There’s a section in my last book where I ponder my life, education and opportunities comparative to my daddy. My Daddy’s Promise: Lessons Learned Through Caregiving, is the outpouring of my soul upon considering the burden my daddy carried on his back. I concluded a need to be grateful. My daddy, born in 1936 in McBaine, MO, didn’t have the privilege of attending the University of Missouri. Black students weren’t allowed to enroll back then. My daddy didn’t have the privileges of Black folks living in the South. I wonder, would it have been different if there were more HBCU’s to shift the culture of Black people seeking economic privilege.
There is a whirlwind of emotions related to that discussion, but it doesn’t stop there. Would it have been different for me?
In pondering, I made a gratitude list for Thanksgiving: mama, daddy (he’s still with me with all the ancestors), my children, grandchildren, one uncle still alive (18 aunts and uncles sharing camp with my sister Crystal on the other side), friends, health, faith, peace of mind, the resources to survive – pause. Radical shifting.
Why is there only enough to survive given the contributions of my ancestors, including the ones trapped in the African slave trade? Pause. Reflect. Cry. Breathe, Pause. Damnit. Why Lord.
Reparations.
For a brief moment, the nation seemed poised to engage in a long-avoided conversation about repairing the economic devastation wrought on Black Americans. The scholarly groundwork was not only being laid; it was becoming impossible to ignore. A wave of rigorous research, spanning disciplines and generations, had begun to converge around a shared conclusion: America owes a debt. And the receipts - centuries of laws, policies, and practices designed to suppress Black advancement - are meticulously documented.
But just as the country approached that rare inflection point, the ground shifted. The attack on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It followed, and was arguably provoked by, the growing intellectual and political legitimacy of reparations.
A SCHOLARLY FOUNDATION THAT COULD NO LONGER BE DENIED
The sequence is important.
Economist Sandy Darity, alongside A. Kristen Mullen and Lucas Hubbard, produced The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice, an unflinching framework detailing the moral and economic rationale for redressing the racial wealth gap. Their work built on decades of critical scholarship by Randall Robinson, Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Patricia Williams, and others who developed critical race theory as a lens to expose how racism is embedded in America’s laws and institutions, not as aberrations, but as design.
Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project broadened public understanding of slavery’s foundational role in shaping American capitalism and democracy. Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow documented the modern machinery of mass incarceration. Isabel Wilkerson revealed caste as America’s hidden operating structure, and writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates forced the nation to confront, with uncompromising clarity, the generational extraction of Black wealth.
Together, these works formed more than a scholarly canon. They formed a case - coherent, evidence-driven, widely accessible - that America’s racial inequities were not accidents. They were the predictable outcomes of policies intentionally crafted to advantage white Americans while immobilizing Black people.
And when a case becomes clear, remedies become harder to avoid.
Reparations were gaining credibility not simply as a moral imperative, but as a practical, data-backed necessity.
THE COUNTEROFFENSIVE
Then came the counterattack.
Donald Trump entered office promising to be a disrupter, and in this arena, he delivered: not by addressing the scholarship, but by attacking structures that might operationalize its conclusions. With the support of the Supreme Court shaped in his image, the conservative movement didn’t merely critique DEI - it sought to dismantle it. The Court’s landmark decision restricting race-conscious policies in education, hiring, and contracting effectively kneecapped one of the few remaining mechanisms institutions used to address historical inequities.
The Supreme Court decision framed DEI as divisive, unfair, even dangerous. But make no mistake, the target wasn’t the trainings or the job titles. The target is the emerging legitimacy of reparations.
Because DEI, for all its shortcomings, represented an acknowledgment that historical harm requires active correction. If even modest corrective efforts could be portrayed as discriminatory, then reparations, which demand far more, could be dismissed as unconstitutional before they even reach the starting line.
REPARATIONS STALLED BY DESIGN
The Supreme Court’s DEI decision did more than ban certain practices. It rewrote the narrative: any race-based remedy, no matter its historic justification, is now suspect. The ruling fortified a political climate in which advocating for reparations is construed as radical rather than rectifying. And it handed opponents a new legal vocabulary to argue that repairing racial harm is itself a form of racial discrimination.
This shift is no accident. It is a strategic recalibration.
Instead of debating the merits of reparations, a debate scholars are winning, political actors changed the terrain. They moved the conversation from history to legality, from morality to perceived fairness, from evidence to fear.
With one ruling, the Court curtailed the ability of universities, corporations, and public institutions to acknowledge racial inequity in any operational way. It also fortified a backlash movement built on the claim that addressing racism constitutes racism.
A DEBT DEFERRED - BUT NOT ERASED
For Black Americans, the consequences are profound. Reparations are not just symbolic; they are an economic necessity for repairing a racial wealth gap created through redlining, discriminatory GI Bills, unequal pay, stolen labor and a criminal justice system engineered for extraction.
Dismantling DEI weakens the infrastructure that could have carried reparations forward with policy labs, research institutions, philanthropic initiatives, corporate equity programs, and government offices staffed by people who understand the stakes.
But even in this retrenchment, the scholarship remains. And scholarship has a way of outlasting political winds.
Darity’s models for direct payments, the 1619 Project’s historical reframing, the legal clarity of Bell and Crenshaw, the sociological rigor of Wilkerson, the moral clarity of Coates, and the systems critique of Alexander - these texts will continue to teach. They will continue to persuade. They will continue to expose the unfinished business of justice.
THE PATH FORWARD
The backlash to DEI is not simply a rejection of diversity efforts. It is a defensive maneuver against the possibility of accountability. As the country moved closer than many realized to accepting reparations as not only legitimate but necessary; the question now is whether this generation will allow a political backlash, one manufactured in response to truth-telling, to halt the nation’s moral progress.
Reparations are not a fringe idea. They are a debt. And debts, when ignored, do not disappear. They accumulate interest.
I closed my eyes upon feeling my daddy’s presence.
“Keep writing son,” a presence stronger than before. “Tell them the story about how we will overcome.”
