DEI: Dead or Alive?
What Is Even Happening?
For decades, diversity, equity, and inclusion and racial equity work have served as both a moral compass and a practical toolkit in the long march toward a more just America.
Communities and equity advocates have been the driving force behind this country’s unfinished work of accountability, repair, and transformation. From the founding of the United States on the genocide of Native Americans and chattel slavery of African, Caribbean, and Indigenous people, to the ongoing exploitation and economic inequality produced by racial capitalism, our communities have fought (and are still fighting) to transform systems built to exclude us.
We fought to vote, to own land, to work dignified jobs, to live in safe, thriving communities, and to have a say in decisions shaping our lives. We fought for access to the rights, resources, and opportunities that were and are readily available to wealthier communities. That fight is what has moved America toward a more just future. This country is nothing without its diversity, and there is no diversity without generations of communities who fought for liberation and made this country what it is today.
But today, DEI and racial equity stand at a critical crossroads.
The Trump Administration’s DEI Attack Strategy
The second Trump Administration has launched an all-out assault on evidence-based DEI initiatives through rhetoric, executive orders, agency guidance, investigations, funding threats, and political intimidation.
Many of these attacks are not true legal transformations, but pieces of a calculated campaign to sow confusion, fear, and federal chaos designed to drain resources, invite lawsuits, and divide working communities who could be in solidarity along racial lines.
Confusion is the point.
Trump has issued over 145 executive orders and reversed many Biden-era policies since taking office, but most face legal challenges and have not actually changed the legality of DEI and racial equity work. Instead, they have created a fear-fueled chilling effect. Some institutions are taking the bait and retreating from DEI before they are legally required to do so.
For example, Portland’s Mayor rescinded the city’s DEI work in 2025 citing Trump’s executive orders and federal funding cuts. However, recent victories, such as the recent Department of Education rollback of its 2025 restrictions on DEI efforts in schools, indicate a turning of the tide and a signal to continue fighting forward.
Beneath the smoke and mirrors of executive orders and culture war distractions is a truth the right refuses to acknowledge: the fight for racial justice has survived attacks before, and done so even in the face of constant federal challenges.
As conservative activists celebrate what they believe to be the death of DEI, we should be clear about what is actually happening. Racial equity work is not dying. It is being forced to evolve – away from performative commitments and toward more systemic, distributed, and economically rooted strategies required to meaningfully disrupt the concentration of white power and wealth.
Not Taking the Bait
The right wants people to believe that anything connected to race is now unlawful. That is false.
A well-funded conservative bloc has spent years targeting race-conscious policymaking, including affirmative action, voting rights, environmental justice efforts, and corporate DEI. The 2023 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court striking down affirmative action in universities was a major victory for that movement, but it did not make racial equity illegal.
Institutions can still study racial disparities, at least for now. They can still collect disaggregated data. They can still enforce civil rights laws. They can still design policies that address unequal access to housing, credit, clean air, transportation, health care, infrastructure, and economic opportunity. They can still pursue racial equity through legally durable, race-conscious strategies.
But in 2026, as the Trump Administration continues to ramp up its attacks, racial equity practitioners have to adapt their strategies.
For many communities, DEI never went far enough – treating the symptoms, not the disease. Too often, DEI efforts devolved into quotas, generic trainings, and surface-level representation that ultimately propped up unequal systems without changing them. This kind of work left institutions fragile when political winds shifted.
Still, DEI remains a legal and viable tool – just not a complete strategy.
What Comes Next: Practical Advice for the Road Ahead
At Greenlining in 2021, we started to build out a strategy for making equity real through a Greenlined Economy: a different economic system intentionally designed to address wealth inequality and unlock access to opportunity for communities of color and everyday people.
Building a Greenlined Economy is possible through systems change – the process of transforming inequitable systems through power-building, investment in disinvested communities, and policy change. This work remains urgent and possible today. We just need to push forward with what works.
We need to build cross-issue, cross-class solidarity and coalition power to build power to hold our ground and advance effective strategies no matter who sits in the White House or in Sacramento. We must move the fight to the states and local governments. We need to shift our focus from narrow race-based mechanisms to race-conscious, systems-level change.
Here is what that can look like in practice:
Build Community Power
Racial equity work must begin with the people most impacted by inequitable systems.
