They say everything old is new again. The current backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in government, education, and the workplace is no surprise when viewed through the broader lens of Black advancement and retrenchment since emancipation. Just as anti-DEI activists today are organizing at the grassroots level and using political strategies to halt efforts to remedy culturally embedded injustices, so too did antagonists who opposed integration, equal protections under the law, and civil rights gains.
Public discourse around backlash against racial progress tends to air the grievances of the opposition and, in the case of DEI, fails to or only marginally explores why our institutions need such efforts in the first place. This timeworn playbook relies on a divisive and false narrative that Black advancement is undeserved and disadvantages white people.
The repeated use of this playbook is illuminated by political strategies employed in the last decades of the 20th century and those used today. More than 40 years ago, Lee Atwater, a Republican political strategist, infamously outlined his party’s decades-old strategy to build support among white voters in the South to a young political scientist named Alexander Lamis. Atwater, then an advisor to the Reagan White House, conceded that using racial epithets and other overtly anti-Black propaganda was no longer an effective political tool. Instead, he said, securing support for economic austerity and regressive tax policies required obscuring the message. Opposition to school integration became “forced busing,” for example. “State’s rights” became a rallying cry to create hostility toward federal regulations and the administrative state. The byproduct of these “economic things,” Atwater said, “is that Blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
“Now, you don’t quote me on this,” Atwater said to Lamis before launching into a racial-epithet-laced description of the psychology of the Southern Strategy.
Times have changed and methods employed to halt racial progress have evolved. The internet and social media have democratized the public sphere, making it easier for more people to have far-reaching platforms and fashion themselves as public figures. Unlike Atwater, who demonstrated a modicum of awareness that he shouldn’t publicly announce his intent, today some activists have no such qualms. Christopher Rufo, a conservative firebrand, has made sport out of contriving culture wars and publicizing the central goal of his polarizing, often racially coded speech. Over the last few years, he’s been the subject of profiles in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and other publications. His agenda relies on exploiting anti-Black sentiment.
In 2021 Rufo tweeted, “We will eventually turn it [critical race theory] toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”
Rufo was a prominent voice in the successful campaign to oust Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black woman president. That effort relied on exploiting valid outrage over increasing antisemitism, distorting complex debates over what constitutes tolerable speech on college campuses, and maliciously declaring that Gay failed to adequately address these challenges because she was a DEI hire. The relentless campaign to oust her erased her career accomplishments and flattened her personhood. Rufo publicized his strategy to sow resentment among progressives on X, formerly Twitter, and crowed about its effectiveness in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and a Q&A in Politico.
Of course, Rufo couldn’t notch wins in his campaign to influence the public discourse if he didn’t have powerful accomplices. A recent, extensive New York Times report outlined how conservative think tanks, wealthy donors, and right-wing activists work in states to dismantle DEI efforts. Their agenda is a direct response to a nation that is more enlightened about how our public policies and institutions historically created the conditions that perpetuate racial and social stratification. A public that recognizes how systems of oppression continue to marginalize Black and Brown people and economically encumber people of all races might demand their policymakers dismantle those systems—systems that primarily benefit the wealthy and powerful. So operatives are working overtime to dilute or stamp out K-12 curriculums that address uncomfortable truths about our nation’s history, ban books that embrace the complexity of humanity, and weaponize the legal system to hack away at institutional efforts to remedy the lasting effects of structural racism.
Any student of the history that anti-DEI activists are trying to erase knows that backlash is sadly par for the course. Since this nation ended slavery in 1865, it has churned through cycles of racial advancement and retrenchment. The nascent social and economic advancement of Black people during the Reconstruction era was upended by a campaign of racial terror and complicit political forces determined to maintain a racial hierarchy. Racist propaganda was socially acceptable then, as white culture maligned Black people as lazy, ignorant, hypersexual, and criminal through minstrel shows, magazine ads, and other forms of mass media.
Civil Rights advances that dismantled Jim Crow and opened economic and social opportunities for Black people were met with the rhetorical attacks that Atwater described, stoking racial divisions and preventing class unity. President Reagan infamously turned one egregious case of welfare fraud into a lasting trope about Black poverty and burdened white taxpayers. Using Black people as a foil in political and electoral propaganda in the mid to late 20th century had its intended effect: distrust in government and a public willing to support economic and social policies that, as Atwater said, hurt “Blacks worse than whites.”
But to be clear, people of all races feel the pain of economic policies that upwardly distribute wealth, regulatory policies that enable harm to our environment and corporate malfeasance, and social policies that inadequately fund our public schools, ignore the affordable housing crisis, and force seniors to spend a significant percent of their limited income on prescription medication.
Attacks on DEI and social change are old hat and in service of a broader anti-government agenda. The difference between today and previous eras is that messaging strategies aren’t in off-the-record conversations for books, proprietary campaign memos, or white papers: they are in blogs, tweets, and other very public mediums. And like before, the messages underlying anti-DEI attacks rely on a vision of so-called prosperity that requires ignoring the nation’s past, pretending the nation is a meritocracy, contriving culture wars, and marginalizing Black people.
Derrick Bell, a pioneer of Critical Race Theory, once wrote, “If America didn’t have Black people, it would have invented them.” Jenice Rochelle Robinson is an independent communications consultant who has developed communications strategies for organizations focused on tax policy, economic inequality, poverty, the racial wealth gap, women’s rights, and worker power.