31 Mar 2025 Donna Jackson: Black Community Wins When DEI Loses

In a commentary published at The Boston Herald, Project 21 Ambassador Donna Jackson says DEI programs hailed as helping black Americans are unnecessary, and actually racist in themselves:

DEI may provide a nice payday for its many practitioners and be a boon to its political beneficiaries, but for the black community, it is just the latest version of the racism we have faced for generations.  President Trump is to be applauded for taking it on.

Read her entire commentary below.

The politics of victimization is rarely for the benefit of the victims, and so it is with the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs that have spread across the federal government and private business. DEI may provide a nice payday for its many practitioners and be a boon to its political beneficiaries, but for the black community, it is just the latest version of the racism we have faced for generations.  President Trump is to be applauded for taking it on.

Donna Jackson

At the heart of DEI is the age-old and highly insulting notion of the helpless negro. We are told that we are victims of our white oppressors and incapable of overcoming anything on our own. And we need benevolent whites — 76% of DEI officers are white — to help us succeed. The paternalism is as thick as pea soup and hardly distinguishable from the straight-up racism of the past. Indeed, much of the advice from the DEI “experts” — for example, that hard work and educational achievement are associated with white supremacy and should be avoided — couldn’t be any more damaging to young blacks than if it had been deliberately designed for that purpose.

Real racism exists, and there are civil rights laws that protect against it. In 2025, there are far more significant problems facing the black community — too many single-parent households, dreadfully bad public schools, obstacles to homeownership and wealth creation, crime, and now a DEI industry that tells us that prosperity and self-sufficiency are impossible and that we should focus instead on demanding handouts and special favors. In this way, DEI fosters dependency on government — and on the Democratic Party supporting this agenda.

Sadly, DEI is often marketed as a new chapter in the civil rights movement.  In reality, it flouts nearly everything Martin Luther King and others stood for.

It is fair to ask what good DEI has done for the people it is supposed to be helping. Qualified blacks don’t need it, as the underlying assumption of systemic racism holding back all minorities is simply untrue. One wonders how much, if anything, the DEI establishment knows about the long history of black achievement in science, technology and entrepreneurship. Quite possibly, this history gets swept under the rug because it counters the perpetual victim narrative.

Granted, a relative few blacks may get make-work jobs or cash in as DEI consultants, but everyone else suffers from the continuation of race-obsessed policies that send precisely the wrong message.

Trump’s executive order Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity helps set us on the right path by ending DEI in the federal government and enforcing civil rights laws against its use in the private sector.

Treating DEI for what it is — a divisive step backward — is a necessary move toward replacing it with an approach that can lift up all Americans. The only people who need to fear a merit-based society are all the pointless DEI practitioners themselves.

Donna Jackson is an ambassador with the Project 21 black leadership network. This was previously published at The Boston Herald.