avoiding it. Mr. Trump’s policies refuse to acknowledge true racial injustice and, even worse, prevent others in society from addressing it. When examined through the light of the Gospel and Catholic social teaching, his policies reveal fundamental contradictions with church doctrine on justice, human dignity and the common good.
Structural Sin Requires Structural Remedy
President Trump’s executive orders do not merely misunderstand racism, they obscure it. The orders make no acknowledgment of historical injustice, structural discrimination or the conditions that created current racial disparities. They treat present distributions of wealth, opportunity and power as legitimate baselines requiring no examination. This approach simply starts from today and asks only whether current policies treat individuals identically, as if history began this morning.
More troubling, the orders perform a rhetorical inversion: They redefine race-conscious remedies as discrimination rather than recognizing the ongoing harm of the historical injustices those remedies address. For instance, the administration claims that its executive order regarding these issues “faithfully advances the Constitution’s promise of colorblind equality,” and boasts that it is “the most important federal civil rights measure in decades.” In other words, the administration is invoking the Civil Rights Act of 1964, enacted to dismantle structures of racial oppression, to dismantle programs designed to remedy that oppression. The legal architecture to secure civil rights is turned on its head against those rights.
Catholic teaching, however, offers a fundamentally different understanding.
In his 1987 encyclical “Sollicitudo Rei Socialis,” St. John Paul II named “structures of sin” as injustices embedded in social systems that, after being introduced by individually sinful acts, continue to “grow stronger, spread, and become the source of other sins, and so influence people’s behavior,” even when individuals aren’t consciously malicious. Sin can be woven into laws, policies and economic systems. St. John Paul II pointed out that two of the motivations behind such structures of sin “are very typical: on the one hand, the all-consuming desire for profit, and on the other, the thirst for power, with the intention of imposing one’s will upon others.”
American history exemplifies this: First, 250 years of chattel slavery created both Southern and Northern wealth; then 90 years of Jim Crow prevented Black wealth accumulation while many white families built equity through favorable policies such as G.I. Bill benefits and as a result of restrictions against homeownership by Black Americans. Other historical and ongoing discrimination in housing, lending and employment compounded those disadvantages across generations. It is no wonder, then, that the median white family holds eight times the wealth of the median Black family—not through superior merit, but through historical theft compounding over time.
To recognize this historical theft is not to assign personal guilt to any living person; it is to acknowledge that we have inherited a social and economic structure shaped by grave injustice.
Mr. Trump’s framework refuses to see this reality. By failing to acknowledge structural injustice, it treats current disparities as natural or earned. By labeling remediation as “discrimination,” it makes addressing injustice a social evil. In an administration where so many officials trumpet their bona fides as Christian believers, they would do well to recall the admonition from the Book of Isaiah 5:20: “Woe unto them who call evil good, and good evil.”
Catholic social teaching insists that structural sin requires structural solutions: Unjust structures and systems must be dismantled and replaced with structures of solidarity built upon just foundations. As St. John Paul II wrote, “To diagnose the evil in this way [as structures of sin] is to identify precisely, on the level of human conduct, the path to be followed in order to overcome it.” This objective is the basis for well-designed D.E.I. programs. Mr. Trump’s policies thwart that possibility by design.
The Preferential Option and Obligations of Restitution
President Trump condemns any “preference” for historically excluded groups as reverse discrimination. This characterization directly contradicts the “preferential option for the poor,” one of the cornerstones of Catholic social teaching, which calls us to asymmetric concern for the marginalized as a demand of justice, not optional charity.
In addition to the Old Testament prophets’ ongoing call for care and concern for the poor and vulnerable of every age, Scripture provides clear models of justice, like the idea of jubilee years (including the one we are presently celebrating). In the biblical conception of jubilee, every 50 years, all land returned to its original families—regardless of how it had been lost. As John Paul II wrote in “Tertio Millennio Adveniente” in 1994, “The jubilee year was meant to restore equality among all the children of Israel, offering new possibilities to families which had lost their property and even their personal freedom.”
This practice was not charity, but a legal mandate embedded in Israel’s covenant with God. It provided a remedy for the ways that inequality compounds across generations.
False Unity v. Authentic Solidarity
Mr. Trump’s executive orders frame D.E.I. as “divisive.” But that charge of “divisiveness” has accompanied every movement for racial justice. Abolitionists were condemned as divisive; civil rights activists were told they threatened the peace. But peace maintained through suppressing justice claims is not authentic peace. As Pope Paul VI taught, “If you want peace, work for justice.”
A clear moral vision would recognize that Americans are not divided by programs addressing injustice, but by the injustice itself. The wealth gap, the opportunity gap and the incarceration gap represent fractures that well-designed D.E.I. programs attempt to repair.
Of course, not every program labeled “D.E.I.” is well-designed. Such programs should be subjected to scrutiny and debate—but the basis for that evaluation should be how clearly they address the historical injustices that make them necessary, not a hostile skepticism about any policy that acknowledges racial disparities. The discomfort D.E.I. produces in beneficiaries of structural advantage is the inevitable consequence of repair, not evidence programs are poorly designed.
Catholic teaching places the burden of reconciliation on the wrongdoer, not the wronged, and also recognizes the value of diversity as part of the inherent human dignity of each individual. Following President Trump’s remarks against Somali Americans, Bishop Daniel E. Garcia of Austin called on Catholics to “recognize the rich gifts that neighbors from diverse cultures bring to our communities.”
“As Catholics, we believe that every person is beloved by God and created in his image. Each child of God has value and dignity,” said Bishop Garcia, who chairs the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Subcommittee for the Promotion of Racial Justice and Reconciliation.
“Language that denigrates a person or community based on his or her ethnicity or country of origin is incompatible with this truth,” he continued.
While Mr. Trump may use dehumanizing rhetoric and divisive policies, the church in this country must offer a better way forward. A truly Catholic response would improve D.E.I. programs, not eliminate them. On questions related to structural sin, restorative justice and restitution, our tradition speaks clearly. Those with ears to hear should listen.
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