This is a sharp move away from the somewhat traditional legal and political fights over race, to effectively prohibiting nearly spiritual expressions of identity and solidarity. It’s a disturbing echo of our nation’s  deep history of racial oppression, when plantation owners forbid slaves from singing, gathering or otherwise affirming themselves. The push to eliminate DEI practices feels, in part, like an effort to delegitimize Black people. We won’t disappear, but it feels to a lot of us like they’re trying to make us invisible — again.

The order uses the well-tread logic, often from conservatives, that anything race-conscious is inherently unfair and unequal (i.e., an affront to white people). But it departs from that logic in this bald attempt to smear a whole range of communal, supportive school activities, associations and aid programs that have been largely uncontroversial for decades. The education order calls such activity not just discriminatory but “shameful.” 

The judgment here seems to be that Black group activity, however positive, is by definition un-American and should be done away with, and in lifting each other up, Black people should be ashamed of themselves.

This browbeating is thin cover for a fear and loathing of Black unity and consciousness that goes back to slavery. Many plantation owners viewed Blacks organizing in any way, off the plantation and away from their oversight, as a threat to their own power and wealth. Decision makers in the federal Department of Education, which the Trump administration has made clear it wants to eliminate, feel entitled to dictate what Black people should be doing in school — not just what they should be learning. 

The new order is related to attacks that have long claimed that “critical race theory” is poisoning the American narrative and needlessly making white people feel bad about themselves and their history. But dictating  what Black students should be doing out of the classroom, among and for themselves, goes beyond curriculum: it’s an attempt that restricts Blackness itself and makes sure it doesn’t grow, or flourish. It’s yet another attempted purge in an early presidency of purges, but more existential than firing federal workers.

No wonder Black History Month feels uprooted by recent events. It is the first time since I was born in the 1960s that the observation of American history feels as though it is actively opposed by our government. The federal government still formally recognizes Black History Month, but the Education Department’s sprawling directive suggests that there is really no space or circumstance to which Black people have an absolute right — not to the pages of history, not to educational institutions that enshrine that history. In the social order of the second Trump presidency, they have little role beyond sports and entertainment. Trump gave lip service to Black History Month at an event with Tiger Woods, an athlete of color who famously downplays race, without mentioning the hardships and violence that Black people have endured, fought and overcome in this country — what Black history is mostly about.

Of course, the nation’s top leaders can call for the end of Black-themed activities all they want — some can even call for an end to Black History Month — but they can’t ban our collective experience. 

They can’t erase our memory, or our desire for progress. Less than five years ago, Americans took to the streets in the middle of a deadly pandemic because of a Minneapolis police officer’s brutal murder of George Floyd, a wholly ordinary Black man, that stirred the conscience of millions of people across color lines. 

That took place during Trump’s first presidency. The spontaneous and sustained protest, with its potential for not just Black unity but for a new kind of multiracial unity, rattled some Americans, notably some MAGA loyalists, who then stepped-up a Black-delegitimization campaign and transformed renewed popular scrutiny of police into a cudgel that drove some white people back into a silo of racial anxiety. 

This new order is a continuation of such anxiety and the targeting of diversity, equality and inclusion in education — a major site of social change — and is another cudgel with a similar purpose. While this may work to reinforce that anxiety, it will almost certainly do nothing to keep Black students and others from supporting one another with graduations and scholarships  that honor them for what they do and who they are. It will do nothing to stop them from wanting — needing — to claim their legitimate place in school, in California or in the increasingly imperiled American democratic project.

In keeping with the breakneck pace of Trump’s orders and edicts, the Department of Education gave the nation’s schools until the end of February — Black History Month — to comply with the ban. I don’t think they’ll meet the deadline.