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As President Donald Trump continues to hammer away at diversity, equity, and inclusion, while pressuring the private sector, including businesses and college campuses, to end DEI policies, U.S. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley admits that as she and other Democrats continue to fight for racial equity, she is frustrated by the lack of “sustained outrage” over how the rollbacks of DEI and civil rights protections are impacting Black communities.
“It’s very frustrating that the work of Black liberation and having our full freedoms and those things that are birthright for others, the appetite to do that work is fickle. The stamina is lacking and the commitment short-lived,” Pressley told theGrio this week just before introducing the “Equity in Government Act,” which would restore former President Joe Biden‘s executive orders advancing DEI across the federal government.
In his first six months, Trump has fired or laid off tens of thousands of federal employees, many of whom are disproportionately Black–which includes roles that were either explicitly or presumed to be DEI-related. Advocates have also decried the president’s “Big” tax and budget bill that resulted in historic cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, which Black Americans disproportionately rely on.
The Trump administration’s war on DEI has closed offices or agencies and clawed back funding intended to expand Black entrepreneurship and address racial disparities in health, environmental injustice, and education.
Pressley and other Black members of Congress have been on the frontlines raising alarm about the rapid speed of blows to years-long, and in some cases, decades-long programs designed to repair the harms of centuries of enslavement and racial subjugation that faced Black Americans.
Some gains were seen during the Biden-Harris administration, including historically low Black unemployment and poverty rates, and record growth of Black-owned businesses. Seeing the loss of the modest gains for Black communities, including the reneging of racial equity commitments made by corporations during the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020, is admittedly difficult to digest, said Pressley.
“Black folks are still being killed by police. Black women are still three to four times more likely to die of childbirth and postpartum complications, and those numbers continue to rise since the fall of Roe [v. Wade]; Black books, authors, stories are still being banned; Black homeownership is the lowest it’s been in six decades,” the congresswoman reflected.
Pressley, quoting her former colleague and civil rights activist, the late Congressman John Lewis, explained, “This is a struggle for a lifetime, and as exhausting and demoralizing as that is, and it’s, you know, every Black woman has said, ‘All my life, I’ve had to fight,’ right? We’re having to litigate, legislate, agitate for those things.”
The Democrat representing most of Boston also called out allies who she said aren’t speaking out loud enough about policy issues that are crippling Black Americans and their futures. Sharing a personal story, she told theGrio, “I just had a conversation with some allies today, I said, ‘Why don’t you ever name anti-Blackness?’” She continued, “It has become so normalized as par for the course to be Black in America, as if it is just our lot in life.”
Pressley said there isn’t enough “sustained outrage” nor “sustained allyship,” adding, “This work cannot be tied to hashtags and sporadic headlines of focus. I’m not sure what it is going to take.”
Despite her frustration and, at times, exasperation, the U.S. House representative said she often turns to the words of Dr. Coretta Scott King: “Freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation.”
“I don’t have the luxury of cynicism or apathy. When my weariness takes over, I say those words because they remind me of my responsibility in this moment,” Pressley told theGrio. “The gains are not guarantees. These things do not exist in perpetuity. We have to fight like hell to preserve the gains that have been made, and then we have to fight like hell to expand them.”
