Black people have always fought racism. Trump, DEI attacks won't change that. | Opinion
Black people have fought against the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow segregation and a series of racist presidents long before Donald Trump was born. We will continue to resist.
Be warned – what you are about to read will soon be illegal (if it already isn't) in this now declining country. This missive will be banned because it reaffirms that white supremacy, racism, non-merit based white privilege and other ills have always been real and are still alive and well in America.
That is the truth. But now, in this increasingly villainous and authoritarian madhouse ruled by lies, political strongmen and oligarchs, simply telling the truth has become a revolutionary act.
It doesn’t matter if we speak of King Donald Trump, his chainsaw-wielding hitman Elon Musk, a child of South African Apartheid who openly supports a far-right German political party with Nazi ideological roots, or historically insignificant backwater Kentucky politicians like Jennifer Decker, Lindsey Tichenor and others who are attacking diversity and truth in education from kindergarten to college in one of America’s most uneducated states. They are all rooted in the same supremacist ideology that fears illusionary white physical displacement and political disempowerment.
As James Baldwin said, at this point "they have become, in themselves, moral monsters." They are heartless merchants so engulfed in vampiric capitalist greed that they even reduce suffering and dying people at home and abroad to cold, misleading monetary arguments. They have lied and done wrong for so long that they've forgotten how to do right, if they ever knew at all.
These people are rapaciously attacking everyone and everything from accomplished American military flag officers to prostrate federal workers to colleges and universities. Their meanness extends well beyond race but, to be sure, using the demonized catchall of DEI as cover, racial stratification is a major part of their agenda.
As Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic, what they are really seeking is a "Great Resegregation" that "will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety."
They should be warned to not mistake the weaker, fearful Black people whom their system has embraced for the whole of us.
Most of us are not easy kills. We never have been. I can't speak for other groups, but to paraphrase Claude McKay from over a century ago, when Black backs are pressed to the wall, we may die ‒ but we fight back! If our persecutors actually knew the history they're trying to ban, they'd know that.
Black people have fought through racist hell for centuries
Our people have fought through this country's racist hell for centuries:
- The slave Jemmy and his followers fought back in the Stono Rebellion of 1739.
- Black folk fought back in the New York Insurrection of 1741.
- Richard Allen and Absalom Jones fought back when they founded the Free African Society in 1787, and later the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
- Gabriel Prosser fought back in 1800.
- Charles Deslondes and more than 500 slaves fought back in the German Coast Uprising of 1811.
- Denmark Vesey fought back in 1822.
- David Walker fought back with his pen in 1829.
- Nat Turner fought back with knives, swords, guns and anything else he could find in 1831.
- Black people fought back after the U.S. Supreme Court told Dred Scott we had no rights that whites were "bound to respect" in 1857.
- Harriet Tubman resolved to "be free or die" and backed it up.
- Black people fought for our freedom in the Civil War.
- We fought back when white backlash tried to choke the life out of us after the Hayes-Tilden compromise ended Reconstruction.
Black people fought back through America’s glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow segregation, a series of racist presidents long before King Donald Trump was born and other unimaginable atrocities.
We fought back when you lynched our men, women and children.
We fought back at every turn when you disrespected and dehumanized us. Whether your name be Trump, Vance, Musk, Decker, Tichenor or those in league with them, know that there have always been Martins, Medgars, Malcolms, Thurgoods and Fannie Lous to oppose you. Whether you be a callous politician on the right or silent one on the so-called left; whether you be greedy transactional business leader or cowardly university president who quickly bows to this devilishness – be clear that we will fight back again!
That said, thank you! Thank you for making your racism more blatant with your every word, action and inaction. Thank you for taking your masks off.
As Malcolm said, thank you for "making it plain" for all to see and leaving no room for excuses. But remember this – you don’t know history. If you did, you’d know there was once what you would call a DEI poet named Langston Hughes who wrote a piece titled "Warning." It begins, "Negroes, sweet and docile, meek, humble and kind. Beware the day they change their mind!"
So keep coming for us if you want, but know that you’re going to have another fight on your hands. Consider yourselves warned!
Ricky L. Jones is a professor of Pan-African Studies at the University of Louisville and an opinion contributor for the Louisville Courier Journal, where this column originally appeared.