A Scottish colleague asked us, “Why is everything being blamed on DEI and Black people?”

Our answer: race has always been a tool of United States politics.

This skin-color caste system was first developed in the colonies and then globally marketed to rationalize and justify intentional deep divisions in a society that proclaimed its belief in equality. That narrative has carried forward into the 21st century and is now openly upheld by the current White House administration. 

Also, the acronym “DEI” has been successfully co-opted as a political dog whistle, a stand-in for all people Black and Brown, whom the United States has historically marketed as scapegoats for its societal ills. The decades-old term, DEI, is about egalitarianism – equal opportunity for all. But the 2025 Inaugural Address our Scottish friend listened to and its supporters have turned it into a three-letter profanity. 

Why Scotland and The World is Watching the U.S.

Many business peers in other countries have asked, like our Scottish colleague, “how does this happen in America?” It happens because America is skilled at globally marketing the myth of its own exceptionalism. Meaning, the United States presents itself as the world’s democratic exemplar, inoculated from the autocracy and fascism that plagues other nations. All the while obscuring its full history, including the fact that European fascist regimes studied racial apartheid in the American South when creating the road maps for their own fascism. 

If there is one statement that sums up our answer to our Scottish colleague, it is this: Black and Brown Americans have always been inconvenient to the myth of American democracy. 

How That Narrative Plays Out at Home

The internal mythology is the same as the global one, of a nation perpetually progressing with only occasional blips backwards.

Historically, that’s not true. 

However, it is a well-scripted, emotionally triggering narrative. Autocratic societies must control narrative to justify why they are taking away freedoms. The narrative that our Scottish business colleague questioned is: these Black and Brown folks are taking things from you (White people). They haven’t earned it. The reason you’re struggling is NOT the rich oligarchs who are hoarding wealth and funneling it up. No, it’s the immigrant and Black person in this job you should have had. 

The truth is most of the time the United States is regressing.

If you grew up in the United States, do you remember learning in primary or secondary school about a period directly after the Civil War in the mid-1800s when there were Black senators and congressmen in the House of Representatives such as the men posed in this blog’s headline image? You know, those pictures showing the abolition of slavery when newly freed enslaved Black people received land and more than 2,000 Black office holders served at every level of America’s political system? That includes in 1870, Hiram Revels, who became the first African American in the U.S. Congress when he was elected to represent Mississippi in the Senate. Remember that? No? 

That’s likely because you were never taught it to begin with. 

If you did learn it, probably you sought out the history as an adult. 

This multiracial governance happened during a period called Reconstruction, from 1865-1877. The historic period in which the United States grappled with the question of how to integrate millions of newly freed African Americans into social, political, and labor systems. It was a time of significant transformation.

During Reconstruction, Congress passed three constitutional amendments – Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth – that permanently abolished slavery, defined birthright citizenship and guaranteed due process and equal protection under the law, and granted all males the ability to vote by prohibiting voter discrimination based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude. African Americans across the United States faced steep obstacles of resistance as they attempted to claim their newly won rights.

Despite the significance of Reconstruction – historians often call it the country’s “Second Founding” – many Americans know little about it. 

That’s intentional. As is the erasure of history happening today.

If you do know the history of Reconstruction, the most common way taught in high school is that it was a failure. As in, “we tried to let Black people govern and they didn’t know how to do it.” 

Also not true. 

How We Remember History

Historian Kate Masur said in a 2022 interview, “teaching American history has always been political. Teaching Reconstruction has been one of the more political or ‘controversial’ periods of American history, because it was a [time] in which a dramatic new experiment in interracial, multiracial democracy was undertaken and a lot of people didn’t like that. There were battles not only on the ground about what to do in that moment but also about how to remember it: was this a period that was horrendous for the United States, as many White segregationists wanted us to believe, or was this a period that was actually very heroic on the part of a lot of people that was tragically cut short.”

Reconstruction is just one of many historical examples of what historian and professor Heather Cox Richardson calls this White House administration’s “full throated attack on American history.” 

In one of her “This Week in Politics” videos, she says, the current White House administration holds “The idea that some people are better than others and have the right to rule. And those few people tend to be White and male and they are more qualified than Black Americans, Brown Americans, People of Color and women are to have a say in their society and to determine their own fate. And that is what the administration is trying to do with its attacks on US history.” 

Richardson continues, “When scholars of Black American history talk about how Black history is American history, what they’re saying is that the central theme of Black history, and I would add women’s history and any marginalized history, is really the central theme of American history…Democracy in the United States has always been the effort of those people who were excluded from it to be included. So, we understand attacks on our rights. We understand how hard it is to protect those rights. We understand creating movements of solidarity to expand those rights.” 

The Power of Storytelling

Demonizing Black and Brown people serves a purpose. It creates a racial wedge to discourage a multiracial coalition of Americans who have more in common economically with one another than they do with the oligarchs who attempt to discourage their alliances.

If you are attempting to remove the economic, social and political rights of Black and Brown people you have to justify those actions with a story. 

And the story our Scottish colleague questioned in that inaugural address is that the Black and Brown people who fought for a more democratic United States don’t matter. So, it’s okay that the federal government is taking away their rights. It’s okay to exclude them from economic opportunities.

