Out of the many things I learned during my tour of the Historic New Orleans Collection given by Winston Ho is that after any movement for civil rights, especially for Black people, you see a vicious “Whitelash” in response (to coin a term from Van Jones).
After Reconstruction, there was Jim Crow. The was a Whitelash after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 during the Civil Rights Movement. After Barack Obama was elected, there was this resurgence of White nationalism and the election of White mediocrity embodied by Donald Trump himself, not to mention an insurrection at the White House. After the killing of George Floyd with the newfound embrace of Black humanity and the sudden discovery of Black existence, we now see the dismantling and defunding of DEI departments, the repudiation of Critical Race Theory, this revisionist racist sentiment that DeSantis and his ilk try to promote, and the repeal of established caselaw, including the recent assertion that affirmative action is unconstitutional.
Most days I look at what’s going on in the US with mouth agape. We don’t necessarily call it “affirmative action” in Canada, but we do have many programs, policies, and laws that aim to do what affirmative action wanted to accomplish — remove the systemic barriers to access and acknowledge historical exclusion. These programs and policies have been no less…
