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      in US Politics

      ‘HillmanTok’: how The Cosby Show inspired resistance to Trump’s war on Black education

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      In 1987, the Cosby Show spinoff A Different World made its US TV debut and followed the elder child, Denise Huxtable (Lisa Bonet), as she studied at her parents’ alma mater. The fictional historically Black college (or HBCU), Hillman, would go on to become a byword for Black excellence. “The influence of kids wanting to go to school, period, I think is very powerful,” one of the stars of the series, Jasmine Guy, said while touring HBCU campuses with her former castmates in 2024, 35 years after the sitcom ended. “Because they could see themselves there.”Hillman College is credited with driving record levels of enrollment at actual HBCUs in the 1980s and 90s, and remains a source of inspiration for Black creatives to this day. The actor-screenwriter Lena Waithe had the fabled campus in mind when she launched her production company, Hillman Grad. “I want to call it something that is close to my heart, and that is the world of A Different World and what that show represented for me and so many other people,” she said.View image in fullscreenFour decades later, that fantasy world lives on and finds itself reckoning with the reality of a second Donald Trump administration hellbent on rolling back diversity programs and gutting the Department of Education. On TikTok, the hashtag HillmanTok has become a free online space where Black scholars share their expertise in subjects that the administration is trying to excise from libraries and school curricula. Anyone who scrolls to their content on TikTok and sticks around for the lesson is part of the class. “I’m mindful of the weight of this particular teaching and this particular time,” says Leah Barlow, a liberal studies professor at North Carolina A&T, the country’s largest HBCU. “Honestly, it feels a little ancestral.”Last fall, Barlow posted an introductory two-minute TikTok video for her African studies class; 250,000 users subscribed to the class channel overnight and within a week it hit 4m views. “I thought it was going to be a trend for a short time, and then we’d move on to the next thing,” says Barlow, who posted the video on the same day Trump retook office and rescinded a federal TikTok ban.But then a sixth-grade math teacher named Cierra Hinton seized on the enthusiasm and started the hashtag HillmanTok. She encouraged Black educators to post instructional videos under the banner, and was inundated with hashtagged submissions. Like Black Twitter and Black Lives Matter, another digital social justice movement was born – the world’s first crowd-sourced HBCU. In an emotional response video, Hinton took a measure of satisfaction in helping “people come together and build something that is bigger than we ever imagined, something that means so much”.HillmanTok class subjects run the gamut from US history to mathematics to culinary arts. There are even electives on African American food studies and Stem careers. “I am finally about to post the syllabus,” Carlotta Berry says in the greeting for her Engineering 101 HillmanTok course. “You can learn asynchronously by watching any of my videos.”The HillmanTok educators aren’t limited to real-world academics like Berry, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana. Shannan E Johnson, a former creative executive at the Syfy channel, has a course on screenwriting. The music journalist Touré has a course on the prehistory of hip-hop. “This is actually a reprise of the class I did 20 years ago at NYU,” he joked. “We’re overenrolled, as usual.”Just as A Different World regularly dealt with weighty subjects such as war, homelessness and the Aids epidemic at the risk of losing advertiser support, HillmanTok also offers culturally urgent lessons on resistance and restorative justice. “People have always been trying to limit and marginalize the impact and effect of Black education,” says Jelani Favors, the director of North Carolina A&T’s Center of Excellence for Social Justice. “But it was those teachers opening up their classroom doors, pouring into young idealists and finding ways to unlock their potential to engage in the deconstructing of Jim Crow and white supremacy.”This is all happening against the backdrop of a Black college enrollment gap in which Black men account for 26% of the student body. All the while Maga donors add insult to injury by trashing the value of HBCU education overall. “Howard was not Harvard,” the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel said in a dig at the former vice-president Kamala Harris’s scholarship at Howard University, the most prestigious HBCU. “You couldn’t even point this out [when she was running]. This is probably a racist thing to say.”That’s just the start of the slights against HBCUs, which were founded to provide educational opportunities for Black students at a time when it was illegal or impossible to attend college in the US. A 2023 investigation by the Biden administration found that HBCUs had missed out on more than $13bn in federal funding for more than three decades because state governors blocked the funds. North Carolina A&T, which has a 14,000-student enrollment, was owed more than $2bn alone. HBCUs could well end up suffering more under Trump, who has made a U-turn from allocating $250m in funding to freezing educational grants and loans – which is how most HBCU students cover tuition. Last month, he signed an executive order to close the Department of Education – a critical lifeline for HBCUs, which have a much harder time fundraising than predominantly white institutions.View image in fullscreenThat HillmanTok is poised to become a resource for a Black student population that could find itself locked out of the traditional college experience makes it more relevant than just another Khan Academy, YouTube University or MasterClass. Inevitably, that momentum faces new headwinds from the rush to capitalize on the Hillman name – not unlike the Black Lives Matter movement did at the end. Some HillmanTok supporters have taken exception to attempts to sell merchandise and live events under the name. What’s more, as a number of trademark claims have been filed for the name, Black TikTok users have raised concerns about a white business interest winning control.“Anytime something looks like it’s going to make some money or turn into a movement, you see this,” says the Howard University law professor Nicole Gaither, who adds that the case for each filing also holds potential ramifications. It just really depends on how the US Patent and Trademark Office is going to view this. “Lena Waithe has Hillman registrations that are related to entertainment services, but she also has education services related to manners and etiquette. And she sells apparel,” Gaither aded.While that plays out in the background, Barlow remains strictly committed to the work. Last month TikTok and the United Negro College Fund hosted an event in Washington to connect HillmanTok instructors with Capitol Hill lawmakers and bring awareness to inclusive education and Black history preservation. While there, Barlow conducted TikTok interviews with the Democratic senator Raphael Warnock and the representative Jasmine Crockett for her class. Crockett implored her students to “take advantage of this moment and realize we don’t have a million Leahs running around. Please value her and value your education.”HillmanTok continues a tradition of Black self-determination through education that dates back to the flouting of anti-literacy laws during slavery. “We always find a way, regardless of what is happening – we, meaning Black people,” says Barlow. “We have always been resilient, autonomous and used agency to get information where it needs to go.”View image in fullscreenThe Hillman brand wasn’t always such an easy sell. Where The Cosby Show was largely written and produced by white people for white audiences as a showcase for Black respectability, A Different World boldly entrusted young Black creatives with the task of relating the cultural experiences that young Black students were having in real time. A Different World faced bitter critical reception when it debuted. One newspaper reviewer called it “a greed-motivated sitcom” in a slam of the show’s creator, Bill Cosby – who patterned the college after the women’s HBCU Spelman College, where he was once a major benefactor.After that rough first season, control over the sitcom was passed to the Fame alumna Debbie Allen (sister of The Cosby Show matriarch Phylicia Rashad) – who not only brought her own college experience at Howard into the production process, but also an army of Black writers and consultants. She empowered actors to give feedback and introduced clauses into their contract that freed them up to write and direct episodes, adding to the show’s diverse perspectives. For a kicker, Allen enlisted Aretha Franklin to record the theme song.Also in the middle of that first season, Bonet became pregnant with her first child, Zoë, with her then husband Lenny Kravitz. Cosby, scoffing at the cultural optics of Denise being portrayed as an unwed mother in college, had Bonet written off the series and reabsorbed into The Cosby Show. “I thought that show just wasn’t going to come back because she was and is the star,” Guy said. But after reconfiguring around the romance between Whitley (Guy) and Dwayne (Kadeem Hardison), A Different World became a ratings colossus alongside The Cosby Show and a mainstay in Black households for generations.Among others, the sitcom introduced the world to Jada Pinkett Smith and the Oscar winners Halle Berry and Marisa Tomei – who took the role playing Bonet’s white roommate after Meg Ryan passed. (It certainly worked out for the both of them.) And unlike with The Cosby Show, the disgraced Cosby’s involvement has not dinted A Different World’s popularity over the years. (He only appears briefly in the pilot.) Last fall, the cast reunited for a national HBCU tour to spark enrollment and scholarship fundraising and found that many of the students who remain inspired by the show had been born long after its initial 144-episode run.In February, A Different World finally made its debut on Netflix – six months after the streamer announced the development of an Allen-produced sequel that would focus on the Hillman experience of Whitley and Dwayne’s daughter, with the pilot to begin shooting over the summer. It remains to be seen whether this new version of the series will address Magaworld’s assault on Black education. It wouldn’t be the same show if it didn’t. “The issues we were dealing with then,” said the series co-star Dawnn Lewis, “we’re still dealing with in some shape or form today.”HillmanTok roll call: five to follow