For centuries, elites have used storytelling to justify theft, exclusion and exploitation to amass wealth and power to the detriment of Black and Brown people.

We call this the business of race.

The Five Ds

The erasure and rewriting of history remain political tools to:

• Dehumanize. Use narratives that describe Black and Brown Americans as inhuman, then you don’t have to feel bad about supporting policies that disparage their identity, strip away their rights, destroy their livelihoods and take their lives.
• Distract from the factual history of the country’s founding and growth through 246 years of chattel slavery and 100 years of “Jim Crow” apartheid enforced through systemic, pervasive and egregious violence.
• Divide marginalized groups who would otherwise benefit from forming coalitions with Black and Brown Americans to challenge race-based wealth inequality that has substantially increased since the 1980s.
• Deny all Americans the knowledge of what is possible in a multiracial democracy because it can and did exist in the United States during Reconstruction. It’s a blueprint for a more truly democratic future, where all are equal and can participate because there IS enough for everybody.
• Destroy policies that were created to enforce protection against race-based discrimination in all sectors of American society and strip away the rights of Black and Brown people. It is happening now as we draft this blog post with ongoing plans to redistrict the seats in the House of Representatives in the South. The Supreme Court will decide if the Voting Rights Act still allows voters of color to challenge racially discriminatory voting maps in court.

Progress Can Be Erased When Collective Memory is Intentionally Erased

So let us remember, using basic math:

• Slavery began in 1619 and was abolished in 1865. That’s 246 years.
• Reconstruction is from 1865 to 1877. It lasts only 12 years. Because the federal and state governments refused to enforce Civil Rights Acts that were passed in the 1860s – the 14th amendment, and the 15^th amendment. It’s as if those laws did not exist. So Black people were not protected by them.
• As a result, what followed was the segregation and disenfranchisement borne from Black Code laws also known as “Jim Crow” which represented a formal, codified system of racial apartheid and lasted for about 100 years, from the post-Civil War era (starting around 1865) until the mid-1960s.
• This system of racial segregation that violently enforced these laws (“Jim Crow”) was dismantled by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
• The entire civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s was fought to vindicate rights that Black people had already won following the end of slavery in the 1860s during Reconstruction.
• The civil rights movement as we think of it in modern times actually began right after WWI ended in 1918 when Black American veterans returned home after fighting fascism overseas, anticipating the dignity and respect earned during military service. Instead they faced intensified racial tensions in their domestic lives. The influx of returning men meant competition for shrinking economic opportunities in postwar America leading to the “Red Summer” of 1919 when racist violence broke out in at least 26 cities. The civil rights movement that is being dismantled in mere months in 2025 was fought for 46 years, from 1918 to 1964.
• So in the United States, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act of 1964, 1965 and 1968, respectively, democracy has only existed for 60 years. Slavery and codified systems of discrimination based on skin color has existed for nearly 350 years. This, for a country that is looking to celebrate 250 years of “democracy” in 2026.

In 2025, 160 years after the 13^th amendment abolishes slavery, the current White House administration implemented a swift campaign of not only erasing the full American history that tells the story of the central role of enslaved Africans in America’s economic global dominance, but more importantly, guts decades-old agencies that were created to enforce laws against discrimination: 

• Scaled back the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), part of the U.S. Department of Labor. This is the very agency created to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and to prevent discrimination in employment tied to federal dollars.
• Gutted the funding and staff needed to investigate and fight housing discrimination at the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO), part of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
• Shuttered the EPA’s (Environmental Protection Agency) Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights (OEJECR), which addressed the fact that Black communities are disproportionately exposed to toxic pollutants, pesticides and waste.
• Closed the Department of Veteran Affairs Equity office. That office was dedicated to addressing the racial disparities in how disabled veterans receive compensation.
• Shut down regional civil rights offices that were key to fighting discrimination in schools and to enforcing desegregation. As a result, schools were forced to eliminate initiatives that diversify teacher pipelines and support Black students to help close the achievement gap.
• Brown-skinned American citizens are being stopped and harassed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and in some cases falsely accused and detained.
• White convicted criminals are being pardoned by executive order resulting in a U.S. Justice Department which has no teeth.
• The White House is using the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department to enforce executive orders dismantling diversity programs.

The United States President cannot unilaterally overturn the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. At least at the time of this writing, it requires an act of Congress. But what the administration can and is doing is gutting the agencies that were created to enforce those laws. And so, this landmark legislation that a coalition of American citizens fought and died for, over centuries, might as well not exist at all.

The Past is a Prologue

In the United States, history does repeat itself: 149 years ago in 1876, United States President Rutherford B. Hayes was elected. One of his first acts when he took office in 1877 was to remove all federal and state protections for newly freed enslaved people, thus ending Reconstruction. Despite the 14th and 15th amendments being written on paper, once they were not enforced by law, it was as though the legislation never happened.

Thus, United States President Rutherford B. Hayes, ushered in codified, and violently enforced racial apartheid for the next 100 years. 

Reimagining the Future

We close this response to our Scotland colleague using the opening paragraph from the final chapter of our book, The Business of Race. The chapter title is Reimagining the Future: The Power of Narrative: