The big difference between the Affirmative Action era of 1969-2012 and the DEI Great Awokening of 2013-2023 was that racial preferences were kept on the downlow during the affirmative action era. You were only supposed to talk about affirmative action in the press about once a decade when a case made it to the Supreme Court.
But then in the DEI age, you were supposed to rant at vast length about how much you hate white men and how they have it coming to be cheated out of jobs.
The Democrats prudently put the kibosh on that kind of rhetoric in 2025-2026, until after the midterm elections.
But now that they are home free, can they continue to hold themselves in check in hopes of winning the big prize in 2028?
Maybe, maybe not…
Talleyrand, who served as foreign minister of France under both Napoleon and the restored Bourbon king Charles XVIII, famously quipped about what his latter Bourbon employers had grasped during the tumultuous years of 1789-1815: “They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”
Meanwhile, in the New York Times, the Bourbons of DEI are returning, their worldviews un-flummoxed by the manifold failures of their Great Awokening. Their racist anti-white hate is as obvious as ever. From the Opinion section:
Claudia Rankine: My Life as an Experiment
Nov. 6, 2026, 11:32 a.m. ET
By Claudia Rankine
… Claudia Rankine is the author of eight books, three plays and many video collaborations; a co-founder of the Racial Imaginary Institute; and a professor of creative writing at New York University.
Back during the Great Awokening in 2015, MacArthur Genius Rankine won the National Book Critics Circle award for the best poetry book and was nominated for best book of criticism, both for Citizen: An American Lyric (despite her screed being neither poetry nor argument). The book is a paranoid collection of anecdotes that she perceived as white racist microaggressions against herself and her friends.
The adulatory NYT review explained:
Told mostly through a series of “micro-aggressions” (the term coined by Harvard professor Chester Pierce in 1970 to describe unconscious insults nonblack Americans aim at black people), Citizen is a circuitous and intimate descent into the poet’s past in order to examine race in America. Some of the incidents happen to the poet, some are reports from friends. …
… In a historic first, Citizen was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award in both poetry and criticism and on March 12 won the award for poetry.
At the core of Citizen is an “anger built up through experience and the quotidian struggles against dehumanization every brown or black person lives simply because of skin color.” In “Making Room,” Rankine writes:
On the train the woman standing makes you understand there are no seats available. And, in fact, there is one. Is the woman getting off at the next stop? No, she would rather stand all the way to Union Station. …
Rankine was born in 1963 in Kingston, Jamaica, and studied at Williams College, then took an MFA at Columbia. She’s published five collections of poetry, edited several anthologies, and is the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including the 2014 Jackson Prize. She’s the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
In Citizen she presents her life as lived in the mostly Caucasian world of the academy, of privilege: she speaks of tennis lessons, housekeepers, conferences. Many pieces are about how her color precludes acceptance in this white space she inhabits. She foregrounds her own position (“Because of your elite status from a year’s worth of travel, you have already settled into your window seat…”) as a means of demonstrating an all-pervasive racism that cuts through economic and social privilege. The micro-aggressions she suffers may seem small compared to the brutality and indignity experienced by those less fortunate, but they are still presented as corrosive, undermining, and overwhelming.
For example:
It’s finally your turn, and then it’s not as he walks in front of you and puts his things on the counter. The cashier says, Sir, she was next. When he turns to you he is truly surprised.
Oh my god, I didn’t see you.
You must be in a hurry, you offer.
No, no, no, I really didn’t see you.
Wow, what poetry!
Back to the NYT today, Rankine writes:
To mark The Times’s 175th birthday, Times editors asked writers to reflect on — and imagine a little bit about — the newspaper’s front page on the day they were born. …
Turns out the great experiment of racial integration was legislated to maintain its status as an American dream. On Sept. 4, 1963, the day I was born, the front page of The New York Times showed a photo of a Black girl, Millicent Brown, surrounded by a sea of white girls with bouffant hairstyles and quizzical expressions. The Black girl, sporting the same hairstyle, was integrating a South Carolina public school. …
Eleven days after these articles were published, four Black girls were killed in a church bombing on what wasn’t a school day.
Of course, by the time the Rankine family immigrated to the USA in the early 1970s, we were already in the Affirmative Action era.
Turns out “over your dead body” will always be the thing. Years ago, I was surprised to learn that during the 1950s in multiple states, officials closed schools rather than comply or continue with the integration project. Both the baby and the bathwater were tossed. The school boards and the state legislators understood that true integration was about sharing resources and power and not just about who was sitting in the chairs. What is left out of the narratives in the newspapers and the history books makes the inevitable surprising rather than inevitable.
Turns out only time was needed to defund and disintegrate the public schools, while white Americans came up with a new legal form of the same “separate but equal” rhetoric that had marked the Jim Crow era. The impossibility written into that “separate but equal” phrase functioned in tandem with redlining. The Fair Housing Act passed five years after the articles written on my birth date didn’t stop white flight, which lowered property values and led to underfunded schools that the integrated Black children now had to themselves, as if integration was ever only about spatial proximity. Public schools with majority Black and Latino children are not “bad” schools when they are properly funded, resourced and staffed.
Actually, slightly more money is spent on nonwhite students per capita on average. Prof. Sean Reardon, head of the Stanford Educational Data Archive, explained:
“As a result of state school financing reforms enacted by state legislatures or ordered by courts, per-pupil revenues are now modestly positively correlated with districts’ enrollment rates of poor and minority students within most states (Cornman 2015). This means that in most states—conventional wisdom notwithstanding—poor and minority students are enrolled in districts with higher per pupil spending than white and middle-class students.”
Yet, racial gaps in average achievement on school test scores are found in every single school district of any size in the country. Reardon also notes:
… there is no school district in the United States that serves a moderately large number of black or Hispanic students in which achievement is even moderately high and achievement gaps are near zero.”
(There are a couple of school districts in the U.S. — Detroit and the one out by the Atlanta airport — where so few whites are still there that the left-behind survivors, presumably the result of family tragedies, barely outscore blacks.)
The main change in average test scores since the abolition of intentionally bad Jim Crow schools two generations ago is that Asian students have in this century increasingly been pulling away from all other races.
Turns out my own neighborhood school, P.S. 89 in the Allerton neighborhood of the Bronx, didn’t meet my mother’s educational standard, despite its diversity. True integration, as my friend the sociologist Prudence Carter has been telling me for years, means shared power, equitable resources and deep multicultural fluency — defined as the practice of working across social differences woven into daily routines. It was never just about the class photo. After one year, my mother moved me into a Catholic school.
Turns out in the early fall of this year, as school began for so many, I followed the various reactions to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s article in The Times, which addressed her daughter’s reaction to her mother’s earlier decision to place her in a local public school despite its ranking. I couldn’t help but compare Ms. Hannah-Jones with my own immigrant, working-class mother. My mother, evidently, did not feel equipped to ensure that her children were educated properly, given the state of the neighborhood public school. She certainly did not feel she would have the time, resources or community with other parents needed to invest in changing the school. Or maybe she instinctively knew that structural change needs more than good intentions.
Turns out my mother once told me that she was told two things when she arrived in the United States from Jamaica. First: Do not trust white people. And second: Do not send your children to the public school if you wish them to get an education. She was given good advice on both counts, if you understand “white” to communicate a commitment to white supremacy and a legacy of what Prudence has called pervasive inequality. This means some of the white people are Black people who maintain the structures that are dedicated to their own erasure.
Uh … in other words, Rankine is claiming that black teachers and principals are covert “white people” “who maintain the structures that are dedicated to their own erasure.”
Or something.
It’s …
Paywall here.
