Labor Must Oppose Racist Purges

Last year, Trump rode back into office, guns blazing, aiming to take down this country’s previous liberal status quo. The ruling class could no longer afford the cost of maintaining appearances to mask its oppressive ways and had anointed him to lay down the law. Chief among his targets right out of the gate was “diversity, equity and inclusion” aka DEI. On Day One, Trump signed an executive order banning DEI in federal agencies. On Day Two, he revoked LBJ’s 1965 executive order mandating “equal opportunity” for black people in the recruitment, hiring and training of federal contractors, referring to it as “illegal DEI.” And Trump was only getting started.

With tremendous speed, he moved not only to bulldoze DEI in every corner of society, but also to make the very words “diversity, equity and inclusion” taboo. In a high-profile showdown, he beat the DEI right out of Columbia University and other educational institutions by swinging the club of financial blackmail. Law firms, facing the loss of security clearances and federal contracts, also fell in line. Corporate America did not require much convincing at all to significantly scale back their initiatives or scrap them altogether—the time for “wokeness” had come and gone. Today, DEI programs are far fewer and further between.

The racist reactionary in the White House has waged his war against DEI with such intensity that a casual observer might believe that these initiatives were somehow fundamentally transforming the country’s landscape in favor of black people. Hardly. While DEI programs often look different from workplace to workplace, most have featured some combination of employee resource groups, “cultural awareness” training and hiring targets. The main focus of DEI departments is to push liberal values, while internally set goals for hiring and promotion of women and minorities were almost never met. Very few black people have received any tangible benefit from DEI outside a thin layer of professionals who got access to jobs that otherwise might not have been available to them—and DEI has clearly done nothing to reduce rampant discrimination in society.

Slamming this barely cracked door shut on black professionals would be bad enough. But Trump’s anti-DEI witchhunt has assumed far greater dimensions as a widespread, all-around racist purge throwing back black people and dragging down the working class too. The closure of federal DEI offices and layoff of their staff were the opening salvo in an ongoing offensive against the government workforce that claimed some 300,000 jobs last year. Tolerating no opposition, the Trump administration at the outset threatened federal employees with “adverse consequences” if they failed to snitch on colleagues who defended DEI.

In response to the DEI ban and early DOGE cuts, the leadership of federal employee unions like the AFGE filed suit in court. Not missing a beat, Trump gave them a taste of the bare-knuckle tactics of a true class warrior and voided the union contracts by executive fiat. True to form, the labor statesmen rushed to bring more litigation rather than do anything to show Trump that he was not the only one who could disrupt business as usual in the corridors of power.

Black women have borne the brunt of the DEI purge and attacks on federal workers. They have also suffered the failure of union leaders in both the public and private sector to meet the moment. Over the course of last year, black women suffered a sharp rise in unemployment, at levels unknown among white women since the Great Recession. The reactionaries have successfully twisted DEI (“Didn’t Earn It”) to cast a long shadow over the qualifications and accomplishments of black people, especially black women, freezing many out of the job market.

Trump has kept right on kicking black people down every chance he gets. His MAGA cronies find the DEI bogeyman lurking behind every disaster resulting from the decay of this society and the negligence of its ruling class: the midair collision over the Potomac, the L.A. wildfires, the Baltimore bridge collapse. References to historic black figures, like Harriet Tubman, Jackie Robinson and the Tuskegee Airmen, were scrubbed for a time from government websites as casualties of the DEI war. At the same time, the Commander-in-Chief has ordered the restoration of Confederate statues and has taken the Smithsonian to task for supposedly focusing too much on “how bad Slavery was.” To top it off, he leveraged the dismantling of DEI programs into the dismantling, agency by agency, of the federal government’s civil rights enforcement infrastructure dating back to the 1960s.

All this is clearly bad news for black people, whether or not they ever participated in DEI programs. The forces of racist reaction are swarming all around, and things can easily go from bad to worse very quickly. Something must be done to hold the line on behalf of the black masses—and running to the courts ain’t it. Rulings that did not go Trump’s way have proved little more than small bumps in the road that he just goes right around and keeps on steamrolling.

