Black History Month

By Regan Byrd

It is Black History Month, but it certainly doesn’t feel like it. This is usually a time for self-reflection on our nation’s deep history of anti-Black racism and hostility towards one of the demographics who built the country as it exists today. This is usually a time for the Black community to celebrate the ingenuity, resolve, beauty, and spirit of our ancestors. Sometimes, it is even a time to reflect on the future of the Black community in the United States, and where we see ourselves hundreds of years from now in, hopefully, a more liberated future. But I have seen precious few of those conversations happening today. Or yesterday. Or the day before.  What do I see instead?

Fear. Panic. Dejectedness. Sadness. More sadness. A lot of sadness. In short, a torrent of emotions that ironically, speak very deeply to the Black communities of the U.S. and beyond, especially during this month.

So many of us right now feel…lost.

Most of these emotions can be attributed to the election and inauguration of Donald Trump for the second time. January 20th, inauguration day,  was only the 3rd time in our nation’s history that an inauguration took place on Martin Luther King Jr Day. This federal holiday has only existed since 1983 (and has only been recognized in all 50 states since 2000), so maybe it isn’t that unusual. For it to happen now though, during this Presidency, during this time, feels like a cosmic joke to me.

Donald Trump, by any objective standard, has not been a friend to the Black community, other communities of color, or really, any community besides his own family for his entire adult life, I would argue. In 1973, he and his father were sued by the Justice Department (which he now controls) for their alleged refusal to rent apartments to Black tenants in buildings predominantly occupied by White tenants, even illegally labelling Black applicants as (C) for colored on applications.  In 1989, he called for New York State to reinstate the death penalty against the Exonerated Five, formerly known as the Central Park Five, five young Black and Mestizo teenagers who were dehumanized as animals and predators on a national scale, and wrongly convicted of rape with coerced confessions and dubious evidence. In the 1990s, he questioned the indigenous ancestry of tribes looking to build casinos that would compete with his. He claimed our first Black President can’t have been born in the United States and demanded to see a birth certificate, which was produced and promptly ignored. His former chief of staff quoted him as saying “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had” and “Hitler did a lot of good things” during his last term.

I could continue down this pathway, describing other incidents of racism, describing how shocking it is, yet still not surprising it is, that a man who has made repeated sexual comments about his own daughter, has been photographed with child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on multiple occasions, has been found liable for sexual abuse and assault in civil court, has incited an insurrection against the peaceful transition of power on January 6, 2021, has been convicted of felony falsification of business documents to hide an extramarital affair, has repeatedly personally profiteered off the office of the Presidency, including releasing a “meme coin” crypto scam to rob his supporters and the naive of millions of dollars immediately after beginning his second term, is our President.

Again.

And he won this Presidency, twice, against the only two women who have ever been in contention for the Presidency; two women who, to many of us, had every seeming advantage to earn the plurality of the votes, in terms of intellect, poise, and experience.

I could keep talking about that, but everyone already knows all of this. To many, it didn’t matter enough not to vote for him. To many others, they appreciate him for all or most of these facts.

I could keep talking about this, but I don’t want to anymore. And I don’t think we, those who oppose this administration, should anymore either.

adrienne marie brown, author of Emergent Strategy, says “what we pay attention to grows.” This administration thrives on attention, chaos, and dominating the news cycle at every turn. Donald Trump, the former reality TV star, has mastered media manipulation and getting free coverage from the 24 hour for-profit press and the social media moguls that love to make money on our fear, outrage, and frustration. Media that at the same time cowers before this new administration and seeks favor for company gains and government funds. You watched news articles and commentators lie directly to your face and refuse to call a Nazi salute a Nazi salute at this President’s inauguration. By continuing to feed into this media cycle, we grow and empower this administration, as well as profit-driven news and social media. Sadly, our anger and fear makes a lot of people a lot of money.

I ask instead: What is it we want to grow?

That is all easier said than done. The fact is, we have to pay attention, at least some of the time. Many communities are living in fear of ICE raids, stolen data from federal agencies, legislation dismantling fundamental rights, and the destruction of social safety nets. All these efforts must be tracked, opposed, defunded, organized against, and stopped. But still…

What world are we trying to create? What future are we trying to build? And what has gone wrong in that building process?

These are in fact the harder, much more profound questions we must ask ourselves in this moment. The “we” on the left are quite adept at examining, critiquing, deconstructing, and dismantling. We are much less practiced at envisioning, collaborating, building, and constructing. We speak far more about what needs to be stopped, torn down, and eliminated, and far less about what should exist, what we have yet to create, and who we need to partner with to create it.

I know what future I am trying to build with my fellow community, what future I want to live in.

I want more people, as many as possible, to live out their entire lives as they would see fit, without being murdered, enslaved, raped, or robbed of their time, resources, sanity, health, peace, or hope.

I want more people to have their basic needs met, like good food, clean water, reliable housing, and safe medicine, so they have more time and energy to build relationships, contribute to the collective community and collective good, and find their purpose and meaning in life.

I want to reduce harm as much as possible. I want to reduce suffering as much as possible.

I want to increase joy as much as possible. I want to increase love, community, and belonging, as much as possible.

I want to enjoy my time here, on this planet, as much as I can, before the next phase of my existence or non-existence, whatever that may be. I want others to have the same opportunity.

I don’t want to hate you. I don’t want you to hate me.

I want you to thrive. I want you to want me to thrive.

What is it we long for, for this world and each other?

These are the principles I always come back to, partially because they ground me, keep me centered in my own work and purpose, but also because I truly believe these principles are nearly universal. I think these ideas at least give us a starting point to discuss what it means to be human, what our vision for the future is or could be, and what common understanding and collective purpose as a species might look like.

