When, after his stellar World War II service, Harry Stewart Jr. applied for a job as a Pan Am pilot, he was clearly overqualified.

The Tuskegee Airman had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his heroic actions, which included, on one mission, downing three German fighter planes, one after the other. His four-man team earned a “top gun” first-place trophy in a competition that Tom Cruise could only make movies about. His experience far exceeded the few hundred hours of flying time the ad said the job required.

Yet he couldn’t get an interview. “Just imagine what passengers would think if during a flight they saw a Negro step out of the cockpit and walk down the aisle in a pilot’s uniform?” the personnel manager told him, as recounted in his biography and reported in a New York Times obituary after his recent death at the age of 100.

Sounds a lot like the uninformed President Donald Trump and the minions who repeat his every utterance, who, reflexively and without evidence, blame diversity for the country’s every ill, including plane crashes.

Against roadblocks placed by those who believed African Americans lacked the mental fitness to be pilots, Civil Rights activism and the perseverance of the would-be pilots themselves pushed military leaders into initiating what would be a DEI program of its day, one that made Stewart’s exploits possible.

Stewart went on to a distinguished corporate career after years of night school earned him an engineering degree. But he never got that coveted job flying for a commercial airline. It would take a 1963 Supreme Court decision to make airlines stop discriminating against the ridiculously talented Black pilots who gave white flyers competition they had never had and support in the sky.

Eventually, the courts and, yes, diversity, equity and inclusion efforts forced airlines and a lot of other companies, sometimes kicking and screaming, to recognize and reward talent they were deliberately overlooking, to look beyond the white men who automatically had — and still have — the advantage in America.

DEI doesn’t discriminate. It’s one tool that fights discrimination.

How Republicans, with a straight face no less, can say eliminating these programs is about returning to a meritocracy is beyond me, not with the crew Donald Trump is appointing to important government posts.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth promises to rid his department of the DEI boogeyman of the GOP’s fevered dreams, perhaps forgetting that he barely made it through the confirmation process. According to Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Hegseth promised to stop drinking if confirmed.

Imagine if you or I or most anyone, in a job interview, tried to convince the manager with a pledge to stop drinking if hired. I’m pretty sure that position as assistant manager at McDonald’s would be out of reach, though since the fast-food chain rolled back some DEI programs, the road to the grill might be cleared for Hegseth’s sort, the ones who might otherwise be laughed out of the personnel office.

Hegseth, whose own background was once scrutinized, has downplayed the influence of extremist groups on members of the military and portrayed the Jan. 6 rioters as patriots. As part of the Pentagon’s DEI purge, military organizations backed out of recruiting at an engineering, science and technology conference this month, one that traditionally attracts a large and diverse crowd and has served as a way to identify the best and the brightest.

And this is supposed to make the country safer?

The ascendance of mediocrity mixed with cruelty starts at the top, and yes, I mean the reality-show commander-in-chief and his unelected buddy Elon Musk, who have proven their lack of judgment and empathy just a few weeks in.

How far have standards fallen, now that opportunities for those once excluded, judged the wrong color, gender, age, faith or just not the “right” fit are disappearing?

Well, rather than being a deal breaker, the new résumé booster is racism, the kind that squashed the dreams of American pilot and patriot Harry Stewart. Marko Elez, a 25-year-old software engineer, part of the Elon Musk Department of Government Efficiency team working inside the Treasury Department, resigned after the Wall Street Journal surfaced racist posts he made last year.

“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” is just a sampling.

Vice President JD Vance came to the defense of the Musk bro, writing on X: “I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” leading Musk himself to post that he intended to rehire him: “He will be brought back. To err is human, to forgive divine.” 

Taking responsibility is for other people, I suppose, not these white men who get to be Peter Pan, “kids” at 25. How comforting it must be for these “lost boys” to retreat into a fantasy world where you and those of like minds rule, not because the game is rigged in your favor but because it’s the way it’s supposed to be.

It would be sad if it wasn’t so destructive.

Their power pushed the U.S. Air Force, spooked by orders to erase anything touched by DEI, to remove training materials depicting the history of the Tuskegee Airmen and the World War II-era Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), until cooler heads, and backlash, prevailed.

For now, at least, new recruits will see the exploits of the airmen who overcame every obstacle thrown their way, and learn how small those in charge look when they try to stand in Harry Stewart Jr.’s shadow.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call “Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis” podcast. Follow her on X @mcurtisnc3.