      @amfamstudies Clip highlights from North Carolina A&T’s Leah Barlow from her actual African American studies course.

      @toureshow The music journalist offers a deep rewind on the prehistory of hip-hop.

      @dr.clo.flo The University of Oklahoma education studies professor Christy Oxendine unpacks the history of US education.

      @drdre4000 The Holy Cross chemistry professor Andre Isaacs puts the fun in functional groups.

      @iamalawyerinreallife The Atlanta defense attorney Danielle Obiorah shows civil servants how to protect themselves against Doge cuts in Federal Employee Rights 101. More

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      in US Politics

      First Black Republican congresswoman honored in Utah memorial service

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      Family and friends of the former US congresswoman Mia Love gathered Monday in Salt Lake City to honor the life and legacy of the first Black Republican woman elected to Congress after she died of brain cancer last month aged 49.The former lawmaker from Utah, a daughter of Haitian immigrants, had undergone treatment for an aggressive brain tumor called glioblastoma and received immunotherapy as part of a clinical trial. She died on 23 March at her home in Saratoga Springs, Utah, weeks after her daughter announced she was no longer responding to treatment.Hundreds of mourners entered her service from a walkway lined with American flags at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Institute of Religion on the University of Utah campus. Long tables displayed framed family photos and bouquets of red and white flowers.Love served only two terms in Congress before suffering a razor-thin loss to Democrat Ben McAdams in the 2018 midterm elections as Democrats surged. Yet she left her mark on Utah’s political scene and later leveraged her prominence into becoming a political commentator for CNN.She was briefly considered a rising star in the GOP, but her power within the party fizzled out as Donald Trump took hold. Love kept her distance from the US president and called him out in 2018 for vulgar comments he made about immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and some African nations.Jason Love, her husband, drew laughter from the somber crowd at Monday’s service when he told stories of his wife’s “superpowers”.View image in fullscreenHe described discovering her influence after he tried to return the many toasters the couple received as wedding gifts and failing because he didn’t have receipts. His wife then entered the store and came out three minutes later with cash in hand.“I thought: ‘Wow, I have married a Jedi knight,’” he said with a laugh.Her motherhood, he said, was her greatest superpower.“She was an extraordinary mother, and she believed that the most important work she would do within her life was within the walls of her own home with her children,” Jason Love said. “She always made it a special place for each of them to feel loved and to begin to achieve their full potential.”A choir of Love’s friends sang some of her favorite hymns, as well as Ed Sheeran’s Supermarket Flowers. Her children, Alessa, Abigale and Peyton, read an op-ed their mother published in the Deseret News shortly before she died in which she shared her enduring wish for the country to become less divisive.Love’s sister Cyndi Brito shared childhood memories, including how Love used to rehearse all day and night for starring roles in her school plays. She was always the best at everything she did and made everyone around her feel important, her sister said.Brito read an excerpt of a speech her third-grade daughter gave at a recent school assembly for Black History Month honoring Love’s legacy.“Mia Love played many roles and had many titles, but the most important role and the most important title that Mia Love played in my eyes was auntie,” Brito recalled her daughter, Carly, telling classmates.Love did not emphasize her race during her campaigns, but she acknowledged the significance of her election after her 2014 victory. She said her win defied naysayers who suggested a Black, Republican, Mormon woman could not win a congressional seat in overwhelmingly white Utah.On Sunday evening, state leaders and members of the public visited the Utah capitol to pay their respects at Love’s flag-covered coffin behind ropes in the building’s rotunda.Love, born Ludmya Bourdeau, was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2022 and said her doctors estimated she had only 10 to 15 months to live, which she surpassed. With aggressive treatments, Love lived for nearly three years after receiving her diagnosis.Her close friend, Utah’s lieutenant governor, Deidre Henderson, told the audience on Monday that Love had asked her friends and family to rally around her like a campaign team when she was diagnosed.“‘I’m in fight mode,’ she told us, ‘and what I need from you all, more than anything, is to help me fight it. This is a campaign, and we are going to win,’” Henderson recalled.Love entered politics in 2003 after winning a city council seat in Saratoga Springs, 30 miles (48km) south of Salt Lake City. She was elected as the city’s mayor in 2009, becoming the first Black woman to serve as a mayor in Utah.In 2012, after giving a rousing speech at the Republican national convention, she narrowly lost a bid for the US House against the Democratic incumbent. She ran again two years later and won. More