That means grounding policy priorities in the voices, needs, and leadership of communities that have been excluded from wealth, health, land, safety, and opportunity by government and the economic system. Advocates and organizations must bridge the divide between communities and policymakers, staying faithful to long-term systems change rooted in community needs.
For practitioners, this means:
- Building long-term relationships with impacted communities when developing policy solutions.
- Treating community expertise as evidence, not as an afterthought.
- Creating accessible pathways for people to shape policy, budgets, implementation, and accountability.
- Supporting community-led solutions around housing, climate resilience, transportation, health, landback, and economic opportunity.
Adapt Proactively
Racial equity practitioners must be legally strategic without losing sight of core equity principles. That means prioritizing policies that are conscious of and informed by race, while targeting the systems that produce racial disparities. In some contexts, the strongest legal pathway may require race-neutral mechanisms. But race-neutral language should never mean race-neutral goals.
Practitioners can use indicators like pollution burden, income, wealth, geography, health risk, housing cost burden, language access, infrastructure gaps, and lack of access to credit to design policies that reach the communities most harmed by inequitable systems.
For practitioners, this means:
- Naming race and racial disparities where legally and politically possible.
- Using data and evidence to identify root causes.
- Designing policies around material outcomes, not symbolic representation.
- Using race-neutral language like “accessibility,” “affordability,” “disadvantaged communities,” or “high-need communities” when necessary, while staying clear about race-conscious goals.
- Focusing on systems, not symbols.
Hold Power Accountable
Even in this hostile environment, many equity mandates remain on the books. Civil rights laws still exist. State and local obligations still matter. Public agencies and private institutions still make decisions every day about where resources go, whose needs count, and whose harms are ignored.
Racial equity practitioners should hold decision-makers accountable for the legal and political commitments they have already made and move forward effective, feasible equity strategies.
For practitioners, this means:
- Demanding transparent data collection disaggregated by race, income, geography, language, disability, and other relevant factors.
- Tracking where public dollars flow and who benefits.
- Exposing when investments reinforce displacement, pollution, exclusion, or the racial wealth gap.
- Holding agencies accountable to existing equity mandates, plans, and legal obligations.
- Challenging institutions that claim equity while refusing to measure outcomes.
Reframe the Narrative
The right has invested heavily in making DEI a symbol of unfairness, bureaucracy, and division. We cannot respond with jargon, defensiveness, or silence. We need a clearer story.
For practitioners, this means:
- Naming race clearly in mission, vision, and values.
- Connecting racial equity to material outcomes people can feel: housing, health, safety, affordability, jobs, climate resilience, and access to capital.
- Deploying coordinated, bold messaging that counters misinformation and clarifies what remains legal.
- Using precise descriptors like “disinvested communities,” “pollution burden,” “wealth gap,” “health risk,” “geographic exclusion,” and “infrastructure access” to show how inequity works.
- Leaning into class-based economic narratives without erasing race.
- Highlighting collective action and coalition power as the path forward.
Build Durable State Power
Federal attacks are serious, but they are not the only arena for change.
Unified networks can withstand federal attacks and advance long-term policy even as administrations change. States retain broad authority over housing, transportation, climate policy, insurance, lending, infrastructure, public health, procurement, and economic development. These are the places where racial equity can either be quietly dismantled or rebuilt with discipline and power. Strong partnerships now lay the groundwork for equity that outlasts any single election.
For practitioners, this means:
- Building coalitions that can respond quickly to federal attacks.
- Coordinating legal, policy, organizing, and communications strategies across issues.
- Advancing state and local policies that improve material conditions for communities most impacted by inequality.
- Defending existing protections while building new ones.
- Creating infrastructure that can outlast any single election, administration, or political cycle.
Not Dead. Sharper and More Strategic.
DEI and racial equity are not dead – they are evolving beyond the boardroom and into the streets, statehouses, and economic structures where true transformation must occur.
The path forward demands that we shed the limitations of performative equity work and embrace a bolder, more resilient vision rooted in systemic change and collective power. By anchoring our strategies in race-conscious, systems-level policy, building durable cross-issue coalitions, and refusing to be distracted by manufactured culture wars, we can move from defense to offense.
The goal is not merely to survive the current political chaos, but to use it as a catalyst for building a Greenlined Economy – where race, class, and background do not determine opportunity or outcomes. The fight is far from over, but with disciplined adaptation, honest narrative, and unwavering solidarity, we have the tools to build an equitable world from the ground up.
