One day after President Donald Trump issued an executive order demanding all federal agencies cease from partaking in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and programs, Mayor Bob DaSilva issued a proclamation of his own to reaffirm the city’s longstanding efforts to promote more diversity in its hiring decisions.

Trump’s executive order, titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity”, came on his first day in office, Jan. 21, one day following the federal observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

“…today, roughly 60 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, critical and influential institutions of American society, including the Federal Government, major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, large commercial airlines, law enforcement agencies, and institutions of higher education have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI)…that can violate the civil-rights laws of this Nation,” the order reads.

“Illegal DEI and DEIA policies not only violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws, they also undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system,” it continues. “Hardworking Americans who deserve a shot at the American Dream should not be stigmatized, demeaned, or shut out of opportunities because of their race or sex.”

DaSilva’s response to that order came during the city’s own MLK Jr. Day observance at East Providence City Hall on the next day, Wednesday, Jan. 22.

“These things are important,” DaSilva said in a recent interview. “Because when people hear this coming from the national level, they think it applies all the way through to your local government. And it's important for me and for our administration to let our very, very diverse community know that we are still going to be adhering to the policies and procedures and the way we’ve always been doing things — which is to try to be as open to all different backgrounds as possible and to treat everybody the same across the board.”

Ideologies at odds
If it seems like both sides of the argument are saying the same thing — wanting to promote equality for all — while simultaneously saying something totally different, that’s because they are.

Critics of programs like DEI and affirmative action have long maintained that they create an inherently discriminatory situation while hiring for certain jobs, which prioritizes intangible things like skin color, gender, and ethnicity over the individual merits of the candidate. It’s a viewpoint summarily explained in Trump’s executive order.

“These illegal DEI and DEIA policies also threaten the safety of American men, women, and children across the Nation by diminishing the importance of individual merit, aptitude, hard work, and determination when selecting people for jobs and services in key sectors of American society, including all levels of government, and the medical, aviation, and law-enforcement communities,” it reads. “Yet in case after tragic case, the American people have witnessed first-hand the disastrous consequences of illegal, pernicious discrimination that has prioritized how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing.”

Meanwhile, proponents of DEI and affirmative action maintain that such procedures do not prioritize any one race, gender, or ethnicity above any other — they merely provide more opportunities to groups of people who have been marginalized and looked over for those kinds of jobs in the not-so-distant past.

“If you look back, and you don’t have to look back too far, at our history and the makeup of government at one point in time…look back at the 90s and the mid-80s, there were issues that existed,” DaSilva said. “Workforces were very homogenous, city government was very homogenous. It was all one ethnicity and one color.”

DaSilva said that a lawsuit in the 1970s created the impetus for East Providence to pass its first official ordinance promoting affirmative action practices to encourage more diversity within city government. Since his administration began in 2019, he said that he has been proud to expand those efforts by creating a community advisory board to discuss issues of diversity, and advisory boards specifically for LGBTQI+ community members and for indigenous peoples to provide their perspectives on city issues.

“I think my administration has made more gains than any other time before. And it’s evident by the people currently representing our community,” he continued. “If not for some of these policies in place, some of these people may have never had a chance to get a seat at that table. And what I’m concerned about is rolling us back to the time of the 1970s, 1960s, when it was all one group of people running the show.”

Does diversity matter?
Few in East Providence have a better understanding of what the implementation of DEI and affirmative action actually looks like in practice within a city administration than Elmer Pina.

An employee with the city since 2005, Pina has been in his current role as the city’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Officer since 2008. He was named “municipal integrity officer” in 2020.

When asked if these practices create unfair advantages and disadvantages or inherently create discriminatory hirings, Pina said that that elements like race or ethnicity would never be the one tipping point in a hiring decision.

“Basically what we’re doing is we’re looking to level the playing field,” he said. “At the end of the day we’re looking for the best qualified candidate. Regardless of the education, the experience, their skin color, we’re looking for the best person available.”

However, Pina said that it was important, particularly in an increasingly diverse city like East Providence, to be mindful of hiring a wide range of people with different experiences to better serve the entire population.

“If you look around at our city, it’s changing every single day,” he said. “You can look at our elementary schools, our middle schools, our high school; it’s changing. There’s more and more diversity coming into the city because it’s a beautiful, safe city to live in. And I think our workforce needs to reflect the people that we are serving.”

Pina reasoned that having a more diverse workforce within city hall makes for better services for everyone.

“Having a diverse workforce is about representation. Representation is extremely important because we want to represent our community and how it looks to our Hispanics, to our African Americans, to our Native Americans here,” he said. “By having people in city hall, they can relate when they come to city hall and do business. They can see somebody who sounds like them, somebody who is bilingual that can relate to the issues that they’re having. Having people with diverse backgrounds in city government is extremely important. They bring different ideas to the table. They bring different cultural experiences to the table, and they can actually educate those who are not minorities.”

Asked about the debate occurring at the national level now and in years past, Pina said that he felt the issue of affirmative action is often presented in a confrontational way that ignores the tricky context of the nation’s history — where skin color and ethnicity did matter for a very long time, and rendered non-white populations in a disadvantageous position.

“I think we kind of jump over that and forget the purpose of it. It gets tainted,” he said. “With affirmative action it’s almost like it becomes ‘us against you’ or ‘us against other people.’ And it’s not. It’s just to equal the playing field to ensure that people of color, women, our veterans, our disabled people, are being treated equally.”