To Be Equal #1
Marc H. Morial, President and CEO National Urban League
“Every nation’s history includes unsettling truths that many would prefer to forget or deny. But true patriotism demands confronting the truths of our history—no matter how embarrassing or dishonorable—and undertaking the difficult work of learning from the lessons of our past in order to move forward. For the United States, that work requires reckoning with our shameful legacy of racial subjugation of Black people in this country—from slavery and Jim Crow to mass incarceration and police violence—as well as our long history of express discrimination against other people of color, women, and LGBTQ persons.
Without uninhibited discussion and examination of that legacy, we are ill-equipped as a nation to address its ongoing manifestations in present-day forms of discrimination and bias.” — National Urban League v. Trump
At the current rate of progress, it will take between 100 and 300 years for Black Americans to achieve parity with white Americans.
First annually and now biannually, the National Urban League publishes the Equality Index, a calculation of the social and economic status of African Americans relative to whites. Rooted in the Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787, which counted enslaved African Americans as “three-fifths” of a person, the Index would be 100% under full equality. Currently 75.7%, the Index has moved less than 3% in 20 years, indicating a 180 year wait to achieve parity.
That squares with the findings of a McKinsey study showing it will take between 110 and 320 years for “Black Americans to reach a level of economic prosperity and quality of life that’s on par with that of their White neighbors.”
President-elect Donald Trump and his allies are determined to make sure that it takes even longer.
At the end of his first term, Trump issued an executive order banning policies that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion for federal agencies, contractors, and grant recipients. The National Urban League immediately filed a lawsuit; Trump lost reelection and President Biden overturned it immediately upon taking office.
This time around, Trump isn’t waiting to start stamping out racial justice initiatives. He’s vowed to rescind President Biden’s Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity, issued on his first day in office.
Seizing on the widely-accepted myth that increasing diversity is synonymous with “anti-white discrimination,” the Trump administration plans to use civil rights laws to reinforce white privilege in every facet of society, public and private. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for Defense Secretary has promoted the racist fallacy that the long-overdue elevation of Black officers to senior leadership positions compromises military readiness.
In fact, Trump’s proposed cabinet includes only one Black member, a former NFL player whose only qualification to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development is his history of opposing affordable housing, protection for poor tenants, and aid for the homeless.
Trump will eliminate federal funding for any school that promotes racial equity or confronts the reality of racism in the nation’s history. He has even vowed to direct the Department of Justice to pursue federal “civil rights cases” against them.
He plans to resurrect the failed 1776 Commission, which historians reviled as a plot to “elevate ignorance about the past to a civic virtue.
Hoping to avoid attacks from the incoming administration and its most fanatical defenders. many private corporations are retreating from their commitment to DEI. The board of Costco, in contrast, recently rejected an anti-DEI shareholder proposal.
While post-election surveys show that Trumps’ election was largely a misguided reaction to the cost of groceries, Trump and his allies have taken it as an endorsement of their every vicious and bigoted policies. Americans overwhelmingly support corporate diversity policies. President Biden’s administration — like most diverse institutions, was more innovative, adaptable, resilient, and able to solve problems more quickly because of its diversity.
If the incoming administration doesn’t realize the benefits of DEI early on, the National Urban League and our civil rights allies are on hand to hold it to account.
