But the takeover is having widespread and unprecedented consequences that, while alarming, are also not surprising. The national effort to diminish or entirely eliminate Black people from jobs and hard-fought positions of power and influence is undercutting not just the government that serves us all, but the entire American democratic experiment that has always rested on truly integrating its Black citizens. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that whatever affects one of us affects us all because all Americans are “tied in a single garment of destiny.” It was a lofty ideal but also a warning that if we ultimately failed to see this interconnectedness, we as a country would fall. We are falling now. 

The clearest evidence of that is how many other people have been sacrificed in the purging, notably the 80% of the federal workforce that isn’t Black but is expendable simply because they’re part of what Trump and other right-wing politicians have demonized as the “deep state.” That includes people from other communities who, like Black people, have been stigmatized for supposedly getting preferential treatment, including women, gay people, transgender people, Latinos and immigrants who have all felt the wrath of Trump’s fierce and sustained attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion.  

But that scorched-earth anti-DEI campaign has always been a fig leaf for the larger mission, seeded 10 years ago when Trump became the Republican Party’s avatar, to terminate any and all efforts at racial justice, within the federal government but also within a host of other institutions: schools, nonprofits, workplaces, even health research organizations. Terminating all efforts at justice, however commonsense or even lifesaving, flows from that mission and always has. Trump is targeting public spaces for DEI cleansing, but private business is expected to follow suit (never mind that Republicans have historically been loath to let government set any kind of rules for the private sector.) 

This is happening because Trump and his MAGA supporters see efforts at diversity and inclusion not as discrete programs, but a collective threat to white dominance everywhere, which must be preserved at all costs. The cruel and rampant job-cutting affirms that dominance, and sends the age-old message to Black people that they are inherently incompetent, that they do not deserve the job and never did. It also sends the message that white people are always in control of hiring, and can exercise that control at will. To Trump, it was only by the grace of “wokeness” that all these Black folks had jobs at all. What a layered irony that a word coined by Black folks to mean elevated consciousness and self-awareness has become MAGA-speak for misplaced white generosity towards fellow Americans they refuse to see as equals. A country that once largely saw itself as a democratic work-in-progress has become increasingly unrecognizable to me: a grotesque house of mirrors. 

While many Americans tarnished as DEI hires have suffered the unfair loss of jobs and careers, for Black people these attacks carry special significance. For African Americans, employment and justice have long been synonymous. After the end of the slavery, getting a toehold in a private labor market hostile to hiring Black people as anything other than maids and cooks was critical, and elusive. Jim Crow segregation laws that enforced the idea that Black people were not fit for real American society also had the effect of segregating work. It wasn’t until World War II that the federal government and taxpayer-funded contractors began hiring Black people in significant numbers — that is, hiring at scale. Lyndon Johnson signed an executive order in 1965 (nullified immediately by Trump in January) that called for racial fairness in federal contracting, in the wake of the significantly named March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. 

But this modest progress came at a cost. White resentment of the federal government’s role in aiding Black people that began during Reconstruction simmered for decades after the 1960s, heating up during the Reagan and both Bush administrations and finally boiling over what we have now — a federal government that isn’t just not hiring Black people, it’s openly working to erase the history of Black struggle and achievement altogether. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the former chair of the Joint Chiefs, was canned partly because in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd that outraged people across color lines, he was moved to comment about his own experiences with racism in his rise to the top — his bumps in the road. In the antiblack era of Trump 2.0, such reflection constitutes a fireable offense.

MAGA’s logic seems to be that since virtually all Black people have stories like Brown’s — stories that impugn America’s greatness — they are not fit for any positions, especially those of influence and authority. Trump’s Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who himself lacked the qualifications of his Biden administration (and Black) predecessor Lloyd Austin, had been transparent in his disdain for an accomplished Black leader. Last November, Hegseth said that Brown had to be fired because any general “that was involved in any of that DEI woke shit has got to go.” Last month, in a speech that felt like a culmination of months of the Trump administration’s racial animus meant to break not just American institutions but American culture, he told hundreds of top military officials that the Trump administration had worked since day one “to remove the social justice, politically correct and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department” and called the idea that diversity is our strength an “insane fallacy.”

Underpinning the new racism cast as anti-DEI is its intellectual laziness — its  rank stupidity. Calling leaders of color who simply support diversity the “woke radical left,” a stock smear within the GOP, is absurd on its face. Racism is always rooted in fear and unreason, of course, a prime example of intellectual laziness. It’s the foundation of Trump’s bigger war on intellect and reason in America, and it’s worked. When he accused President Barack Obama of not being born in America back in 2009 — suggesting the nation’s first Black president didn’t qualify for the job because of his color — there was some outcry but plenty of takers. That pernicious lie laid the foundation for many other attacks on Black Americans that have become Trump’s hallmark as president, including his speculation earlier this year that a plane crash in D.C. was caused by DEI, or his more recent call to prosecute Beyoncé for allegedly being paid millions to endorse Kamala Harris (she wasn’t). 

The total lack of shame these days around antiblackness within a GOP that has capitulated to Trump, our elected officials’ willingness to make knee-jerk bigotry a pillar of politics and of daily life, is dispiriting, to say the least. It’s also terrifying because it marries the mercurial stupidity of racism with real power to enact it. The Confederacy only controlled the South; Trump, who is restoring a Confederate monument to the nation’s capital, seeks to control the whole country. And virtually his entire party seems to approve. 

In this distressing reality there is a truth that qualifies as a ray of hope. In continually discrediting Blackness, Trump and his MAGA base continually remind us of the opposite: that Black people, far from being inferior or separate from other Americans, have long been the moral vanguard for the entire country. The post-slavery fight for Black equality led by Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois and others was from the beginning a fight for a free America articulated in the Constitution and venerated over generations by leaders of all colors and all causes. The Black fight for a more just and compassionate nation, starting with the fight for jobs commensurate with their talents, positions they more than earned and had every right to keep, is nothing less than America’s fight for its own claims on democracy and that nebulous but still-essential thing called the American dream.

After the rude awakening with my professor in 1986, I fought for that dream by holding my ground, insisting he was wrong and that the work I’d given him was mine. He gave me an oral quiz on the thesis, which I easily passed, and he finally gave me an A, albeit reluctantly. He hadn’t changed his mind about me, or about Black students. I had won a battle but hardly the war.

Still, I remained optimistic. I told myself that this was only one setback, that there would be more chances to prove myself to different professors and potential employers down the road that was many miles long. This was America; for all its troubling history, I believed in the breadth of opportunities unique to such a wealthy country whose great diversity was part of that wealth, opportunities that would always offset the hypocrisies. Black struggle would keep the good tension going, the democratic experiment in play, and Black people would finally overcome. I don’t believe that anymore.