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      in US Politics

      Bernie Sanders: law firms that cut deals with Trump administration ‘sell out their soul’

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      Law firms that cut deals with Donald Trump’s administration after the president issued executive orders targeting attorneys who challenge his priorities are demonstrating “absolute cowardice”, the independent US senator Bernie Sanders has said.“They’re zillion-dollar law firms, and money, money, money” is all that motivates them, the popular Vermont lawmaker who caucuses with Democrats said in a feature interview on the latest CBS News Sunday Morning. “So they’re going to sell out their souls to be able to make money here in Washington.”Sanders’ remarks provided a notable condemnation of law firms who had represented political rivals of Trump then chose the path of least resistance after he aimed orders that threatened to cripple them. The orders sought to revoke security clearances, ban attorneys from accessing federal buildings, and – if they do business with the government – to force the targeted firm’s clients to disclose existing relationships with them.Some of the US’s most prominent legal practices subsequently capitulated. Willkie, Farr and Gallagher; Milbank LLP; and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom all reached deals with the White House meant to avoid Trump’s orders.In exchange, the firms would perform pro bono work for causes that are dear to them and Trump while also declining to engage in race-based hiring.Some firms, on the other hand, have sought to stand up to Trump. Perkins Coie got a court injunction blocking much of an executive order from Trump that targeted the firm. Hundreds of law firms and former judges have signed on to court briefs supporting Perkins Coie in its opposition to Trump.Meanwhile, after suing over Trump orders directed at them, Jenner & Block as well as WilmerHale were able to secure court mandates impeding most of his measures against them.Alums of the law firms which have yielded to Trump have voiced some of the strongest criticism for choosing that course of action.On Sunday, CBS asked Sanders what the cost was to the US when some of its most well-heeled institutions folded in that manner amid a standoff with Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It is indescribable,” Sanders said.Sanders on Sunday also contended that many of Trump’s maneuvers nearly three months into his second presidency had rendered the US into a “pseudo-democracy”. He singled out how Trump tasked Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, with slashing the size as well as funding of various federal government agencies and services.The multibillionaire owner of Tesla, SpaceX and X landed the role after spending more than $270m supporting Trump’s successful run for the White House in November.“Look, you get one vote, and Elon Musk can spend $270m to help elect Trump,” Sanders told CBS. “Does that sound like a democracy to you?” More