But the unions themselves could be a roadblock to this reaction. They have both social weight and a real interest in stopping the racist purge dead in its tracks. Trump’s success in throwing black people out of jobs and forcing them into retreat has only made it easier for him and the bosses to turn the screws on all other workers. This is true even when the jobs in question are, in the first instance, professional or managerial. The purge, well underway, is obviously not confined just to the top but extends throughout society. The attacks on DEI have not left labor unscathed either, beginning with the federal employee unions but not limited to them. For example, legislation adopted last year to ban DEI from Ohio colleges and universities also prohibits faculty strikes.

Labor has much to gain from fighting against every aspect of the reactionary assault on DEI. Doing so would be a means not only to relieve some of the pressure on its own neck, but also to cement a fighting alliance with the black community against the common enemy. But a simple defense of the remnants of DEI or a push for its revival is not going to get the job done because this would be toxic to the unity of the working class and oppressed that is urgently needed to beat back the Trump juggernaut. To get anywhere, this fight must strive instead to break down all barriers to the advancement of black people in a way that brings all other workers up too.

DEI: An Invitation to a Backlash

DEI is premised on the wrong view that racial oppression stems from the moral failings of individuals, rather than the material interests of the ruling class. It is also stamped by the timing of its birth—the period marked by growing cracks in U.S. imperialism’s global dominance. As a result, DEI is largely performance art. The bosses make a show of caring about women, black people and other minorities and subject their employees to training sessions about how race works, all the better to create the illusion of progress despite their refusal to provide decent wages and benefits, much less the promised opportunities for the “underrepresented.”

Obama first institutionalized DEI in the federal government. He entered office in the early days of the Great Recession and dedicated himself to saving the banks and industry from collapse. His success came at the expense of the working class and black people, who lost their homes and jobs in droves. Recognizing that he was sitting on a powder keg, the first black president advised the Wall Street vultures: “My administration is the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks.” The discontent ran deep, as the much-touted corporate recovery two years on had not trickled down to workers, whose jobs were increasingly temp, part-time and low-tier if they had a job at all. There was little positive to point to when Obama issued his 2011 “Diversity and Inclusion” executive order for the federal workforce.

The less the liberals had to offer materially to the working class, the more they resorted to grand “woke” gestures like DEI. They had no way to retain their hold on the reins of power other than to cry crocodile tears for the oppressed and beat their gums about DEI to distract from the worsening conditions of the vast majority of the population. Under Biden, this most token of measures flourished all the more as the overall economic picture darkened for working people, propelling a massive backlash that shook the old liberal order to its foundations.

DEI mushroomed in corporate settings after the murder of George Floyd and outbreak of mass BLM protests. DEI was convenient window-dressing that corporations soon made highly profitable. It allowed the bosses to pat themselves on the back and score points for nothing more than promoting a woman or a person of color. It also let them off the hook and shifted blame for inequality and discrimination onto white workers, especially white men, who were scolded for their privilege and “unconscious bias.” “Chief diversity officers” were hired for PR purposes, but nothing of substance was done to improve conditions for black people or women or any other group of workers on the job.

The Biden presidency was the perfect storm. On the one hand, his policies fueled rampant inflation that clobbered workers of all races and ethnicities. On the other, he frequently saluted his own DEI credentials, promising in advance to promote black and women candidates to high government posts. And he did so in record numbers. This played right into Trump’s hands. The potent brew of economic strangulation and perceived “reverse discrimination” made Trump attractive to many.

Hiring targets added to the explosive mix. Blocking off a certain share of a limited pool of jobs for one group to the exclusion of all others is an invitation to a backlash, especially when the overall economic pie is shrinking. And it was shrinking before everyone’s eyes. The predictable outcome was to inflame racial divisions and pit white and black working people against one another. All the while, the ruling class, which is truly and solely responsible for keeping black people down, gets away with murder. Their very rule is based on the forcible segregation of the black masses as a powerful instrument to weaken the working class and drive down its conditions.

