The end of an era
by Matt May
When I was 13, my family moved to Tuba City, Arizona, a small town northeast of the Grand Canyon, on the Navajo Nation. I’m thinking back to a specific event that I witnessed while I was there, and what it means for us now.
At the time, Tuba City High School was jointly operated by the state-sanctioned school district and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (yes, it’s still called that), which had a dormitory for rural students coming in from almost a hundred miles away. This was a step up from the forced “residential schools” of the first two-thirds of the 20th century, but by and large, the curriculum was under the control of the state of Arizona, not the tribe. So the tribe announced that it was going to operate its own separate school on the same campus.
There was an outcry from the community, which led to a number of tense public hearings. Being a white kid with all of two months’ experience living on the rez, a lot of the intricacies of the debate flew over my head, and I have a much different perspective on what was happening now than I did then. But this is the speech I remember, as I remember it.
One of the teachers at the school came to the microphone holding a large Navajo clay vase. The tribe is known for its pottery, made of rust-colored clay, etched and painted with black geometric patterns. This one was artwork, and he brought it to make a point.
“I want you to look at this vase,” he said to the school board. “It’s the product of one of our artisans, who learned the tradition from the people who came before. It was made with care, and all of the materials and patterns are in harmony with one another.”
He held the vase out in front of him. “So what happens if I do this—“
He let go. The vase shattered across the auditorium floor. The room fell silent.
“What’s left? I still have all of the material that went into it. But it’s lost its integrity. I can’t use it for anything. Maybe I could try to glue all of the pieces back together, but it’ll never be the same as it was before.”
If you work in a DEI field in the US, it’s worth knowing that the way in which it’s been practiced is not something that’s going to snap back to the way it was before. Our vessel is already in pieces on the floor.
I’ve seen a lot of takes suggesting that, actually, all that needs to happen is a name change, and then we’ll be back to business as usual. I think that’s naïve. DEI work as practiced in the United States has been dependent on legal foundations like the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, and many, many other laws, policies, opinions and standards. Each sets a series of baselines, incentives and consequences that in turn have shaped the practice of DEI in the workplace.
We’ve known throughout that the targets of these executive orders and policies—particularly corporations—tend to do the minimum possible to avoid regulators’ attention. This meant doing more in some administrations, and less in others, based on the level of pressure that could be brought to bear. And given there was an apolitical civil servant track in the federal government, it was assumed that both Democratic and Republican Departments of Justice, for example, would both pick up the phone when someone’s civil rights were being violated, whether or not the political appointee in charge at the time agreed with the case.
That is not the reality here anymore. DEI practitioners have been targeted for the very first rounds of firings across the federal government. DEI contracts have been canceled, sometimes based on something as flimsy as a LinkedIn post. The nominee to run the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, which acts as the enforcer for most of those underpinning civil rights laws, testified in her confirmation hearing that she believes initiatives to hire racial-minority candidates at a higher rate should be considered a violation of civil rights law. It is often hard to tell which American companies are abandoning DEI outright and which are just pulling down their DEI sites to avoid unwanted legal or regulatory attention, but it is known that the White House is threatening even the CEOs who were VIPs at the inauguration.
If your hope is that this is just the normal partisan swing that happens between administrations, that this is a period to endure until maybe 2027 or 2029 when the balance of power shifts again, I have to disabuse you of that notion. What is happening now is not cyclical. It is the end of the previous cycle. The structures underpinning the last sixty years of civil rights activism, and the institutions that were created to oversee progress toward an equitable society, have been eviscerated; laws are no longer being followed, and in some cases are being read in a way opposite to what was intended. And this will be the policy of the United States government for the foreseeable future.
What this means for you, as an individual who is committed to fostering a more equitable society, and particularly if your politics have intertwined with your organization's, is that you cannot rely on existing structures to support, sustain or guide you. “It’s the law!” was never the winning argument many imagined it was, but relying on legal arguments or the threat of DoJ intervention is particularly polyannaish. The laws meant to protect us are no longer in force, or worse, they may only be used to persecute trans girls and comfort straight women and white guys who thought they were entitled to that new job, promotion, or university acceptance.
Denying this reality is as futile as pretending that teacher at my high school didn’t drop that vase. What will get us out of this is not a CEO who really gets it, or a couple lawsuits going our way. We are going to have to embrace our own individual politics on this subject and show those around us another way.
Tuba City High School split in two that summer. Today, Greyhills Academy sits a few feet away. The corridor between the two complexes has long since been torn down. In sports, the schools are bitter rivals. There is now a second gymnasium and a second football field, both hundreds of yards away from the one they once shared. A seven-foot iron fence marks the boundaries.
There is no point in pretending there is still only one school there. The split happened, and life has gone on. If you are under 35, you have never known it any other way. And yet, for all their differences, both schools are now staring down the barrel of bruising federal budget cuts: Greyhills at the hands of the Department of the Interior; Tuba City, the Department of Education (whose new secretary is charged with its elimination).
As for us: we have not yet seen the worst of our losses. The goal of this purge is not just to neutralize DEI in the federal government, but to tear it out, root and branch, and use the power of the purse to scare corporations and universities off of it as well. The layoffs will continue as well, as some come to realize how many programs rely on federal funding and support in order to operate, and how little some companies really cared for their DEI projects.
Trying to outlast or wait out this attack will not work. It is already too late to go back to what was there before: career civil servants have been fired, their organizations stripped for parts, their office leases terminated. If and when the tides turn in our favor, we will have only the tatters of our existing legal landscape, a civil service that will need to be purged of unqualified partisans, and a large number of disenfranchised, unemployed and/or increasingly at-risk people to care for. We will need to start almost from square one.
All is not lost, and the situation is not hopeless. My warning here is that “going back to normal” is not possible. But when we look at what that was like—the unfulfilled promises, the PR stunts masquerading as change—is going back what we want?
If we’re going to have to endure this administration just in order to spend all of the next one rebuilding the foundations of an equitable society, our next priority—after taking care of those, including ourselves, whose lives are impacted by this attack—should be a re-evaluation of where we want to be, and how we can get there. Structures, policies, practices, measurements, everything. What will serve us better in the long run: to cobble together the smashed-up pieces of clay on the floor, or to start spinning a new vessel?
Needless to say, I’m not who anyone, including myself, would want to lead an effort to restore equity at a national level. I think there needs to be coalition work, across communities, to arrive at a better path forward. I also think that if we don’t take some time to think about it, then in 2026 and 2028 all we’ll get is the same old, same old recycled back to us, including all of it that’s outdated, and all of the compromises that allowed many of these bills to become law. (In particular, everything that’s happened and everyone who’s been installed since January 20, has got to go.) It will be the job of DEI practitioners and the communities they represent to decide what needs to be built back in its place.
This may be the end of a 60-year cycle, but if we are thoughtful, and act together, it could be the beginning of a new one. If you are looking for a glimmer of hope for our future, it is in doing that work.