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      in US Politics

      American corporations didn’t want to diversify, anyway

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      View image in fullscreenAt Ford Motor Company, the moral stock-taking began with a letter.“This is an extraordinary moment in our history,” Bill Ford, the company’s executive chair, and Jim Hackett, its CEO, wrote to employees on 1 June 2020. It had been three months of upheaval since the coronavirus pandemic began and the company first suspended production at its manufacturing sites. By mid-May, more than 87,000 people in the United States had died from the virus. Then, on 25 May, the video of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, ultimately killing him, was seared into Americans’ consciousness.Even in the midst of a global pandemic, as systemic inequities around healthcare and wealth and education were thrown into sharp relief, the world saw how deadly everyday injustices remained. “All at once, we are grappling with a public health crisis that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, an economic shock that has forced us to adapt on the fly, and social upheaval that has challenging all of us to think and act differently,” Ford and Hackett wrote. Globally, people wanted to do something, but they did not know exactly what. There were online gestures: Black squares on Instagram, direct messages of apology to Black friends, well-designed slides with digestible facts about systemic racism. But, as the video spread, millions flooded the streets as well. They rallied in Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland and Washington DC; and they protested overseas in London and Sydney and the Canary Islands. The actions were bolstered by calls to finally address the disparities that made the nation so inequitable.C-suites and boardrooms and universities couldn’t look the other way. Colleges and hospitals began renaming buildings; activists toppled statues and busts of traitors and racists, politicians took down others; and across the country, institutions were pushed to evaluate how their policies had locked certain people out of the American dream. But now, as the Trump administration has brought back to the White House its war against a diversifying workforce, the federal infrastructure and a critical history of the US, corporations are dropping diversity and equity programs as quickly as they created them.How did we get here? Why were so many companies – from Walmart to Paramount to Victoria’s Secret – willing to roll over on their diversity goals after the promises they made in 2020 to uproot systemic racism and transform the nation? Were they all just paying lip service? In many ways, the programs were never intended to radically change the workplace in the first place – they were intended to appease workers and dampen discontent. What we’ve seen since 2020 is not new. It’s a reversal rooted in the policies the US created decades ago, when it cast aside the goal of addressing a legacy of discrimination for the vague idea of diversity – an idea that was always destined to fail, and an idea many corporations never truly believed in.Superficial actionsFor employees at Ford, which was founded in Detroit, where nearly three-quarters of the city’s residents are Black, there was nothing academic about the issues highlighted in 2020. The pandemic hit the city as the plague of racism had left it economically distraught for decades; healing the disease systemic discrimination had left would require effort and intention. “There are no easy answers. We are not interested in superficial actions. This is our moment to lead from the front and fully commit to creating the fair, just and inclusive culture that our employees deserve,” Ford and Hackett wrote.Ford’s first step to healing was a series of conversations with staff to better understand how they felt. They would launch employee resource groups to ensure workers believed they could be their whole selves at the office. “We know that systemic racism still exists despite the progress that has been made,” the Ford executives wrote. “We cannot turn a blind eye to it or accept some sense of ‘order’ that’s based on oppression.”If that sounds familiar, it’s because offices across the country were undergoing similar soul-searching efforts. Within a year of Floyd’s murder, companies had pledged at least $50bn to support racial justice and advance equity and by 2023 that number had jumped to more than $340bn, according to a report by the McKinsey Institute for Black Economic Mobility. Companies such as Apple, Facebook and Pfizer committed to spending externally. Bank of America pledged $15bn to expanding low- and middle-income homeownership; Netflix, PayPal and Nike deposited millions in Black-owned banks; and other companies gave to organizations such as the Equal Justice Initiative. Corporations committed to internal changes, too: they set diversity goals and launched initiatives to try to meet them; they hired chief diversity officers; they held mandatory – if sometimes clumsy – anti-discrimination trainings. Most of these tools had existed in some form before, but amid public outcry, they were pushed to the foreground.The problem was that even when companies actually wanted to help, they often launched their efforts haphazardly. When companies jump to solutions before understanding the desired outcomes, they make rushed decisions, said Eddy Ng, a business professor at Queen’s University in Canada. “Without a clear plan, we go buy more training. People don’t like that,” Ng said. Company leaders had little idea how to fix the structural issues baked into their DNA, so they went with the things that sounded good. “It’s like you go grocery shopping with 100 bucks, but you don’t have a shopping list. You’re going to buy chips and cookies,” Ng told me.Chips and cookies can make a person feel full, they can hold someone over, but eventually there’s a crash – and that person will be left wondering why they have not actually had a full meal; why they are not satisfied. Within weeks, it seemed, companies had built out their diversity, equity and inclusion plans. But not everyone was convinced by them. “Someone like me might say, ‘let’s wait and see if they mean it,’” said Cedric Dawkins, an associate professor of management at York University who studies business ethics. Marginalized communities have felt the sting of America’s empty promises before.Progress in the US is always met with pushback. During Reconstruction, the so-called “Redeemers” – who sought a return of white supremacy – argued that federal support for recently enslaved African Americans was a threat to their liberty. The civil rights movement was immediately met with lawsuits that would limit its desired effects on voting, education and labor. In that context, the only real measure of an organization’s commitment to justice is whether they keep pushing forward with their reforms in spite of any backlash.When corporations launched their plans, they felt like drastic measures, Ng said: “Instead of actually having clear guidelines and goals and outcomes in terms of what they wanted to achieve over the five-year period.” Now, as we come to the end of the five-year period – and companies begin to roll back their diversity efforts, vindicating those who were waiting for the other shoe to drop – one question remains: what was it all for?The backlash beginsOn 6 March 1961, then president John F Kennedy signed executive order 10925 – which created the president’s committee on equal opportunity. “Americans who are members of minority groups have often been unjustly denied the opportunity to work for the government or for government contractors,” Kennedy wrote in his signing statement. He directed the committee to launch a study of government employment practices that would examine the “status of members of minority groups in every department, agency and office of the federal government”. The report would lay down a marker, Kennedy hoped, by which Americans could measure future progress. “I have no doubt that the vigorous enforcement of this order will mean the end of such discrimination.”View image in fullscreenTypically, Kennedy’s order is where histories of affirmative action or race-conscious employment practices begin – after all, it’s the first time the idea of affirmative action as we understand it today emerged. But federal action to address discrimination in the workforce actually stretches back to at least Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, and one New Deal policy in particular: the 1935 Labor Relations Act. The act protected the rights of employees at private companies to better working conditions. If a company engaged in unfair labor practices, employees were “entitled to affirmative action as a remedy to make the employee whole”, said D Caleb Smith, a labor historian at Mount Holyoke College. Those remedies could look like job reinstatement or back-pay. Essentially, the provision was a general remedy to employment discrimination.But the Labor Relations Act was also a mixed bag. The National Urban League and NAACP opposed the legislation because it provided for closed-shop provisions that allowed unions and employers to exclude workers from union membership and apprenticeship programs. Union race discrimination had historically limited Black participation in the workforce: in 1930, for instance, just 3% of the 3,392,800 trade union workers in the US were Black.Still, it was a starting point, and over time, additional protections were added. In May 1943, executive order 9346 reconstituted the fair employment practices committee, which processed 8,000 discrimination complaints in its three years of existence. And in 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act prohibited the closed-shop provision from the New Deal policy. By 1960, however, affirmative action still did not have a formal