Back in February, representatives of several right-wing groups told our mostly right-wing state senators that diversity programs and honest depictions of history were dangerous.
They were “dehumanizing,” said Becky Gerritson of the Eagle Forum. John Eidsmoe, a longtime ally of former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, called them divisive.
“We’re concerned about indoctrination and a particular ideology, an ideology that divides people into identity groups rather than measuring their individual worth, that teaches people to be ashamed of their race or their heritage and teaches them hatred of their ancestors,” Eidsmoe, who is white, said at the time.
Anyone with a fourth-grade Alabama history course behind them can appreciate the chutzpah of this statement. Alabama is Alabama because white elites spent nearly a century identifying and abusing Black individuals and communities. That fact is a “divisive concept,” I suppose.
But GOP lawmakers, cynically or wholeheartedly, swallowed up these absurdities about diversity.
Now our public campuses have to prioritize this nonsense over building communities that reflect a state where over a quarter of the population is Black.
Both the University of Alabama and Auburn University plan to shut down their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices to comply with the new state law.
If you want colleges where young people of different backgrounds mingle and learn from each other, this is madness. Both schools are overwhelmingly white. And while the percentage of Alabama’s student body identifying as Black rose from 10.5% in 2016 to 11.5% in 2023, it’s going backward on the Plains. The percentage of Black students at Auburn fell from 6.8% in 2016 to 4.9% in 2023.
UA and Auburn seem to be trying to salvage their programs. Alabama is creating an office of “access and opportunity.” Auburn stressed that it would reassign diversity staff. We’ll have to see who the campuses deem worthy of opportunity, and how much that offends the anti-DEI crowd.
But this isn’t the only place where even modest efforts to address Alabama’s long tradition of inequity are under attack.
Conservative activist Edward Blum, who helped Shelby County and the U.S. Supreme Court gut the Voting Rights Act in 2013 (and who is also a famous enemy of attempts to create campus diversity) formed a group that is suing Alabama over a 1989 law requiring that the nine-member Alabama Real Estate Appraisers Board include at least two Black members.
“Alabama has not just the statute we are challenging, but other statutes that require racial discrimination on public boards,” a representative of the group told Ralph Chapoco. “We intend to eliminate racial classification on boards across the country, and Alabama is in our crosshairs.”
Of course, we know what actual racial discrimination looks like. Take Black Alabamians’ homeownership rate (50.3%), which trails that of white Alabamians (77%). Giving Black Alabamians a small voice in a process key to reversing decades of wealth destruction is the least the state can do.
But the state has effectively conceded the point to Blum. The state is only fighting the organization’s challenge to broader and effectively nonbinding diversity language. In fact, if an organization representing Black realtors in the state hadn’t intervened in the lawsuit, Blum’s group might have coasted to victory.
It’s just another pathetic attempt to co-opt the ideals of the Civil Rights Movement in order to entrench deep racial inequities in the nation. It’s the mindset that quotes Martin Luther King Jr.’s yearning for judgment by character while ignoring his insistence that economic justice accompany that.
This project claims to be a call for a colorblind society. In fact, it’s just trying to affirm our white-conscious one.
Whatever their intentions, these anti-DEI, anti-affirmative action projects protect white privilege and elevate white grievance over all other concerns. They view criticisms of either as illegitimate. They treat independent minority voices as alien and hostile.
So they put blinders on education and public policy. Not to treat individuals as individuals, but to ensure that the heavy burdens of racism that many Americans bear are kept out of sight.
That way, you can ignore major disparities in health, wealth, and schooling as you insist that everyone is on the same path in life.
And we already know what happens when our judiciary shuts its eyes to the damage of racism. After Shelby County v. Holder, where Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “the nation has changed” since 1965, Alabama politicians moved to ban curbside voting; ban private aid for election administration, and criminalize some forms of voting assistance with absentee ballots.
Now two of our leading state schools, which enroll over 70,000 students between them, are afraid to acknowledge the obvious facts of racial injustice.
Maybe these desires for a colorblind society are sincere. But if that’s the case, they’re impractical. They’re skipping over the long and difficult work of repairing the damage of slavery and segregation and going straight to public declarations of equality.
That’s not colorblindness. That’s refusing to see.
And when we don’t see the diverse burdens our neighbors bear, we ensure that Alabama remains an unequal state.
This article was published by Alabama Reflector, which is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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