LOS ANGELES — The 78th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s breaking of Major League Baseball’s color barrier centered on the Los Angeles Dodgers, as it always does. But on Tuesday, the league’s annual commemoration also served as a flashpoint of President Donald Trump’s quest to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, with the Dodgers trying to explain their decision to accept an invite last week to the White House and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar using a Dodger Stadium speech to issue a forceful rebuke of Trump’s policies, calling them a “ruse.”
“Trump wants to get rid of DEI,” Abdul-Jabbar said on Tuesday while speaking at the Dodgers’ celebration of Robinson. “And I think it’s just a ruse to discriminate. So I’m glad that we do things like this, to let everybody in the country know what’s important. They also tried to get rid of Harriet Tubman. But that didn’t work. There was just uproar about that. But you have to take that into consideration when we think about what’s going on today.”
A Trump executive order last month led to the scrubbing of government websites spotlighting historical contributions by women and minority groups, and the removal of articles on Robinson, Harriet Tubman and others. The article on Robinson on the Department…
