The national crackdown against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) was inevitable. After racial progress, there is often retrenchment.
DEI programs were the institutionalized response to the Black Lives Matter movement. They reshaped conversations around representation, missing perspectives, and ultimately who belongs, whether in universities, boardrooms, or other institutions of power.
So when President Donald Trump terminated these programs in the public and private sectors with a stroke of his pen through executive orders, it was a stark reminder that the past is a prologue in the struggle for racial equality. That is, racial justice in the United States has always been a cycle of violent repression followed by nonviolent progress, prompting retrenchment by white elites.
We are seeing a similar wave of retrenchment today, targeting not only the accomplishments of the Black Lives Matter movement but also the Palestine Human Rights Student Movement, a direct but underappreciated legacy of the Black Lives Matter Movement.
Today’s anti-DEI wave is the contemporary version of the anti-affirmative action retrenchment of the 1970s. Affirmative action was the racial progress arising from the nonviolent civil rights movement of the 1960s, which was in response to decades-long anti-Black repression of the Jim Crow era. Jim Crow laws were the retrenchment against the racial progress of the Reconstruction era. And Reconstruction arose from a bloody civil war that ended the 250-year enslavement of Black human beings.
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