The cost of DEI is certainly not worth the measly benefits it has provided, including for the lucky few who received jobs or promotions under its umbrella, because now an inescapable cloud of doubt surrounds black people and their abilities. They always had to work two, three, four times as hard as everyone else to “prove” they belonged. Now it’s even worse.

Trump regularly denounces DEI as the main obstacle to purely merit-based hiring. This, of course, is total fantasy. Employers never hired based on merit alone before DEI and will not do so after it is gone. Trump, as a businessman with more than a few employees, is well aware of this. But he is playing to the grievances of white men, partly in an attempt to distract from his own inability to corral the cost of living despite his campaign pledge to put the brakes on inflation the moment he returned to the White House.

The administration has gone to great lengths to paint DEI as discriminatory toward white people, whom Trump judges to have been “very badly treated” ever since the civil rights movement. He has even put the remaining government civil rights enforcement infrastructure at their disposal to pursue “reverse discrimination” suits against liberal figures and institutions. Notably, in December the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission publicly solicited white men to file such claims. The liberals are horrified that Trump has turned their apparatus against them. They present the federal government as the main instrument to defend black rights. But its main role has been to help liberal leaders contain and derail the black struggle.

Working-Class Unity Across the Color Line

Although the Democrats were prime movers behind DEI, they have offered no defense outside of court challenges to Trump’s hammer blows against it. In fact, they were quick to drop any semblance of concern for black people and other oppressed groups after Trump’s electoral victory. They most certainly are not going to reignite the black struggle.

Some liberal forces have initiated consumer boycotts of corporations, like Target, which rolled back their DEI programs. These have accomplished little to nothing, aside from possibly contributing to CEO turnover at Target. What would actually make a difference to the status of black workers at the retailer would be a campaign to unionize them. This would be a means to win higher pay, better benefits, job security and greater protections against discrimination. More generally, a large-scale unionization drive across industry is a surefire way to put both white workers and black people on firmer footing to defend themselves and fight for advances on the job and in society. Appeals to the bosses to “do the right thing” just leave them in the driver’s seat to do as they see fit.

Instead, the unions need to step out front to fight against the unfolding racist purge. To make that happen will require struggle within the unions themselves. All too often, their leadership pushes token liberal schemes like DEI in partnership with the bosses to claim commitment to black equality, rather than mobilize the membership to fight for it in the concrete against the bosses so as to bridge racial divisions and strengthen the unions and their struggles.

This is true in the private sector as well as the public. For example, the UAW-Ford National Joint DEI Committee had operated for some years prior to the 2023 auto strike, in which Shawn Fain refused to explicitly raise anything to combat racial oppression. And so, a golden opportunity was squandered. Black Detroit could have been galvanized behind the union and a real blow landed on behalf of auto workers and the black population. Instead, the strike ended without winning anything of enduring value.

Bringing the unions forward will only be possible if white workers recognize that the defense of their own quality of life requires defense of black people under attack. Throwing a bunch of black people out of work is not going to make things easier for white workers or create more opportunities for them. It will just give the bosses an even stronger whip hand to crack away at conditions on the job and set the terms of exploitation—and further embolden Trump to attack the unions.

If labor fails to take a stand against the racist purge, it will only reinforce the view among black people that white workers will never fight for them. This would just compound the problem, because white workers are crucial potential allies in the black struggle. Their numbers would provide indispensable additional leverage against the ruling class.

To forge working-class unity across the color line all forms of liberal shaming must be rejected. We cannot keep falling prey to liberal divide-and-conquer in a struggle over the bosses’ scraps. The unions must fight for jobs for all, control of hiring and training and the full equality of black people on the job and in every other respect.

Despite the upward mobility of a small layer of the black petty bourgeoisie, daily life for the masses remains defined by poverty and racial oppression. This will only change by toppling the walls of segregation, and putting the wealth of society to work for us. As long as the parasitic ruling class calls the shots, it will fight tooth and nail to stop us. In order to defeat this behemoth and get the things we all need, the fight for black equality must be fused to the fight for workers power.