definition. “It is implied that it’s the intent to improve working conditions to create opportunity for underrepresented minority groups,” Smith said. Kennedy helped provide some unity of definition.Kennedy’s order created one of the earliest affirmative action programs, the Plans for Progress Program, which encouraged companies to develop plans that addressed discrimination and underrepresentation of minorities. Within the first few months, the committee on equal opportunity reported that the program was in full swing. Agencies had begun designating compliance officers and developing training seminars; they had studied best practices for compliance reporting; and they had launched outreach to contractors and the general public. But “the Plans for Progress Program is largely seen as a performative publicity endeavor,” Smith said. It was done in good faith, he added, but it was hampered by the same problems other compliance agencies had: it was understaffed, underfinanced and could not exercise its full authority. For its imperfections, though, “some historians will point to it as a positive that provides companies a model for desegregation and implementing equal employment opportunity,” Smith said.By January 1964, after Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson took over the reins and carried out Kennedy’s vision. In a speech to new corporate members of the Plans for Progress program, Johnson announced that it had largely been a success. More than 100 major corporations – representing 6 million workers – had bought into the program, he told those assembled. The ratio of white salaried employees to non-white salaried employees at 91 companies had dipped from 65 to one to 60 to one. “Most significant is the fact that these jobs are not all at the lowest level – Negroes and other minority group Americans are being placed and promoted to positions of responsibility,” Johnson gushed. “This was not accomplished by displacing other workers – rather it was the result of conscious adjustments in personnel practices making merit and ability the only real tests – practices that strengthened the individual companies, and, as a result, strengthen our entire economy.”But some companies and federal contractors began creating measures to subvert the new federal rules, Smith told me. They implemented new tests for employees and had segregated seniority lines – white people occupied positions of power; contrary to the pronouncement, Black people were still often consigned to the lower rungs of industry. After Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act – and executive order 11246 a year later, which created the office of federal contract compliance to ensure contractors and subcontractors were complying with requirements to “safeguard equal employment” through affirmative action programs – the backlash was almost immediate.White people began claiming the programs were reverse discrimination and sued in federal court over college admissions, hiring and promotion practices. The supreme court upheld certain provisions of affirmative action programs – such as diversity as a compelling interest – but argued that quota systems designed to account for a legacy of discrimination in the US were a bridge too far. The Reagan administration sought to eliminate affirmative action altogether, and was surprised when corporations fought back. Companies such as Merck had begun to believe in their affirmative action policies – a new crop of workers brought new ideas and introduced products to new markets. It was great development philosophically – for those who cared about addressing a legacy of discrimination – and financially, for those who were more ambivalent. As Julian Mark noted in the Washington Post, a survey of 128 Fortune 500 companies revealed that an overwhelming majority, 95%, would keep their affirmative action policies regardless of Reagan’s policy.Reagan was ultimately unsuccessful – in part because he was largely alone in his efforts, even among Republicans. Still, his push to eliminate affirmative action programs led many corporations to settle for policies aimed at promoting a diverse workforce rather than addressing injustice. Such policies, they believed, had less legal exposure. The result was a new crop of watered-down programs that were a far cry from those that preceded them.Some conservatives agreed with Reagan, and as the decade wore on, became a loud contingent of the Republican party. Through the 1980s and the 90s, Republicans began using judicial appointments to transform the federal bench and pursue litigation to reshape civil rights law – warping its meaning. They argued that even watered down affirmative action programs and civil rights measures had gone too far; they wanted them eliminated altogether. Conservatives lionized the leaders of California’s Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action in public education and employment in 1996. The California Civil Rights Initiative “is the beginning of the new civil rights revolution in America; a revolution that promises to unite all America under a banner of hope and freedom”, Gay Hart Gaines, the former president of GOPAC, the Republican donor group, said at the time. Philanthropic organizations such as the Bradley Foundation, Scaife Foundations and Searle Freedom Trust bankrolled challenges to race-conscious admissions at universities and efforts that ultimately gutted the Voting Rights Act. Reagan lost his initial battle, but conservatives saw it as the first shot fired in a longer war – a war they believe, in 2025, is paying off.The capitulationLess than two months after Hackett, the Ford CEO, sent the letter lambasting systemic racism to the company’s employees, he stepped down from his position. Jim Farley, an executive from within, replaced him. In August 2024, ahead of the election, Farley wrote a letter of his own to the staff about diversity, equity and inclusion.“As we work to build an even brighter future, we are mindful that our employees and customers hold a wide range of beliefs, and the external and legal environment related to political and social issues continues to evolve,” Farley wrote. It was a very elaborate way of telling staff that they would be walking back diversity policies because the political winds had shifted. George Floyd’s murder had receded from the national consciousness. The Republican party had seized upon the language of DEI and turned it into a catch-all symbol for the ways the US was diversifying and becoming less tolerant to sexism, racism, ableism and homophobia.The company would no longer comment on “polarizing issues”. Its philanthropic arm’s mission changed from “[providing] access to resources and opportunities that build equity and empower underserved and underrepresented communities to reach their highest potential” to “[partnering] with communities to move people forward and upward”. And Ford would stop contributing to external culture surveys such as the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. The fresh look at Ford’s policies said nothing – save for vague allusions to the benefits of diversity – about systemic racism. Hackett’s earlier declaration that Ford would not “turn a blind eye” to systemic racism seemed but a memory.Within days of taking office, Donald Trump signed an executive order that would eliminate Johnson’s civil rights order. The order directed the office of federal contract compliance to stop “promoting diversity” and holding contractors responsible for “affirmative action”. To Smith, the administration’s early actions amount to “a blatant effort in order to not only uphold the white power structure, but to remove any government responsibility to uphold the rights of individuals of color, specifically Black people”. It is the fruit of a conservative movement that has been trying to reverse course ever since the government began taking seriously efforts to protect the rights of Americans regardless of race, sex, religion or national origin.In 2020, hundreds of private companies pledged to change their culture – to use their power and influence and, most importantly, money, to re-shape American society toward more just ends. Now, the three largest employers in the nation – Walmart, Amazon and the federal government – have all rolled those policies back. Dozens of other corporations have turned back the clock on even pretending to care about equality in the workplace as well.To businesses’ credit, they had a difficult task ahead of them in 2020. “They’re faced with putting a policy in place quickly that’s responsive and doesn’t sound like lip service to frustrated people,” Dawkins said. But in doing so, they made an admission: they had not been taking diversity seriously before – and the capitulation to the administration’s demands since has betrayed that truth. And they made clear their efforts were always lip service.When corporations pushed back against Ronald Reagan in the 80s, they had the public on their side – and even a significant chunk of the Republican caucus – for at least the valence of effort. Most of the pressure was coming from Reagan himself. But when they felt the united political pressure from conservatives this time around, in the absence of near-universal public support, they had a choice to make.For companies whose values course through everything they do, the choice was easy. As Dawkins, of York University, explained: “A company like Patagonia – which challenged the first Trump administration over environmental regulations – or Ben and Jerry’s, they’ve been in this for the long haul so it doesn’t change as much.” But organizations who opted for expediency – programs to pacify rather than any transformational interrogation of institutional culture and values – capitulated.Values are only as good as their durability under pressure; and many of America’s largest companies proved an equitable, inclusive workplace was never one of their core values to begin with. More

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      Dear Disney: don’t cave to Trump. We need you to shape dreams for kids everywhere | Jeff Yang

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      I remember the moment I truly recognized the power Disney has to move young hearts and minds.It was when I attended a sneak preview of Disney’s adaptation of the Chinese legend of Mulan, about a young woman who disguises herself as a man and takes up her wounded father’s sword to defend her nation.I enjoyed the movie, with its combination of swashbuckling, slapstick and show tunes. But as I filed out of the theater, what I saw hit me like a fire-dragon rocket: two blond, apple-cheeked siblings, probably under the age of eight, leaping and sparring and loudly arguing over the right to pretend to be the movie’s main character, Mulan. A boy and a girl, neither of them Asian, both so enthralled by the film’s Chinese protagonist that they each aspired to be her.It reminded me that Disney doesn’t just tell stories; it shapes dreams, creating heroes iconic enough to inspire young kids to imagine and be more, and providing empowering figures that enable people from different backgrounds to see themselves – and one another.It’s still staggering for me to think that Mulan, a story from China with a gender-blurred title role, was greenlit, made and released in 1998 and is now broadly accepted alongside Bambi as a timeless animated classic – especially now that Maga has announced it’s coming after the House of Mouse, with the apparent objective to make sure that nothing like it is ever made again.On 27 March, the Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair, Brendan Carr – a dead ringer for Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s mirthless toon-terrorizer Judge Doom – sent a letter to Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger, informing him that he had directed the agency’s enforcement bureau to begin an investigation into Disney’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies.Carr stated that he wanted to ensure that Disney had not been “promoting invidious forms of DEI discrimination”, calling out as examples the company’s employee affinity groups, its “Reimagine Tomorrow” multicultural showcase and especially the company’s “inclusion standards”, a set of goals that aim to increase the number of characters from underrepresented groups to half of the regular and recurring roles on its TV network, ABC.It’s hard to explain why any of these are “discriminatory” or “invidious”; voluntary employee-led clubs – which have no restrictions or requirements for membership – are discriminatory? A website featuring remixes of Disney songs sung by artists of color and explanations of how to sign “Mickey Mouse” in ASL is invidious? Even the “inclusion standards” are just broadly aspirational objectives, which could be met in any number of ways: Disney’s definition of “underrepresented groups” includes women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, disabled persons and military veterans.But the mere threat of the investigation has triggered Disney to begin a cautious reframing of some of these initiatives. The Reimagine Tomorrow site is gone, and now points to a generic inclusion page headed by the message: “At Disney, we want everyone to belong and thrive.” The company’s business employee resource groups have been redubbed “belonging” employee resource groups.Carr’s letter makes it clear that mere semantic shifts won’t be enough, demanding that Disney’s policies be “changed in a fundamental manner”. And while Carr cites “equal opportunity rules” and the need to ensure “fair and equal treatment under the law”, it’s obvious that he won’t be satisfied until Disney changes the one thing that the FCC is restricted from regulating by the US constitution: its content.View image in fullscreenOf course, the first amendment prevents the government from infringing on freedom of expression, except in very narrowly delimited ways. Where the FCC is concerned, the only way it can impose its will on a creative company’s storytelling choices is if they are obscene, indecent or profane or contain dangerous disinformation. So the agency can’t just demand that Disney stop making shows about Asian princesses or Black superheroes or Latina anthropomorphic automobiles.Yet that’s just what Carr is doing – using the back door of equal employment opportunity to claim that by casting people who aren’t straight or white or male in its movies and TV programs, Disney is unfairly withholding employment from straight white males. And unless Disney is ready to announce Timothée Chalamet as the new Black Panther, which, thank God, it isn’t, targeting the studio’s ability to hire diverse talent is a deliberate attempt to force it away from making diverse stories.That would spell business disaster for Disney.Yes, the studio has had its share of flops, which the Maga mob has blamed on multicultural casting – including, most recently, its unfairly pilloried live-action remake of the 1937 animated masterpiece Snow White, starring Rachel Zegler, whose mother is Colombian. The film, made on a $240m budget, has so far earned just $142m at the box office, its prospects poisoned by controversy over Zegler’s advocacy on behalf of Palestine and racist backlash over her Latina heritage from online creeps.But similar attacks were also levied against Disney’s The Little Mermaid remake, starring the African American actor Halle Bailey as Ariel, and that film was a box-office success and global streaming blockbuster. It also made the storyline relevant in new ways to young women – which makes sense, given that Disney’s goal with its remakes isn’t simply to photocopy the past, but to extend and refresh it, reaching untapped audiences of the present and emerging markets of the future.If that means they sometimes swing and miss in the short term, in the long run it all evens out, because Disney doesn’t actually plan their business by quarter or year – they blueprint it by age bracket. Their franchises are designed to be evergreen and intentionally aligned to “graduate” kids up a ladder of content: girls go from Muppets to Disney Fairies to Disney princesses to Disney’s Descendants. Boys go from Cars to Pirates to Star Wars to Marvel superheroes. The ultimate goal is to ensure that there’s something for every stage of growing up until young adulthood arrives and their fans become parents themselves, allowing Disney to earn money across the consumer life cycle, generation after generation.And every generation of Americans is more diverse. Baby boomers were 29% people of color. Gen X, 41%. Millennials, 46%, gen Z, 50%. The youngest rising cohort – those born after 2012, and currently squarely in Disney’s prime target demo – is officially the first to be “majority minority”, with kids of color making up a full 52% of gen Alpha.Whatever Trump’s mandate may be, Disney’s demographic mandate should be stronger. The company defiantly and successfully resisted attempts by Ron DeSantis to strong-arm it into ending its diversity practices in Florida. While Trump’s flying assault is coming from a higher top rope, the Mouse should still be mighty enough to fend it off and roar back.Disney’s incentive will be what it always has been: making money. But for diverse communities, the positive manifestation of Disney’s profit motive has been that kids growing up today know what it feels like to be mirrored in the media they consume, with all of the psychological and emotional benefits that confers.I’ve seen this first-hand, as someone who grew up in an era nearly devoid of Asian representation in Hollywood, and who went through the bizarre experience of having my elder son, Hudson Yang, star in the first hit TV series focused on an Asian American family. To this day, Hudson still receives surprise hugs from people who grew up tuning into Fresh Off the Boat once a week, and wide-eyed stares from kids who have discovered it years later through TikTok clips and streaming reruns.The network that aired the show for six seasons, beginning in 2014? Disney’s ABC, a decade before inclusion standards existed and before Maga was around to protest them. And that gives me optimism that Disney will keep doing what it has done so well for generations, regardless: give children from a wide array of backgrounds an answer – “now and here” – to the question in Mulan’s signature ballad: “When will my reflection show who I am inside?” More

