Juneteenth Grenade

As institutions roll back DEI programs — some with pride, others under pressure — the timing isn’t lost on those paying attention. This Juneteenth, while companies post stock photos and send out pre-approved “diversity” emails, there’s a growing silence where there should be progress.

DEI is being treated like a trend that ran its course — a political liability instead of a moral and historical necessity. But dismantling DEI doesn’t create neutrality. It reinforces the conditions that made DEI necessary in the first place. The people leading this backlash either don’t understand the history — or they do, and they’re fine with it repeating.

Slavery in the United States wasn’t a footnote. It was the foundation. For more than 250 years, this country built its economy, its laws, and its institutions on the forced labor and dehumanization of Black people. And when slavery was technically abolished, the oppression simply evolved — through sharecropping, convict leasing, Jim Crow laws, redlining, school segregation, and mass incarceration.

That legacy is still visible today, not just in policy, but in behavior — behavior that is often criticized within Black communities without any connection to its origins. Violence, distrust, fractured families, the internalized use of slurs, generational poverty — these are not inherent traits. They are the aftershocks of a system designed to break the human spirit and profit from its destruction.

Enslaved people were conditioned to survive by suppressing resistance, enduring violence, and avoiding attachment. Black men were torn from families. Black women were forced to raise the children of their abusers. Love itself was dangerous. These weren’t just brutalities — they were cultural disruptions passed down in silence, then mistaken for culture itself.

When people look at the present-day struggles of Black communities and separate them from this history, they are either uninformed or willfully dishonest. The current attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are part of the same denial. Dismantling DEI is not a principled stance — it is an attempt to preserve the status quo.

As for the predictable what-about-me responses — they deserve clarity, not deference.

Yes, the Holocaust was horrific. Yes, Japanese Americans suffered deeply through forced internment. Those injustices are real. But they are not comparable in scale or duration. Black Americans endured 250 years of chattel slavery — not just exclusion, but generational ownership. That was followed by a full century of legal apartheid. There has never been a sustained national reckoning on that scale.

Japanese Americans received formal apologies and reparations. Jewish survivors of the Holocaust have been compensated by multiple governments. In both cases, there was at least an attempt to acknowledge and repair.

Black Americans have received no such structural remedy — only scattered programs, brief moments of attention, and a mountain of excuses.

Even Native Americans — who also suffered centuries of genocide and displacement — have been granted some recognition through tribal sovereignty, federal support, and (in some cases) free access to higher education. Is it enough? No. But the precedent is clear: when a country causes generational harm, it owes generational repair.

For Black Americans, that repair must begin with education.

Free higher education isn’t a radical proposal — it’s a basic attempt at balance. If slavery prevented literacy for generations, and systemic racism blocked access to opportunity after that, then education is the most direct route to rebuilding what was taken. Affirmative action is not about favoritism — it’s about course correction. And it must remain in place until we see multiple generations of Black families earning degrees, building intergenerational wealth, and no longer being treated as exceptions when they succeed.

None of this is about guilt. It’s about responsibility. A country that built its wealth on the backs of enslaved people cannot claim to be just unless it confronts that reality — not with slogans, but with policy.

Slavery didn’t end in a meaningful way. It just mutated into new forms. And if we’re serious about change, then the repair must match the damage.

This is what justice looks like. This is what reparations look like. And anything less is a continuation of the original crime.

Dylan Farris, Ed.D.