Disconnecting the Past: The War on DEI and the Living Shadow of Jim Crow

On September 22, 2026, two men with sharply different visions of America sat down at Harvard's Institute of Politics. Cornell William Brooks, a Harvard Kennedy School professor and the eighteenth president of the NAACP, faced Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and a chief architect of Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for the second Trump administration. Washington Post reporter Laura Meckler moderated. The topic was diversity in higher education, but the stakes reached every ballot cast on November 3.

The debate over DEI is the latest chapter in a much older fight. Diversity, equity and inclusion programs grew up as affirmative action itself was cut back, case by case and referendum by referendum, from Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) through Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023). As the older remedies were narrowed, DEI became the working tool institutions used to keep their doors open. That is why Project 2025 treats dismantling it as job one.

Two Words for One Country

Brooks opened with history. On that same date in 1862, he noted, Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which opened the door to Black service in the Union Army. And on that date in 1969, Harvard's faculty voted to create its Afro-American Studies Department. Diversity, Brooks argued, "has been brought into being by blood, sweat, tears, protests, demonstrations." Where institutions go wrong, he said, is in shrinking it to an acronym rather than backing it with financial aid, scholarships, support, and admissions policies that follow Supreme Court precedent.

Roberts preferred a different word: pluralism. He praised America as perhaps the most pluralistic society in history, then claimed that things had "improved since January 20th, 2025," the day President Trump returned to office. His central charge was blunt: DEI programs "do more to harm social cohesion in the United States than they have done to help it in the last decade."

Autopilot or Struggle?

The sharpest exchange turned on whether diversity sustains itself. Roberts, who trained as a historian, conceded that programs might have been needed in 1964 or 1965 to "level the playing field," but said continuing and expanding them denies decades of progress. Remove the policies, he argued, and campus audiences would still look diverse "because Americans have made such progress."

Brooks answered with his mother's story. As a first-year student at South Carolina State College, she protested segregation and was fire-hosed. Nothing she fought for, he said, arrived "by any organic process or any autopilot." He pointed to studies documenting hiring discrimination today and turned the conservative call for "viewpoint diversity" back on Roberts: "How can you have viewpoint diversity without diversity among those who hold the views?"

The exchange echoes a long pattern. After Reconstruction, after the civil rights era, and again after Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), opponents of remedies have argued that the problem was solved and the remedy itself had become the injustice. Each time, the claim of finished progress arrived before the evidence did.

What the Evidence Shows

Roberts's case rests on a disconnected past: the idea that the civil rights era closed the account and progress now runs on its own. The measurable record says otherwise.

• Wealth. The Federal Reserve's 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances found the typical white family held about $285,000 in wealth, the typical Black family about $45,000, a gap of roughly six to one that has barely moved in decades.
• Hiring. In a landmark 2004 field experiment, economists Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan sent identical résumés to employers; those with white-sounding names drew about 50 percent more callbacks than those with Black-sounding names. A 2021 study covering 83,000 applications to Fortune 500 companies found the bias persists.
• Admissions. In the first classes admitted after SFFA, Black enrollment fell sharply at several selective schools. At MIT, Black first-year students dropped from 13 percent to 5 percent; at Amherst, from 11 percent to 3 percent.
• Voting. After Shelby County v. Holder (2013) gutted federal preclearance under the Voting Rights Act, states once covered by it moved quickly to pass new voter ID laws, close polling places and purge rolls.

None of these numbers describes a country where the effects of Jim Crow have run their course. They describe residue that remains operative.

Project 2025 in Practice

Heritage is not offering an academic opinion. Under Roberts, it organized Project 2025 as an operating plan for the executive branch, including proposals to shrink the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights and redirect the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. The claim that all is well serves a policy goal: disarming the federal government's ability to enforce equal protection.

Brooks argued that Project 2025 is not only a war on DEI but "a war against civil rights protection." He said the Department of Education, charged with closing DEI offices, had also shut most of its civil rights offices, leaving children who face racial, sex, or disability discrimination with less help. At the Justice Department, he said, about 70 percent of experienced attorneys in the Civil Rights Division had at one point been sidelined. Their retreat, he said, has coincided with rising hate crimes and division on campuses.

Roberts rejected any link between Heritage's policy work and political violence, citing studies he said show people on the left are far more likely to justify such violence. That claim, like many in a live debate, went unsettled in the room; readers should weigh it against the full research record.

The Fight Over the Schoolhouse

The two also split on the Department of Education. Roberts said America has long ranked at or near the top in per-pupil spending yet "gotten mediocrity," and backed universal education savings accounts, a voucher-style approach. Brooks countered with Head Start, which studies show has improved the cognition, literacy, and lives of millions of children and their parents.

Why It Matters on the Ballot

This was not an abstract seminar. Project 2025 is being carried out now, through agency budgets, enforcement priorities, and appointments that Congress can fund, check, or ignore. The November 3 midterms will decide who holds that power. For Black students, HBCUs, and families who depend on civil rights enforcement, the gap between Brooks's "struggle" and Roberts's "organic progress" is the gap between protections that exist and protections that are only promised.

Systems of exclusion were built deliberately, and they require deliberate systems of redress. Progress has never run on autopilot; to say it does is to invite old disparities back under the banner of neutrality.

Watch the full debate below, read Harvard's edited excerpts, and decide for yourself.

Related reading on HistorianSpeaks: After Callais: Justin Pearson and the Black Candidates Running on Redrawn Maps and Cracking the Closed Shop: Arthur Fletcher, the Philadelphia Plan and the Birth of Affirmative Action.