As Trump Slams DEI, Racial Justice Leaders Stay Focused on Reparations

President Donald Trump’s executive orders aimed at dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion programs across government, academia and business are nothing new to civil rights advocates in the reparative justice movement.

Soon after his inauguration in January, Trump issued directives instructing federal agencies to investigate “illegal DEI” in both the private and public sectors. One of Trump’s executive orders accused educators of pushing anti-American ideologies and threatened to withhold funding from schools that portray the U.S. as fundamentally racist, sexist or discriminatory. In February, the Pentagon paused observances of Juneteenth, Women’s History Month, Pride Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day and others.

Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to limit conversations around race and accountability, some restorative justice advocates see an opportunity to advance the movement. On the final day of Black History Month, dozens gathered at Mills College at Northeastern University for a conference on systemic racism and reparations.

The message: Reparations advocates aren’t backing down — they’re rising, rooted and here to stay. The pursuit of reparative justice marches on.

“There’s going to be people who are against reparations, who are going to do everything possible to put out their own narratives as to why reparations shouldn’t or can’t be achieved,” said Kamilah Moore, who chaired the California Reparations Task Force, the first statewide commission to study reparations for Black people. “We have to make sure that narratives are out there and to particularly center the narratives of those who have been directly impacted and let them lead.”

The task force focused on the state’s role in advancing slavery and inflicting harm on Black residents, delivering a 1,000-page report on the damages caused by enslavement and anti-Black discrimination, as well as solutions for recompense.

Reparative justice advocates are unyielding in their pursuit of redress for decades of police violence in Black communities, mass incarceration and the seizure of Black-owned properties through eminent domain. Reparations could come in the form of expanded social services, such as housing grants, free or reduced-cost health care and improved education opportunities for marginalized youth.

In 2023, the task force submitted over a hundred recommendations. The California Legislative Black Caucus introduced a slate of bills in 2024 that incorporated many of the task force’s policy proposals. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed six of the bills, including one that required California to offer a formal apology for its role in furthering the oppression of Black residents.

It wasn’t enough. Senate Bill 1403, which would have created an agency to implement the task force’s recommendations, was derailed after last-minute pressure from Newsom’s staff to change the bill, dividing Black lawmakers. Instead of creating the agency, the amendments proposed earmarking $6 million for the California State University system to lead a study of reparations.

Protests erupted inside the state Capitol.

“Without [reparations], it doesn’t matter how hard Black folks as a collective work,” Moore said. “We’re playing catch up because of 256 years of enslavement and over 60 years of state-sanctioned violence and discrimination that has collectively hindered the Black American.”

The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University School of Law, launched in 2007, examines how racial violence in the Jim Crow era shaped American politics and the legal system. Margaret Burnham, CRRJ’s director, said the initiative focuses on victims of lynching — typically Black men and women who were publicly tortured and killed outside of the judicial system.

“There are many communities, cities and localities that are now considering the ways in which governmental entities contributed to these harms,” Burnham, who is also a law professor at Northeastern, said. “It seems appropriate to raise again the question of whether there should be some repair for those families affected by perhaps the most extreme form of racist Jim Crow era violence.”

The CRRJ partnered with the Legacy Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of the descendants of lynching victims, to preserve the voices of Black Americans through its archive. Evan Lewis, the coalition’s founding director, said part of its mission is to ensure people understand how the country’s discriminatory and anti-Black roots, dating back to enslavement, continue to shape many institutions, such as policing.

“When Black people in America stand up and tell the truth about their experiences, you can bet there’s going to be some pushback,” Lewis said. “Much of what we’re seeing right now is sort of a last-gasp effort for folks who are resistant to progress to hold onto the status quo and to hold onto an old and outdated way of doing things.

“These are dark days, but there are certainly bright mornings coming.”

Darcelle Lahr, a business professor at Mills, said restorative justice requires an acknowledgment of the deliberate role that the government has played in allowing racist policies and institutions to flourish, all while inflicting harm on Black people.

Black neighborhoods still suffer from the effects of redlining, a policy that allowed creditors to deny financial services to areas with largely Black and Hispanic populations. Residents continue to battle air pollution, poor infrastructure and higher rates of poverty despite the practice being banned in 1968, according to a 2023 report by the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.

Once known as the “Harlem of the West,” the Fillmore District, with its old Victorian houses and mostly Black population, became the focus of San Francisco’s urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s. Many homes were seized through eminent domain and bulldozed, while others were relocated. Many Black-owned businesses were forced to shut down, and more than 10,000 Black residents were displaced.

The construction of Interstate 980 in Oakland separated West Oakland’s Black residents from downtown. Certain neighborhoods in Oakland have higher rates of respiratory illness due to smog and pollution emanating from the highway, markers of what the reparations task force called environmental racism.

Black Californians make up 28% of the state’s prison population but only 6% of the overall population, according to a 2024 report by the California Institute of Public Policy. In November, Proposition 6, a measure to end forced prison labor, failed.

“California has this reputation of being the most progressive, but when California voters were presented with the opportunity to end slavery in prisons, the majority voted no,” Moore said. “There’s a lot of education that has to continue to essentially change the hearts and minds of folks because that’s really what it’s all about.”

A second bill to ban involuntary servitude in prisons was introduced last month by Black lawmakers as part of a suite of new reparations proposals. It could appear on the 2026 ballot.

In 2020, California passed the Racial Justice Act to address racial bias in the criminal justice system. The reparations task force report included provisions to strengthen the act, which was used last February to challenge alleged racial bias in a criminal case.

A Contra Costa County Superior Court judge ruled that racism within the Antioch Police Department tainted a murder investigation following an FBI investigation into the department that uncovered racist text messages exchanged by officers involved in the investigation.

One of the officers, Eric Rombough, pleaded guilty in January to conspiracy to deprive residents of their civil rights and confessed to brutalizing suspects, mostly Black and brown men.

In March, Rombough testified at the trial of an Antioch officer he allegedly conspired with. In messages, Rombough and other officers repeatedly referred to Black residents as “gorillas” and made racist jokes about the people they injured.

“The longer we continue to try to hide the history of what has happened to this community, the longer the pain will continue, the longer the extraction will continue,” Lahr said, referring to the racial wealth gap that divides Black and white Americans. “That’s why bringing this to folks’ attention — the fact that this is a continuation of things that have been done in the past — is so necessary to move forward collectively.”