He's makin' a DEI list & checkin' it twice

The end of one podcast and the beginning of another

Author

Chris Musei-Sequeira
January 23, 2025

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Christmas is over and he’s already come to town. It’s a bit late for Christmas jokes, but did you know that many Orthodox Christian churches celebrated Christmas on January 7th?1 So at least I’m still in the same month…

Morning Tinto: My new podcast with Heather Luna

This morning, my friend Heather Luna and I recorded the first episode of our new podcast Morning Tinto. “Tinto” refers to coffee in Colombia, where Heather lives… which is ironic, because neither of us drank any coffee this morning.

Morning Tinto will feature short (15- to 30-minute) episodes about events that have just happened prior to recording, through our lenses of oppression and resistance. Our hope is to record and post on the same day, to be as freshly-brewed as possible. (Don’t get me started on my misuse of a Moka pot…)

Morning Tinto Episode 1: The Trump Administration’s attacks on DEI

Recorded today, Heather and I discuss the Trump Administration’s explicit targeting of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives within and outside of the U.S. Federal Government. I read sections of the White House Executive Order titled “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” signed just this Tuesday,2 that explicitly require making “a list of all”:

  • “agency or department DEI, DEIA, or ‘environmental justice’ positions, committees, programs, services, activities, budgets, and expenditures in existence on November 4, 2024 . . .”

  • “Federal contractors who have provided DEI training or DEI training materials to agency or department employees; and”

  • “Federal grantees who received Federal funding to provide or advance DEI, DEIA, or ‘environmental justice’ programs, services, or activities since January 20, 2021.”

Heather and I contrast abstract complaints about “wokeness” against specific harms suffered by specific people due to racism.

Click here to access Morning Tinto Episode 1 on Spotify (23 minutes and 59 seconds), or search for Morning Tinto on YouTube and Apple Podcasts

We Are LaCH podcast: Our final episode

The We Are LaCH podcast is coming to a close! Lavinia will be elevating her multi-country work in (un)sustainable fashion, and Heather and I will continue with Morning Tinto. In our final episode, Lavinia and Heather and I speak with Heather’s relative María Lucía Luna Borda about the recent Biodiversity Conference of the Parties meeting held in Cali, Colombia. We talk about biodiversity, the concept of “peace with nature”, community knowledge, nature as a victim of armed conflict, and the need for healing and justice.

María Lucía is a sociologist and researcher specializing in the impacts of armed conflict and socio-environmental issues on Nature and Territory. María Lucía has worked extensively on territorial dispossession, community resistance, and resilience, including her contributions to the Commission for the Clarification of the Truth and her current role at the National Center for Historical Memory in Colombia.

Previous We Are LaCH recordings

  1. Intro to We Are LaCH, 5 minutes and 11 seconds in length

  2. Episode 1: Sustainable Aviation? with Chris Musei-Sequeira, 51 minutes and 58 seconds in length

  3. Episode 2: Sustainable Fashion? with Lavinia Muth, 1 hour, 3 minutes, and 22 seconds in length

  4. Episode 3: Education for Sustainable Development in Universities? with Heather Luna, 47 minutes and 12 seconds in length

  5. Episode 4: Visioning for Sustainability, 1 hour, 2 minutes, and 34 seconds in length

  6. Episode 5: Ecofascism—Our Vulnerability, 50 minutes and 55 seconds in length

Where to find the perspectives you’ve been missing

FIRST: Subscribe to the Morning Tinto podcast, where my friend Heather Luna and I use the lenses of oppression and resistance to talk about events that happen right before recording.

SECOND: Follow these awesome folks on LinkedIn:

THIRD: Forward this issue to people you know who are doing decolonial and anti-oppression work.

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My name is Chris Musei-Sequeira, and I use he/him pronouns. My mother was born in Trinidad and Tobago as a descendant of African slaves brought to the islands during the time of European colonization. She came to the United States of America (USA) at the age of 10. My father is Goan and was born in India, in Mumbai, and raised Catholic and English-speaking. He came to the USA for his graduate studies, where he met my mother.

My sister and I were born in the USA and lived a middle-class life in the suburbs of multiple American cities. I studied aeronautical engineering and technology policy in university, then worked at the Federal Aviation Administration and as an aviation consultant. I've lived in cities up and down the USA East Coast since the age of 18; I now reside in Queens, New York with my wife.

I thank Heather Luna and Lavinia Muth for showing me the importance of publicly expressing our positions. Because of our positions, all of us are very familiar with some aspects of the world while having no idea of other aspects. Positionality expresses how our individual positions affect our relationships with other people and with the world as a whole.

1  Orthodox Christmas: Why do some people celebrate Christmas on 7 January. (2025, January 6). BBC Newsround. Link. Archived link.

2  The White House. (2025, January 21). Ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing. Link. Archived link.