🔗 Share this article

Democracy flourishes when Black Americans progress. Research demonstrates: birthright citizenship, legal due process, anti-discrimination laws across education, housing, and employment sectors and fair business funding are all byproducts institutional reforms currently called DEI. Yet, recently, DEI has served as a smokescreen by cynical politicians and campaigners to roll back progress and consolidate power.

The Concrete Impact of These Current Strategies

The effect of these tactics is substantial and unquestionable. Since the start of this year, research has found that 306,000 African American women have lost their jobs while $3.4 billion in grant programs investing in Black communities has been eliminated – including $9.4m for sickle cell studies, $42 million in programs designed to address Black maternal mortality and $31 million in reductions targeting asthma prevalence and environmental contaminants harming African American youth.

Historical Perspective with Broader Implications

Coordinated efforts to suppress the advancement of Black communities isn't novel; however, history has proven that whenever advancements for African Americans are removed, all communities face negative consequences. In the Reconstruction era, African Americans achieved remarkable progress – serving in government, establishing enterprises and founding schools. Rarely mentioned is how other oppressed communities, from white sharecroppers to Latino gauchos, similarly gained from increased access to legal and economic systems.

Distortion is one of the most insidious tactics. It alters truth in manners that limit our possibilities and cements bigotry as policy.

When Black people faced a century of Jim Crow and government-approved bias, additional populations experienced comparable setbacks regarding their entry to full citizenship. When the civil rights movement sought to eliminate the vestiges of Jim Crow, its practices of nonviolent civil disobedience increased liberty and opportunity not only for African Americans, but for communities from every demographic. Including Indigenous rights activism to the advancement of gay rights to women's economic empowerment, African American equality efforts broadened the scope for expanded human rights.

Present Obstacles with Intentional Efforts

However, whenever African American neighborhoods make progress, forces threatened by change work to push us back. While confronting the current regime, DEI serves as the defense that guarantees a pluralistic democracy. Its power is rooted not in politics, but in the promise of America itself: that all people possess equal worth and merit opportunity to thrive.

We must understand these attacks as components of an intentional strategy. The objective is to rewrite the country's narrative and restrict the futures for African Americans, and by extension, every citizen considered inferior. It's easy to perceive these measures separately, but this is intentional.

Educational and Economic Consequences

Scholarships and education programs face elimination, leaving Black students with reduced opportunities to pursue a quality education. These cuts also affect Native American students and served as a basis for assaults against Latino scholars. African American households continue to live in districts having poorly funded education due to historical patterns of segregation and inequality, and the resulting impact of cutting programs unequally affects every disadvantaged youth and individuals with disabilities.

Funding for Black-owned businesses and crucial healthcare programs have been slashed, leaving our nation without the data necessary to address systemic disparities within the economic system and healthcare system. The follow-on effect will undermine research and investment for women of all ethnic backgrounds. By rewriting who matters, who is valued and what histories are taught, these policies compound the barriers that populations have struggled for centuries to conquer.

Erasure and Suppression Working Together

Erasure and suppression work in tandem, and those implementing them predictably start with the African American community. Individuals attempting to cripple democracy have eliminated Black stories from educational materials, exhibits and collective consciousness, depriving us of the lessons of confrontation, remediation and redemption. Rising autocracies understand how to influence schools, colleges, corporations and public agencies into silence.

The Path Forward and Collective Responsibility

The question currently facing us involves: what will we do in response? Will we allow anxiety, misinformation and autocracy to write the next chapter? Or should we take action, fiercely and deliberately, to defend the truth, honor Black progress and safeguard the right to opportunity for all citizens? The response will shape not only the present, but the very future of the nation.

Safeguarding and preserving the significant advancements achieved is a moral imperative, one that demands concerted civil action. Like the fight for freedom has taught us, when we struggle for freedom, we succeed. We certainly confront coordinated attacks against reality, which are intended to sow despair or lead to inaction – but we cannot allow that.

Our nation's future will not arrive on its own. Achievement or downfall will be determined on our decisions to do and resist today.

America's story began by deciding that from many, we could become one. E pluribus unum represents the core of diversity, equity and inclusion, the lived reality for African Americans and the evidence that we can build something greater than fear and despair. Together, we can maintain access, respect reality and strengthen our democracy for generations to come.