Back when a public backlash began to rise up mostly among white parents against “critical race theory,” I joked as to whether Black History Month might be next.

I don’t joke about that anymore.

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s re-election, largely on culture war issues, we see how the mere mention of race, academically or otherwise, quickly can turn oddly toxic.

The National Football League, for example, decided to scrub the message “End Racism” from the end zones at this year’s Super Bowl. That message first appeared in Super Bowl end zones in 2021, according to The Athletic.

The NFL opted instead for less problematic messages — “Choose Love” in one end zone and “It Takes All of Us” in the other.

As much as we can debate the appropriateness of “love” and hugs amid the skull-knocking field action at the big game, NFL spokespeople said the phrases fit very well with the league’s diversity efforts. In a news conference last Monday, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell still called those diversity efforts the right thing for the league to do.

”We’re going to continue those efforts because we’ve not only convinced ourselves,” he said, “I think we’re proven to ourselves, that it does make the NFL better.”

Goodell’s cheerful outlook contrasts sharply with the attitude of those who look at expressions of love and humanity — the impulses behind the “End Racism” message, surely — as if they’re really expressing hate.

This comes at a time when at least a dozen of the nation’s most prominent corporations have, with little or no fanfare, chosen to eliminate their diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, commonly known as DEI. GM, Pepsi, Disney and other companies have deleted some or all DEI references from their annual reports to investors, an NPR analysis of regulatory filing found.

Is it because these corporations believe that the problems of discrimination and underrepresentation that gave rise to DEI initiatives have been solved? Or is there another explanation?

Before answering that, let’s consider a revealing incident exposed in the past week concerning the new administration of President Trump. The Wall Street Journal reported that one Marko Elez, 25, one of the whiz kids whom Elon Musk hired to help the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, take a meat cleaver to federal spending, has used Musk’s social media platform to advocate, of all things, racism and eugenics.

“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” said a July posting to the X account linked to Elez, according to the Journal’s reporting. Elez was one of the widely reported DOGE staff members who sparked a legal battle over access to the Treasury Department’s sensitive taxpayer information used to process trillions of dollars in payments each year. Elez resigned after the Journal asked the White House about him.

His messages online sound all too typical of the brash and bratty computer techies who seem to think insults are satisfactory entertainment for their followers.

“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” he wrote on X in September. “Normalize Indian hate,” the account said the same month, in reference to a post that mused about people from India in Silicon Valley.

Interestingly, Musk, owner of X, formerly Twitter, and a tireless producer of Tweets, asked his followers if DOGE should rehire the young man who “made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym.”

Within hours, it had received more than 200,000 votes, overwhelmingly favoring Elez’s return.

Musk reinstated Elez on Friday, writing, “To err is human, to forgive divine.”

That’s life in X-land, where the medium is often — to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan — a mess, and its owner is now some sort of god-king.

As the undisputed arbiter of what gets seen and unseen on X, and as one of the few people on earth who could single-handedly buy the influential social media platform TikTok — which he has expressed interest in doing — Musk may end up supplying a different meaning to the phrase “free-speech absolutist.”

The writer is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.