🔗 Share this article

Democracy prospers as Black Americans progress. The evidence is clear: birthright citizenship, constitutional due process, anti-discrimination laws from education to housing to employment and equitable small business investments all stem from the systemic corrections currently called DEI. Yet, in recent years, DEI has been used as a smokescreen by calculating policymakers and activists to reverse advancements and consolidate power.

Measurable Consequences of These Current Strategies

The effect of these approaches is concrete and undeniable. Since the start of this year, studies indicate showing over three hundred thousand Black women have become unemployed and $3.4 billion in grant programs supporting African American neighborhoods has been eliminated – including $9.4m for sickle cell studies, $42 million in programs designed to address maternal death rates in Black communities and $31 million in reductions to address asthma rates and environmental contaminants affecting African American youth.

Historical Context with Broader Implications

Coordinated efforts to suppress the progress within African American populations is not new; however, historical evidence shows that when progress for Black people is erased, all communities face negative consequences. During Reconstruction, African Americans achieved remarkable progress – serving in government, building businesses and founding schools. Less discussed is how additional marginalized groups, including poor white farmers to Hispanic workers, similarly gained from expanded opportunities within legal and financial frameworks.

Misrepresentation represents among the most deceptive strategies. It reshapes reality in manners that narrow our expectations and institutionalizes prejudice through legislation.

As African Americans encountered a century of Jim Crow and government-approved bias, other communities saw a similar retreat on their access to full citizenship. As the equality movement sought to eliminate the remnants of segregation, its practices of nonviolent civil disobedience expanded freedom and access not only for African Americans, but also for populations from every demographic. Including Indigenous rights activism to progress in LGBTQ+ rights to female financial independence, African American equality efforts opened the aperture for expanded human rights.

Present Obstacles with Intentional Efforts

However, every time African American neighborhoods make progress, groups opposing transformation work to push us back. While confronting the current regime, DEI is the bulwark ensuring a diverse democratic system. Its strength is rooted not in politics, but in the promise of the nation's foundation: that all people are created equal and deserve a chance to succeed.

It's essential to understand these attacks as part of an intentional strategy. The objective is to rewrite our nation's story and limit the prospects for African Americans, and consequently, every citizen deemed unworthy. It's easy to view their actions separately, but that is by design.

Educational and Economic Consequences

Scholarships and education programs face elimination, causing African American scholars with fewer chances to pursue a quality education. These cuts also affect Native American students and served as a basis for attacks on Latino scholars. Black families continue to live in areas having poorly funded education because of longstanding practices of separation and disparity, and the concomitant effect of cutting programs unequally affects all low-income children and individuals with disabilities.

Funding for African American enterprises and crucial healthcare programs have been slashed, leaving our nation lacking the information needed to confront systemic disparities in our economy and healthcare system. The follow-on effect will weaken research and investment for females across racial categories. By rewriting who counts, who is valued and which narratives are shared, these approaches compound the barriers that populations have fought for generations to overcome.

Erasure and Suppression Working Together

Removal and censorship operate together, and practitioners typically begin with the African American community. Those seeking to cripple democracy have eliminated Black stories from educational materials, displays and public memory, costing us the insights of confrontation, correction and restoration. Growing authoritarian regimes know to pressure schools, universities, businesses and public agencies toward quiet compliance.

Moving Ahead and Shared Duty

The challenge currently facing us is: what will we do in response? Will we allow fear, disinformation and autocracy to determine the future? Or should we take action, fiercely and deliberately, to protect reality, respect African American advancements and protect access to chances for every American? The response will influence not just this moment, but the very future of our country.

Protecting and defending the historic progress achieved represents an ethical necessity, requiring concerted civil action. Like the fight for freedom has demonstrated, when we fight for liberty, we win. We absolutely face coordinated attacks on truth, designed to create hopelessness or lead to inaction – but we cannot allow that.

Our nation's future won't come on its own. Achievement or downfall will be determined on our decisions to act and oppose today.

America's story began by deciding that from many, we could become one. E pluribus unum is the essence of diversity, equity and inclusion, the actual experience of the Black experience and the proof that we can create something greater beyond anxiety and hopelessness. Together, we can maintain access, respect reality and reinforce democratic systems for future eras.