In a time where the likes of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty seek to roll back all efforts to atone for centuries of racial and class discrimination, a front-page story in the Chicago Tribune underscored just how sad it’s all become.
During Black History Month in February, a story by the Trib’s Christopher Borrelli told of the work to save and renovate Chicago’s old YMCA building on Wabash Avenue. In the early 1900s the building was called the Black Ellis Island because it was where southern Blacks coming to Chicago during the Great Migration stopped and found temporary assistance.
Additionally, 100 years ago it became the birthplace of Black History Month, which eventually was federally recognized in 1976 by then-President Gerald Ford.
An organization called the Renaissance Collaborative saved the building from being razed in 1992 and is now embarked on raising about $11 million to restore it to its old self. In ordinary times, a fundraising campaign would be figuratively shouted from the rooftops, and potential contributors would be constantly reminded of the cause’s historical significance. But these aren’t ordinary times, especially for Black and brown Americans. These are Donald Trump’s and his devotees’ times.
Borrelli explained the irony of reminding people about the significance of the YMCA. Considering the current political climate, he asked, is it possible to draw too much attention to the Y’s history? In 2026, it’s very possible. Even a newspaper story about the project is risky these days, he conceded.
A few years ago, the project to renovate the birthplace of Black History month was awarded a $436,375 grant from the Historic Preservation Fund, which is administered by the National Park Service. That was before federal agencies started removing Black history from websites, erasing names of Black soldiers from battleships and deciding not to recognize Black History Month, the story explained.
On the other hand, Borrelli wrote, what was once created in the YMCA’s rooms is no longer taken for granted. Some were concerned that Black History Month had started to feel somewhat commercial. Now people are realizing that when you fight to get something, you have to fight just as hard to keep it.
“We look to the long game with Black history,” one of the Wabash Y’s contributors told him. “We survived slavery, Jim Crow. We’ll survive Trump.”
Hopefully.
The Chicago YMCA’s dilemma is a microcosm of the unrelenting attack on anything and everything that can be construed as promoting diversity, equality and inclusion — the effort to level a playing field that historically has been tilted against nonwhites.
The attack on DEI began several years ago, gaining steam after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action college admission programs were unconstitutional.
Here in Wisconsin, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos launched a broad attack on DEI by holding the UW system’s budget hostage to force the university to jettison its programs aimed at fostering diversity.
Who would have thought that many of the nation’s civil rights laws, including the 14th Amendment to the Constitution — ratified to guarantee the slaves freed by the Civil War their equal rights — would someday be used to prevent colleges from offering scholarships for minority children?
But that’s where we are today.
With generous tax deductible funding from the right-wing Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty — WILL for short — has been successful in using those laws to allege discrimination against white people.
A few years ago, it caused the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for instance, to pause a program aimed at forgiving loans to Black farmers for debt they had incurred because of discrimination that had denied them federal benefits in the past.
Now it and other similar conservative so-called public interest firms have taken up the cause to claim college scholarship programs aimed at helping Black students violate civil rights laws that prevent racial discrimination — because they discriminate against whites.
One such case is currently before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. WILL lawyers are attempting to strike down a 40-year-old state program that provides thousands of dollars annually to hundreds of students who are African American, American Indian or Hispanic and attend Wisconsin’s technical, private and tribal colleges.
Righting past wrongs is not legal, the claim goes.
Dozens of colleges have been effectively blackmailed into abandoning their DEI programs and have eliminated other efforts to address systemic discrimination. The latest issue of the Progressive magazine details how that has affected nine major American universities.
The University of Alabama, for instance, put limits on discussion of “divisive concepts,” defined as anything that blames race, nationality, sex or religion for things that have happened in the past. The University of Texas ordered a professor to purge passages from Plato from a class syllabus because they referred to human sexuality.
Even private attempts to level long-tilted playing fields are under attack. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), now under control of the Trump administration, is investigating sportswear giant Nike for diversity efforts that the commission says amounted to discrimination against white workers.
The EEOC, born of the 1960s Civil Rights Act, said it is investigating “systemic allegations of D.E.I.-related intentional race discrimination” against white employees and job applicants at Nike.
The New York Times noted that it appears to be the first time that the EEOC has said diversity, equity and inclusion practices in workplaces can amount to discrimination against white people.
Anti-DEI legislation has been introduced in 42 of the 50 states as far-right extremists and conservative lawmakers politicize initiatives undertaken since the 1960s to deal with the nation’s past.
It’s all an effort to regress to a time when communities of color, women, LGBTQ people and others were marginalized and silenced. And there’s no way to sugarcoat that.