Ayanna Pressley: DEI ‘Is a Must Have, It Is Essential’

Pressley: “We are now six months into the second occupancy of the White House, and all Trump is conducting a wholesale attack on civil rights, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and anything that benefits marginalized communities. This is truly anti-blackness on steroids. So let’s call it what it is. The harms are blunt, so I want to speak directly. This is re-segregation. Donald Trump has rescinded executive orders dating back to Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s civil rights movement. And in fact, though it received little attention, when I introduced an amendment to ban segregation, all the Republicans in the House Oversight Committee voted against it.

Trump and Republicans are trying to force their vision of an emboldened white supremacy as they work to undo centuries of progress that generations of organizers, activists, and lawmakers have fought to achieve. Diversity, meaning all people. Equity, meaning fair access to opportunity. And inclusion, having a pathway to upward mobility to realized dreams. Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not a nice-to-have, it is a must-have. It is essential. It is essential to ensuring our children, all our children, are afforded a better future than their ancestors were forced to endure. That’s why, as Trump attempts to erase black history, to whitewash our shared American history, and attack intellectual freedom, we pushed forward legislation to make reparations a reality.

And we defended our Smithsonian Museums to ensure we learned how to overcome systems of oppression and the whims of petulant men thirsty for power. Diversity, equity, and inclusion is essential to federal workers who are working every day to make life better for our nation’s most underserved communities. That’s why we have fought to protect our federal workforce from Trump’s firing frenzy, in which 1 in 5 federal jobs are held by a black person. And that’s why I was proud to introduce the Equity in Government Act to codify into law a whole-of-government promise to advance equity and to ensure fair and equitable outcomes for everyone in America.

The work of diversity, equity, and inclusion — and I will say it every time, I will not just use the acronym — we have seen them work actively to vilify Critical Race Theory, CRT, Black Lives Matter, BLM, and now Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI. The work of diversity, equity, and inclusion is essential to leaving the world a better place than we found it. Today we aren’t only fighting for diversity, equity, and inclusion, we are fighting for dignity, for justice, for humanity, for progress, for every single person who calls this country — calls this country home, and our fight is far from finished. Thank you.”