How Trumpâs attacks on DEI and Palestine activists are connected
Donald Trump has ushered in his second term with a full-fledged assault on DEI programs and advocates for Palestinian rights. Both attacks should be understood within the long history of White backlash to movements for social and racial justice.
The national crackdown against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) was inevitable. After racial progress, there is often retrenchment.
DEI programs were the institutionalized response to the Black Lives Matter movement. They reshaped conversations around representation, missing perspectives, and ultimately who belongs, whether in universities, boardrooms, or other institutions of power.
So when President Donald Trump terminated these programs in the public and private sectors with a stroke of his pen through executive orders, it was a stark reminder that the past is a prologue in the struggle for racial equality.
That is, racial justice in the United States has always been a cycle of violent repression followed by nonviolent progress, prompting retrenchment by white elites.
We are seeing a similar wave of retrenchment today, targeting not only the accomplishments of the Black Lives Matter movement but also the Palestine Human Rights Student Movement, a direct but underappreciated legacy of the Black Lives Matter Movement.
History of retrenchment
Todayâs anti-DEI wave is the contemporary version of the anti-affirmative action retrenchment of the 1970s. Affirmative action was the racial progress arising from the nonviolent civil rights movement of the 1960s, which was in response to decades-long anti-Black repression of the Jim Crow era. Jim Crow laws were the retrenchment against the racial progress of the Reconstruction era. And Reconstruction arose from a bloody civil war that ended the 250-year enslavement of Black human beings.
Had it not been for the nonviolent social movement led by Black people in the 1960s, American universities, schools, and places of employment would still be comprised exclusively of white people.
But retrenchment on progress in racial equality soon followed. Special interest groups sued the University of California in 1978, the University of Michigan in 2003 and Harvard University in 2022. Like todayâs assault on DEI programs, the plaintiffs sought to prohibit race as a factor in the admissions policy of public universities.
Any attempt to achieve a diverse student body that reflects our diverse society was allegedly anti-white racism. Sound familiar?
On February 14, the U.S. Department of Educationâs Office of Civil Rights warned K-12 schools and universities that they must terminate DEI initiatives in admissions, hiring, and institutional programming or risk losing federal funding. The reasoning put forward by the Trump administration is not new: any efforts to remedy historic discrimination against racial minorities is anti-White discrimination.
Or put another way, DEI programs threaten White supremacy. The same system of racial privileges that has produced the structural racial inequalities harming Black and Brown communities for centuries.
Targeting the Palestine movement
Repression historically first targets freedom of speech exercised by racial minorities..
For over a year, a multi-racial and multi-religious movement of students put into practice the civil rights for racial justice they had studied in their history books when they organized teach-ins and protests against Israelâs indiscriminate bombing of Palestinians in Gaza. On college campuses across the country, an anti-war movement reminiscent of the 1970s anti-Vietnam movement triggered a national conversation revisiting a foreign policy that funds Israelâs ethnic cleansing and racial injustice against the Palestinian people. But it also forced the nation to confront the question: do Black and Brown Palestinian lives matter as much as Israeli lives?
Challenging decades of anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic racist propaganda, college students demanded their universities divest from U.S. companies that produced the military weapons used by the Israeli military to kill over 45,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, in just 15 months. But that progress was quickly met by the retrenchment we are witnessing today.
The diverse group of student activists experienced retrenchment tactics similar to Black civil rights leaders for dissenting against groups raced, and in turn privileged, as Whites: smear campaigns, harassment, and wrongful imprisonments.
The Department of Education weaponized antisemitism to investigate over seventy universities for allowing student anti-war protestsunder threat of losing federal funding. Police forces stormed college campuses to arrest student protesters. And the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce unleashed its coercive power to bully, intimidate, and harass university presidents â starting with the first Black woman president of Harvard University.
Congressional resolutions condemned the student protests as antisemitic, without a single mention of the numerous hate crimes committed against Palestinians since October 2023.
University administrators abused their authority to selectively enforce policies to expel and discipline pro-Palestinian student activists â most of whom were Palestinian, Arab, and black students. External Zionist special interest groups targeted student activists in smear campaigns and doxing. Their motivations are telling.
The advocacy of these students, just like DEI initiatives, threatens White supremacy and its dominance not only in the United States but globally as well. It forces the United States to not only confront its system of racial inequality but to rectify it. The students attempted to, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr, bend the arc of the moral universe towards justice.
Even more chilling, the Department of Homeland Security arrested Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil for leading Columbia Universityâs student protests against Israelâs war on Gaza. In a letter from a Louisiana detention centerwhere he is imprisoned, Khalil encapsulates this by saying, âMy unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the last 16 months⊠for decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand US laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities.â
Opportunity for solidarity
To protect our democracy from such retrenchment, we must learn three lessons from the history of white backlash against racial progress.
First, laws are vigorously enforced to over-police racial minorities, like Khalil, while simultaneously under-enforced in favor of groups raced as âWhiteâ in American society.
Second, individual rights in the U.S. Constitution are robustly protected when exercised by groups that are raced, and in turn, privileged as White. Pro-Israeli white student protesters who supported Israelâs war on Gaza were rarely, if at all, punished by universities or the government for exercising their free speech rights. Yet, those same free speech rights are frequently violated when exercised by racial minorities.
Finally, the more subordinated identities you possessâreligion, disability, sexual orientation, immigrant status, ethnicity and so onâthe more vulnerable you are to experiencing double standards and structural inequality. In Khalilâs case, a Palestinian legal permanent resident with no criminal offense, he was swept away by immigration authorities under Trumpâs orders despite having legal validity to be in the United States.
In an attempt to dismantle a movement that challenges a U.S. foreign policy deeply entrenched in White supremacy, Trump is behaving like an authoritarian while accusing racial minorities, Muslims, Arabs, and others who disagree with his crackdown on DEI and pro-Israeli policies of threatening American democracy.
The governmentâs repression of free speech and academic freedom also makes this historic moment ripe for a new cross-racial social movement toward progress.
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