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      Trump will not stop until every American relic reflects his imaginary world view | Kellie Carter Jackson

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      Last week, Donald Trump issued another executive order, this one aimed directly at the Smithsonian Institution, and called for “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”. He contended that the Smithsonian had “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and that it advocates “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive”. Specifically, the order targeted American history and art that focused on stories of race and racism.Being responsible for the distillation of the nation’s narrative is no small thing. The Smithsonian oversees 21 museums, libraries, research centers and the National zoo. Every year millions of people visit various sites that are free to the public. The collection of museums represents the pinnacle of public history and the story America tells the world about itself.But Trump’s executive order is not about restoring the truth. Quite the opposite. It creates false narratives and myths that promote the supremacy of whiteness. This executive order has the potential for harm because erasure is violence; it robs the public of the truth. Because there is no way to explain slavery and segregation as not “inherently harmful and oppressive”, Trump would rather not explain it at all.One of the most popular Smithsonian sites is the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), affectionately known by Black people as the “Blacksonian”. The museum was conceived of as early as 1915 by Black veterans who fought during the civil war and wanted recognition for their service and valor. These soldiers were not only left out of national memorials and ceremonies, but also faced tremendous discrimination often culminating in deadly violence when they returned home. They wanted a space and memorial that would honor their achievements and pivotal contributions.It was impossible to separate the story of Black military service and valor from racial discrimination and violence. Similarly, one cannot separate out the “good” from the “bad” in creating an honest narrative about the United States. Accordingly, the NMAAHC holds a special place in America, one where the complexity of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are recognized as founding fathers and slaveholders. There is no abolitionist movement without slavery. There is no suffrage movement without women’s denial. There is no civil rights movement without racism and oppression. These are the facts. Museums exist to collect, preserve and exhibit the past as it happened. Archivists and curators care deeply about their mission to be accurate and authentic.An America that will re-erect statues and rename military bases after Confederate generals, while simultaneously stripping the evidence of race and racism from the Smithsonian history museums isn’t correcting the historical record. That nation is whitewashing the political record to legitimize the actions of those in power. Slavery is a fact. Jim Crow is a fact. Racist and exclusionary immigration laws are a fact. Japanese internment is a fact. Native American removal and extermination is a fact. Mexican and Mexican American expulsion is a fact. Removing them from the sight of the public doesn’t change the facts, it only changes one’s perspective on and relation to them politically.Museums offer cautionary tales, hard lessons about where the country has been and where we hope to never be again. They hold a great deal of public trust, perhaps more than schools, media, newspapers or even films. Patrons get to experience first hand documents, letters, original photographs and artefacts. Museums are public time capsules of where we have been. I will never forget seeing Emmett Till’s casket, Harriet Tubman’s shawl, Nat Turner’s Bible or an early flag of the First Republic of Haiti. These artefacts do more than defy the odds by still existing; they tell a powerful story about who people were during the times that they lived. Museums should not be party to culture wars. Our history is a collective memory whether Trump likes it or not.A nation that cannot reckon with its past, triumph and tragedy, is ultimately a weaker one; puffed up with its own delusions of grandeur. There is more power in the truth than there is in a lie. The efforts in the last 50 years to give the powerless a place politically, academically and legally is not from a revisionist view of American history, but rather a move to make all of America the democratic nation it claims to be.Moreover, key features of the NMAAHC reflect optimism, spirituality and joy because anti-Blackness is not the totality of the Black experience. The museum showcases Black food pathways, artistry, music, sports, film, ingenuity and technological advancements. It is a celebration of achievement despite the barriers and challenges racism presents. But even if museums solely focused on slavery, they still deserve a right to exist. America has been a land with enslaved people longer than it has been a county without slavery.Are museums contested spaces? Absolutely. No one space can include everything and offer an exhaustive history of a country, person or movement. But what is included or not included is painstakingly considered. Museums are bipartisan sites where everyone can grapple with the good, bad and the ugliness of nation making. But Trump will not stop until every American relic reflects his imaginary world view, a place where few can see their lived experiences on full display. More

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      As Trump rewrites even America’s history, institutions have two choices – submit or find ways to resist | Charlotte Higgins