Before us is not just a question of one administration, but an existential question about how long this is going to continue. How long are we going to kill each other, steal from each other, ignore crisis after crisis, including the ultimate crisis of catastrophic climate change, and keep making the same mistakes regarding how our societies are run?

The reason I became an anti-oppression trainer, consultant, activist and a proponent of diversity, equity and inclusion, is because I wanted to work on these problems. I want individuals and organizations to learn from the past, of previous individuals and organizations who perpetuated oppression, harm, and death. I want individuals and organizations to truly commit to harm reduction, not just lawsuit avoidance and performative activism. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is a subset of anti-oppression work, and it was always meant to be an organizational toolset to support more proactive harm reduction in workplaces, beyond bare minimum legal requirements that in practice permit a great deal of harmful actions and biased behavior. DEI is about what organizations and workplaces need to examine, create, and anticipate, in policy and practice, in order to prevent discrimination based on identity, and to enable the best work environment and employee support.

For those unaware, the origins of diversity, equity, and inclusion go all the way back to the concept of affirmative action, stemming from Executive Order 10925 from then President Kennedy in 1961. The term affirmative action comes directly from the executive order mandating that government contractors “will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”  This order and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 led to the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce anti-discrimination laws.

Many organizations then and now continue to make the mistake of thinking that if they merely don’t actively discriminate, then fairness and equality naturally and neatly fall into place without any action on their part. This is simultaneously naive, incorrect, and harmful. Our organizations do not exist in a vacuum. They exist in a country and in a society that was and remains rampant with oppressive, unjust polices that have denied political, economic, social, and environmental resources to many historically marginalized groups, including communities of color, people with disabilities, women and people targeted by sexism, the queer community, and both documented and undocumented immigrants. Marginalized applicants and employees face barriers inside and outside the workplace that impact how they engage with employment and how they are perceived and treated by employers.

For example, according to a comprehensive study by the Economic Policy Institute in 2016, women at every single wage level and every single educational level earn less than their male counterparts. Women stand to lose between $500,000 to over $1 million during the course of their lifetime earnings due to the gender wage gap, and this is especially true for women of color. A significant portion of this gap can only be explained by gender discrimination. Meanwhile, my alma-mater, the University of Denver, was sued by the EEOC in 2016 for paying female law professors less than male law professors. It settled in 2018 for $2.66 million dollars being paid to the plaintiffs.

Like affirmative action, diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives advise the proactive and intentional removal of bias, discriminatory practices, and harmful policies in areas like hiring, promotions, leadership structure, retirement, parental leave, etc. This is to ensure harm is not being caused to anyone based on their identity, and that employers are avoiding putting the extreme burden of suing for discrimination on employees seeking remedy, an already difficult, exhaustive, and fraught process.

Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are about the duty of organizations to do and be better. These basic principles and practices of fairness and justice have taken the U.S. hundreds of years to achieve. It has taken decades upon decades of constitutional amendments, legislation, story-telling, activism, relationship building, movement building, and resistance to oppression paid in real blood, sweat and tears to make even the smallest strides in the fight for human dignity, autonomy, and opportunity.

And now, here I sit, during Black History Month, watching the small progress we have made erode and erode, progress has been much smaller than many want to admit.

As we know, slavery in the U.S. didn’t actually end with the 13th amendment. It has merely warped and shifted into our for-profit prison industrial complex, where people can be compelled to work with no pay and under threat of punishment. People with disabilities and medical needs still die because health insurance companies deny care and treat all of us like an expense to avoid, not lives to be protected. Every day, working people are still destroying their bodies and spirits, losing nearly all their time for joy and connection, drowning in debt and doubt for the future, all for crumbs we call wages that barely meet basic needs.

Diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) efforts weren’t going to address all that. But they were and are a step towards better institutions, and a component of hundreds of years of justice and liberation work. It felt like the conversation was just beginning, just starting to shift the tides in a way not seen since the last Civil Rights movements of the 60s and 70s. And now this.

This past year, DEIA has been outlawed or banned across the country. This week, this administration directed the Department of Justice to target private sector DEIA initiatives for potential criminal investigation. Matt Walsh, the right wing anti-intellectual whom I had the misfortune of meeting during his pseudo-documentary style attack on DEI work (a story I will share more about in the coming months and that you can read more about here https://www.washingtoninformer.com/far-right-campaign-against-anti-racism/), said on X “We must also punish the people who imposed [DEI] on our country and our children. They must be humiliated, financially ruined, and left destitution…Destroy them. No mercy.”

I don’t think doing this work makes me worthy of being destroyed. In fact, I don’t think any human is deserving of destruction, even those who cause harm. I think treating people as monsters, as subhuman, as irredeemable, as garbage, as valueless, is always a lie, always a mistake, and always oppressive. I fear that these types of sentiments will only grow and expand in the present day, as more and more of us are intentionally painted as monsters to serve those that benefit from such a narrative.

I cannot say what is to come or what this administration will truly do. What I can say is that we have the benefit of all the knowledge and work of our ancestors. What I can say is that we have all the lessons learned from our past liberation movements. What I can say is that we must do the hard work of building real relationships and a base that cares about justice and liberation for all. What I can say is that if we don’t learn how to be in conflict with one another without destroying one another, we will be lost. What I can say is that if we do not learn to heal ourselves, our minds, our bodies, and our trauma, we will be lost. What I can say is that if we don’t strive for what we long for, what we really desire, we will be lost.

This month, I will be looking to the legacy of my ancestors, to the wisdom of Black scholars, philosophers, and writers, to the creations of Black storytellers and artists, and to the power of activism and resistance the Black community of this country pioneered and has baked into our very bones. Perhaps this month, with renewed vigor and values, with renewed connection and commitment, we may be found.