by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
December 21, 2025
This opinion was inspired by Bryan Stevenson in conversation with Katie Couric where Stevenson offered a diagnosis of why Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs have become such easy political targets. His answer was not that equity is misguided, but that the nation has never done the prerequisite work that equity demands: honest historical reckoning.
Stevenson’s insight is deceptively simple. DEI initiatives were layered onto institutions that never admitted wrongdoing. Without an explicit acknowledgment of harm—genocide, slavery, segregation, exclusion, and dispossession—equity efforts were framed as favors, preferences, or ideological impositions rather than as partial remedies for documented historical and ongoing injustice. When truth is absent, backlash thrives.
This is not merely a communications failure; it is a moral one. DEI faltered where institutions substituted optics for accountability—training sessions without truth-telling, statements without repair, representation without redistribution. In that vacuum, opponents easily recast equity as divisive rather than corrective.
Stevenson’s critique resonates powerfully in this moment of organized forgetting, when states move to ban honest teaching about race, gender, and sexuality and when “neutrality” is invoked to preserve inequality. His work—through the Equal Justice Initiative—has long shown that societies cannot heal what they refuse to name. Memory, he reminds us, is a precondition for justice.His analysis makes me think, in particular, about a recent blog on the many forms of oppression experienced by the Mexican American community whose histories have similarly been silenced.
When these histories remain unspoken, DEI appears unmoored—an abstract, detached moral appeal rather than a grounded response to concrete harms. That omission weakens equity work and reinforces the false idea that inclusion is a modern invention rather than a long-delayed obligation.
If DEI is to survive—and more importantly, to matter—it must be reframed not as a program but as a process of repair. That process begins with truth: naming who was harmed, how institutions benefited, and what accountability requires.
It also requires a broader historical lens—one capacious enough to include African American, Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Native American/Indigenous, Asian American, and other communities whose experiences have been systematically minimized or erased.
This is precisely why battles over curriculum matter—at the Texas State Board of Education, in local school board meetings, and in classrooms across the country. When history is narrowed, sanitized, or selectively told, equity initiatives are stripped of their context and recast as ideological overreach rather than as long-overdue responses to documented harm.
The lesson from Stevenson’s intervention is not that DEI failed. It is that we asked equity to do the work of history without allowing history to be told. Until institutions are willing to admit wrongdoing—and until our national narrative expands to include all the communities shaped by that wrongdoing—equity will remain vulnerable to distortion and attack.
Justice, as Stevenson teaches, is not achieved through silence. It is built through memory, courage, and the collective willingness to tell the truth—even when that truth unsettles the stories we have long told ourselves.
Next Question with Katie Couric. A clip from my longer interview with Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. In my full interview we talked about how the murder of George Floyd and the protests of 2020 sparked a nationwide movement for racial justice and reckoning. Just a few years later, many of those hard-won conversations are being rolled back.
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