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      It has come to this: we are now in Ministry of Truth territory. In Washington DC, the Smithsonian Institution, the US’s ensemble of 21 great national museums, last week became the subject of an executive order by President Donald Trump. “Distorted narratives” are to be rooted out. There will be no more of the “corrosive ideology” that has fostered a “sense of national shame”. The institution has, reads the order, “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” that portrays “American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive”. The vice-president, JD Vance, is, by virtue of his office, on the museum’s board. He is charged by Trump to “prohibit expenditure” on programmes that “divide Americans based on race”. He is to remove “improper ideology”. The order is titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”. George Orwell lived too soon.The move is deeply shocking, but predictable. After Trump’s insertion of himself as chair of the John F Kennedy Center and his railing against the supposed wokeness of the national performing arts venue, the federally funded Smithsonian was bound to be next in line. Those who imagined the Kennedy Center was a one-off, attracting the president’s ire for personal reasons, were deluding themselves about the scale of Trump’s ideological ambition. Picked out for opprobrium in the executive order are the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum for celebrating transgender women (the museum, it should be pointed out, has yet to be built); the National Museum of African American History and Culture; and an exhibition titled The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture at the American Art Museum.I visited the Museum of African American History for the first time a couple of weeks ago. It is a vast book of a museum, heavy with text. It was full, when I visited, of mostly Black families seeking out an encounter with a narrative that has long been a footnote to, or erased completely from, the main national story. You could spend days absorbing the web of stories that the museum offers, beginning in its basements with the transatlantic slave trade, where one of the most moving objects is, unexpectedly and profoundly, a piece of iron ballast that took the place of a human body after a ship’s cargo of enslaved people had been disgorged on the triangular route between Africa, the Americas and Europe. The whole strikes a fascinating balance between an unflinching gaze on systems of oppression, and a sense of Black achievement and cultural richness that has nevertheless effloresced.Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the museum, gave a talk at the House of Lords in 2011 about the institution, which was still in the planning, and would open five years later. I can still recall how moving it was to hear about the difficulties of making a museum – a place where a story is told through objects – from communities traditionally poor in material things. The institution had put out a call for loans and donations. Precious, carefully treasured objects – a bonnet embroidered by someone’s enslaved grandmother, for example – were arriving into the new collection.Fast forward to the present, and Bunch is in charge of the entire Smithsonian Institution. This is a man who believes, as he told Queen’s University Belfast last year, that history can be used to “understand the tensions that have divided us. And those tensions are really where the learning is where the growth is, where the opportunities to transform are.” That compassionate vision of the past, as a means through which the citizens of the present can better understand each other, is completely opposed to the monolithically triumphalist spirit of Trump’s executive order, in which history is reduced to “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness”. How much easier it is, to sink into this pillowy, comforting notion of glorious progress than to grapple with the kind of knotty, often upsetting and confronting history that the Museum of African American History offers its visitors. But it makes me wonder: can the museum survive this government?I visited, too, the American Art Museum, whose show The Shape of Power is targeted in the executive order as emblematic of the Smithsonian’s decline into “divisive, race-centered ideology”. The exhibition, which was years in the careful making, points out what is surely obvious, once it has been given a moment’s thought: that race is not an inherent and prepolitical category, but rather a constructed set of ideologies that served (and still serve) a set of economic and political interests. (One way to tell that race is a socially constructed category, in fact, is by looking to the Greeks and the Romans – the people who established, in the minds of many on the US right, “western civilisation”. They were xenophobic in their own way, and enslavement was a fact of their societies. But as is obvious from their literature, whiteness and Blackness were for them simply not operative categories.) The exhibition is an eye- and mind-opening look at how race ideology has translated into and been reinforced, or deconstructed, by sculpture – that peculiarly lifelike and thus “truthful”-seeming artform.The catalogue quotes Toni Morrison, who once wrote that “I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World.” Such intellectual adventuring is not what is wanted by the White House now. Trump’s world is more like Viktor Orbán’s, under whose government the school history curriculum has been rewritten to glorify Hungary, or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, where the novelist Elif Shafak, as she recalled in a Guardian Live event last week, was prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness”, her lawyer obliged to defend in court the views of her fictional characters. The Smithsonian and all who work there have an unenviable choice, one that has already been put before other great or formerly great institutions such as Columbia University: to comply with Trump’s dark demands; or to find ways to defy them.

      Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer More

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      Advertising giant WPP cuts diversity references from annual report

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      The British advertising giant WPP has become the latest company to cut the phrase “diversity, equity and inclusion” from its annual report as the policies come under attack from the Trump administration.The agency, which counts the US as by far its largest market, boasts the storied “Madison Avenue” agencies J Walter Thompson, Ogilvy and Grey among its top brands.In WPP’s annual report, which was released on Friday, the chief executive, Mark Read, told shareholders that “much has changed over the last year” due to political events.“In today’s complex world, a pressing question for brands and organisations is whether to engage on social issues in a more contested public arena, and how to navigate the expectations of different audiences with competing views on sensitive topics,” he wrote.The same document axed all references of “diversity, equity and inclusion”, “DE&I” and “DEI”. The policy attracted 20 mentions in the previous year’s report. The earlier document mentioned three times that the company was seen as a “diversity leader”.The omissions, which were first reported by the Sunday Times, included changes to how the company reports on measuring top executives’ non-financial performance, which contributes to the size of their short-term bonuses. In the new report, the phrasing has switched to “people and culture”.WPP declined to comment on whether the new wording was a response to anti-DEI policy moves by the Trump administration. The company said that, while the phrasing in its annual report had changed, the way in which executives’ short-term bonuses are calculated was unaltered.Within his first few days in office, Donald Trump instructed US government agencies to shut down their DEI programmes and federal employees working in diversity offices were immediately put on paid leave.Trump signed two executive orders targeting DEI programmes within the federal government. The first executive order largely scrapped the DEI efforts that took place under Joe Biden, who had ordered all federal agencies to come up with equity plans.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA second executive order effectively ended any DEI activities within the federal government. This order overturned a handful of executive orders from past presidents, including one from Lyndon B Johnson that was signed during the civil rights era that required federal contractors to adopt equal opportunity measures.The Financial Times recently reported that more than 200 US companies have removed references to “diversity, equity and inclusion” from their annual reports since Trump’s election. More