By Monica Moorehead
February 10, 2025

Ever since Donald Trump issued an executive order to overturn DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) directives for governmental agencies, there has been an ongoing debate on the validity of such programs within the progressive movement — understandably so, considering DEI’s origins. This order will block programs recognizing the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, Black History Month, Juneteenth and Women’s History Month, among others, for federal workers, many of them African American and gender oppressed.

Former President Joe Biden signed into law on Feb. 22, 2023, requirements for certain federal agencies such as the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and Education to set up “equity teams” and “DEI steering committees.” These groupings were supposed to promote “the consistent and systematic treatment of all individuals in a fair, just and impartial manner,” especially those who had “been denied such treatment.”

The document named “Black, Latino, Indigenous and Native American, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander persons and other persons of color,” religious minorities, women and girls, people in the LGBTQIA2S+ community, people with disabilities, people who live in rural areas as well as U.S. territories and “persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality.” (HR Dive, Feb. 23, 2023)

Some of these DEI programs pushed for family restrooms, paid holidays, pay equity, subtitles and captions for the hearing impaired, breastfeeding and pumping accommodations for mothers, size-inclusive belts and chairs in medical facilities, belt extensions for plus-size people on airplanes and more. To what extent these programs achieved practical goals for a large majority or a small minority is debatable, but the programs addressed a broad range of inequalities that exist under U.S. capitalist society.

Even some corporations and banks felt the pressure to adopt DEI programs whether their workforce was organized or unorganized. Some of these same big businesses are now retreating from any DEI programs that were put into place for their workers.

DEI rooted in Reconstruction era

The attack on DEI programs raises the question of form versus content. Yes, the form of DEI came from a pro-imperialist president, whose true allegiance was to the interests of the profit-driven billionaire ruling class; therefore, the form was certainly bourgeois-oriented. But despite that fact, the general objective of DEI was progressive, if nothing else to raise day-to-day fundamental rights denied to broad sectors of the working class. And this is true when it comes to the issue of bourgeois democratic rights for Black and other people of color.

Following almost 250 years of institutionalized enslavement, the outcome of the four-year Civil War was a military defeat for the slavocracy, ushering in the Reconstruction period — a profound effort to achieve full political and economic rights for freed Black people on par with whites within an emerging wage-slavery society.

Under Reconstruction-era laws— bolstered by thousands of Union troops stationed in the Deep South — Black men gained the right to vote and to become representatives in state legislatures, once wholly dominated by white male politicians. Public elementary schools and colleges for Black youth were set up and more.

Unfortunately, Reconstruction was tragically cut short by a violent counterrevolution carried out by the former slavocracy in the form of the fascist Ku Klux Klan along with the withdrawal of federal troops with a pro-enslavement administration in the White House.

Black people, who had tasted a minimal amount of democracy for only a decade, became victims of racist terror with lynchings, burnings of schools and churches, involuntary servitude through mass incarceration and generally being forced into semi-enslavement conditions. In 1896, segregation in the North and South became the law of the country with the U.S. Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, declaring “separate but equal” facilities were legal.

In answer to these major setbacks in the quest for social equality came the mass Civil Rights struggle led by Black workers in the Deep South, focusing on the right to vote, an end to segregation and the right to decent paying jobs. Despite facing unimaginable racist repression with bombings, jailings, lynchings and outright terror, Black people won the right to vote in 1964 and the desegregation of facilities in the South in 1965. The federal government was pressured into signing these bills due to the mass struggle.

Two months after Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1965, he issued Executive Order 11246 prohibiting employment discrimination based on race, color, religion and national origin by those organizations receiving federal contracts and subcontracts.

In 1969, Republican President Richard M. Nixon signed another executive order to implement equal employment programs, also known as affirmative action, within federal government contracts. Neither Johnson nor Nixon and the parties they represented were friends of Black or any oppressed workers but were forced through the grassroots struggle to pass progressive legislation to help offset generations of discriminatory hiring practices.

Black and Latine construction workers, employed under federal contracts, were beneficiaries of these programs.

Fast forward decades later to Biden’s DEI programs, especially any police “reforms” coming out of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice following the mass protests against the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020. These “reforms” did not stop police repression but served to put a number of police departments on notice.

Trump’s attacks aimed against all workers

The first objective of the racist, misogynist and xenophobic Trumpites’ attack under the guise of opposing DEI is to target Black federal workers and Black people in general.  As of Feb. 13, tens of thousands of federal workers who were on probation for two years or less, have been laid off from their jobs, many of them African American.

These white supremacists want to erase all of the progressive gains first won under Reconstruction over 150 years ago followed by the Civil Rights Movement, including the concessions of Black History Month and Juneteenth!

The Trumpites don’t want to stop with the Black population. As we have already witnessed, they have targeted migrants and trans people as the first wave of scapegoats for the growing capitalist economic crisis faced by all workers.

But the working class is showing optimistic signs of fightback and solidarity with early protests in the streets. They are not waiting for the impotent Democratic Party to show them the way. Pro-migrant demonstrations are spreading throughout the country in response to jailings and deportations, and more and more non-union workers, especially the most oppressed, are signing up to join unions since Trump took office.

The Trumpites are in for a rude awakening as the multinational, multigenerational, multigender working class will continue to consciously organize to unite on all the issues to declare, “Trump says get back, we say fight back!”

Concessions can be temporary and co-opted by the ruling class to reinforce class rule, which history has shown. A socialist transformation of society on a global scale is the only answer to win the total liberation of humanity from the shackles of capitalist slavery.

As the saying goes, “Class oppression is primary. National oppression is not secondary!”

The writer is a great-granddaughter of Black educator William James Edwards, the founder of Snow Hill Institute in Snow Hill, Alabama, in 1893. This private kindergarten through 12th-grade institute helped to educate Black sharecroppers one generation removed from slavery. A protégé of Booker T. Washington, Edwards is the author of “Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt,” which can be read in its entirety at docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/edwards/edwards.html.