y BRIAN CRAWFORD
Donald Trump has returned to power, and the far right is confident that he will surpass what he carried out during his first term. The administration is prepared and motivated; armed with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 as its program, it is primed to do damage. Consistent with the right-wing strategy in legal battles and legislation, it uses the language of civil rights to fight civil rights.
A major component of the plan is the firing of government employees and rooting out all vestiges of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). The Foundation describes DEI as anti-American. This runs deep within the administration. Secretary of State Marco Rubio snubbed the G20 hosted by South Africa because it highlighted “DEI and climate change.” These concepts are considered anti-American by the administration.
Contextually, the moment is defined by the right wing forces seeking to revoke the progressive trend brought about by the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. This administration and its supporters regard even the word “progress” as a vulgarity. Recent Supreme Court rulings have only encouraged the right. The effects of these efforts will have serious consequences for Black workers and students.
Supreme Court decision
In 2023 the conservative Supreme Court ruled in separate cases involving the admissions practices of Harvard and the University of North Carolina that the schools discriminated against Asian students. Henry Blum, the attorney behind the suit, after failing to win a case with white plaintiffs, used Asians instead. While the right wing argues that Black people are admitted based on race and therefore undeserving, Black students admitted to Harvard university graduated at a rate of 96% in 2021. The most significant example of preferences in colleges are for children of alumni; 40% of white students were admitted to Harvard as a result of legacies.
The cases involving Harvard and University of North Carolina are notable as they set legal precedence, and the right wasted no time in proceeding to the next phase. Immediately after the ruling, attention turned to the workplace.
Attorney generals from several states sent letters threatening companies with legal actions if their hiring practices were consistent with DEI. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey sued Starbucks in federal court charging discrimination based on race and sex in making the workforce “more female and less white.” Bailey’s legal action is in defense of “disadvantaged” whites. Would the lawsuit have been filed if Starbuck’s workforce was 90% white male?
Destruction of Black working class
Black people make up a significant part of the public-sector workforce and 20% of the federal workforce, including 20% of Health and Human Services and 24% of the Veterans Administration. In the Education Department, which is targeted for abolition, African Americans are 30%. The slash and burn method will disproportionately affect Black workers. As one federal employee explained to NBC News: “Black people not only benefited from what they call DEI now, but the original affirmative action programs and the veteran preferences. … That combination helped a lot of people get a foothold in the civil service.”
In the colorblind society of the right, blindness to discrimination past and present is key. The administration has endorsed the program to reinstitute full-throated white supremacy by demolishing every bit of progress in the last century.
The right’s multi-pronged attacks are possible only because of demobilization and retreat. Democrats, for their part, are opening confirming their irrelevance. Rather than expressing support for groups organizing opposition, House minority leaders Hakeem Jefferies merely expresses “frustration.”
Affirmative action or DEI programs only exist because of the rising tide of Black struggle. They are concessions made by the ruling class. Affirmative Action was a result of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s. The programs were deployed to hopefully lower the temperature of the times, but they worked in tandem with more repression. Although progress was made, oppression persisted. Richard Nixon’s chief of staff H.R. Haldeman was explicit in “The Haldeman Diaries”: “The whole problem is the Blacks.”
A system was devised to address this specific group without appearing to be focused on them. “War on crime” meant a war on the Black community. Incarceration rates skyrocketed, with drug laws that decimated communities. The ruling class preferred to create a state of despair as opposed to a state of revolutionary fervor.
A new movement required a counter-offensive by the right. Momentum had gathered with the election of Donald Trump as a president with aggressive and openly racist expressions. Constant police violence toward the Black community was encapsulated in the nine-minute video of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis officers. Across the country in major cities and suburbs, a multi-racial movement grew and even spread to other countries. While police violence and murder were the catalyst, demands went beyond addressing police brutality. Recognition that racial oppression is systemic was a challenge that once again terrified the ruling class. Many companies instituted or enhanced DEI programs and made them public. Meanwhile, the right was engaging in a counter-offensive of legislation, propaganda, and violence.
No one should be under the impression that Affirmative Action and DEI are the solution to inequality in regard to the Black community or other groups. But gains must be defended, and we must continue to make demands and not allow for a right-wing offensive to draw concessions from us.
According to U.S. Labor Department statistics, DEI has primarily benefited white women and households. So the idea that Black people are taking jobs from whites is just a myth. Moreover, the greatest recipients of preferences in U.S. colleges and universities are children of alumni, who are overwhelmingly white and well off.
Right-wing arguments that DEI programs cause racial tension—rather than the machinations of the state—are also a myth. Portrayals of African Americans as violent criminals, feeding fears long cultivated in white America, is a part of state propaganda.
Socialism as a project is constructed by a unified working class, but this cannot be achieved by negating the struggles against oppression. Just as here can be no acceptance of retreat in the class struggle, there must be no retreat in the fight against white supremacy and for Black liberation.
