People of color are not simply guests who overstayed their welcome at a party now being hosted by a group of bros in the White House – where the directives are to ask those who are unlike them to leave, be dragged out, or relegated to the corner of the room in shame or humiliation.
At this party, members of the white broligarchy are welcomed regardless of what they have done, including brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate, recently allowed to return to the U.S. from Romania, where they have been charged with rape and sex trafficking. They now may face charges in Florida.
President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders appear meant to harm people across the United States. These orders and additional proclamations target poor people, people fleeing violence, women, survivors of natural disasters, gay and transgender people, and Black and Brown people.
The new executive orders, “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing” and “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” appear to be clear statements about contempt for people of color.
Under the facilitation of the U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, these moves aim to destroy efforts to diversify and educate workplaces, organizations, businesses and education. The orders include peer surveillance, requiring colleagues to hunt down anyone participating in activities that might create opportunities for people of color.
A recent investigation into Sen. Ted Cruz’s call to cancel “woke” National Science Foundation funding was for projects using terms such as “POC,” an acronym for people of color, when actually the studies were about “point of care,” a healthcare term.
Beyond federal programs and institutions, the executive orders target private corporations that, along with other sectors are terminating programs to address what the administration calls racist or racially inept hiring practices.
These orders are not simply an attack on bureaucratic mediocre government initiatives. This de jure racism removes, by edict, hardworking people from actual jobs — their livelihoods– and establishes officially by the government that people of color hold less value than white people.
As a Black female Executive Director of the Louisiana-based Promise of Justice Initiative, I am aware of and direct witness to the harms that hundreds of years of racism and extreme othering has on a society. This idea that people of color– Black people– do not belong, is an insidious, pernicious type of dehumanization.
Extreme othering allows the most egregious treatment against people to not only exist, but to thrive. In Louisiana, the incarceration rate–of mostly Black people– is not seen anywhere else in the country. It is the highest rate at 1,064 per 100,000 residents, compared to the lowest rate in Massachusetts at 241 per 100,000 residents. There are nearly 49,000 people in prisons and jails in Louisiana. Sixty-six percent of those in Louisiana prisons are Black; with 57% of those in jails who are Black.
Some may accept these stats on the belief that it is okay as long as the process is catching the “bad guys.” But the mass incarceration of Black people in Louisiana occurs with very little integrity and nearly no accountability for system actors, like district attorneys, who frequently get it wrong. ,
More than 80% of the people on Louisiana’s death row, fated for execution by the state, have seen their death sentences reversed by a court. The reversals of death sentences do not happen because the State realizes that it is wrong but instead after years of relentless fighting to expose government misdeeds and failures. Louisiana has the largest wrongful conviction rate per capita in the country.
These high rates of incarceration create a captive workforce that seem to make many in society as well as lawmakers blush at. For instance, inside Angola, the state’s largest penitentiary and a former slave plantation, men are forced — mostly Black— nearly every day to toil in fields, bent over under the threat of being shot, to pick crops with their hands in temperatures often higher than 100 degrees.
In Louisiana, enslaved and incarcerated Black people built the grand mansion, creole cottages and shotgun houses that blanket New Orleans, as well as the bridges and roads and infrastructure on the coast protecting communities against natural and human-made disasters.
With the latest edicts from the White House, the dehumanization of whole swaths of society resurrects and normalizes across the country with a 19th-century Jim Crow attitude.
When multi-national corporations such as Walmart, Target, Disney, McDonalds Amazon, Meta, Goldman Sachs as well as grantmaking foundations, and local governments give into racist ideology and problematic policies, the capitulation promulgates white supremacy.
People of color have been at this party since the beginning – and are not to be targeted, rooted out, deprived employment opportunities, or traded out to preserve stock values. As much as the new administration’s broligarchy may despise it, people of color have been and continue to be indispensable to the fabric of this country.
Policymakers, leaders, activists, corporate leaders, advocates and individuals need to speak up and stand up to these outrageous orders and demands—and reverse them. The future of this country is at stake.