This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
DEI Didn’t Fail—Our Willingness to Tell the Truth Did
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. Sign up here for daily email updates from me, Katie Couric, on the news that matters most to you: https://katiecouric.com/wake-up-call/...
It's so hard to read this and not cry, to not feel the pain and emotion in this ghastly, heartbreaking account. My first question is "why isn't this front-page news everywhere?!" We can't even count on the so-called liberal media for according this appalling story its due attention. After all, this CNN report just appeared yesterday.
The structured silences are deafening—and already were a problem even before this anti-Critical Race Theory fascist campaign that is currently underway.
One commentator guesses, and I think correctly, that since there were twice as many boarding schools in the U.S., as opposed to Canada, the death count of children is also at least twice as high. I mention this in the context of the recent, horrific discovery of children's remains in Canada, (see 'Unthinkable' discovery in Canada as remains of 215 children found buried near residential school').
Can anyone imagine their own kids playing next to graveyards instead of playgrounds?!
U.S. governmental policy killed these children under the brutal framework of "assimilation," a term that is so widely used today that it may seem innocuous. Yet, that is exactly what the 1836 Project and anti-Critical Race Theory bills amount to today. Whitewashing, ethnic cleansing, that can lead to actual attacks on native peoples and genocide.
There's no other interpretation of policy that explicitly called for "killing the Indian, to save the man." This settler colonial logic is what defined federal Indian education policy from the the middle 1800s to the middle 1900s. You can read about this history in David Wallace Adam's book, Education for Extinction.
In my own work, "subtractive cultural assimilation" is my preferred term for this kind of harm to children of color whose historical experiences of oppression have been conditioned—not by voluntary migration to our shores—but by the involuntary experiences of slavery, conquest, and colonization.
It's one thing for Texas republicans not to want this taught in our schools. Aside from this brief report on CNN, it's another for our news outlets to minimize this astonishing account as not sufficiently newsworthy to cover, much less make it to the A page of the newspaper.
Rose Long Face was 18 years old when she was taken to the first government-run boarding school for Indigenous children in the United States. Within two years, she died and never returned home.
More than 140 years have passed since the Lakota girl and at least eight other children and young adults with ties to the Rosebud Sioux Tribe who attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. It was part of a campaign to assimilate Native children into White American culture.
For six years, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, also known as Sicangu Lakota, negotiated the return of the remains of 11 children and young adults who have been buried there for generations. Next week, the remains of nine of those children will arrive in South Dakota, just as officials in the US and Canada confront the countries' grim history of Indigenous boarding schools.
"It was a government model... basically, eradicate the Indian in you and replace it with a White man way of thinking," said Rodney Bordeaux, president of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. "'Take the Indian on and save the child' was kind of the talk back then."
"What they forgot is the real resiliency of who we are, how we came about, how we survived and how we're continuing to survive," he added.
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was the first off-reservation boarding school for Native American children, and was built on the abandoned Carlisle Barracks, according to the National Museum of the American Indian and the US Army War College. The college now occupies the site.
The exhumation, announced last month, is the US Army's fourth disinterment project at Carlisle Barracks, after the Army moved human remains to the post's cemetery from the school's in 1927.
The deceased are among more than 10,000 students, spanning about 50 tribes, who were brought from across the US to the school until it closed in 1918.
The nine children and young adults are part of the more than 180 students buried on the Carlisle Barracks Post Cemetery in named and unnamed burials, according to the Office of Army Cemeteries.
Four boys posing for a photo on the grounds of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School
in 1879. Alvan Kills Seven Horses (One That Kills Seven Horses), second from left,
was buried there and his remains are among those that will be repatriated to the
Rosebud Sioux reservation next week.
The students were between the ages of 12 and 18 when they arrived at the school, said Russell Eagle Bear, a historic preservation officer for the Rosebud Sioux Tribe.
Their names, according to the Office of Army Cemeteries, are: Dennis Strikes First (Blue Tomahawk); Rose Long Face (Little Hawk); Lucy Take The Tail (Pretty Eagle); Warren Painter (Bear Paints Dirt); Ernest Knocks Off (White Thunder); Maud Little Girl (Swift Bear); Alvan, aka Roaster, Kills Seven Horses, One That Kills Seven Horses; Friend Hollow Horn Bear; and Dora Her Pipe (Brave Bull).
While some remains have been returned to their families and tribes in recent years, the remains of more than 100 people are still buried on the former school grounds, the OAC said.
It's unclear which tribes the rest of the children came from "due to poor record- keeping by the Indian Bureau during the operation of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School," the OAC said in a statement.
A group of teens fought for the repatriation
Malorie Arrow was a teenager when she and a few other members of the tribe's youth council made a stop on the grounds of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School after a 2015 trip to a conference in Washington, DC.
"It wasn't until we got to the grave sites that... till we got to the parking lot of the grave sites that we all started crying...like we all started crying, we all felt the energy there," said 22-year-old Arrow.
That visit sparked a movement within the tribe, led by youth members on that trip who began asking their elders why they couldn't just bring the children home, said Akichita Cikala Hoksila Eagle Bear, 23, another member of the youth council.
"We got tired of waiting for someone to be our advocate so we had to become our own advocate. We saw a change that we needed so we became the change," said Asia Ista Gi Win Black Bull, 21, a youth council member.
"One little spark of the youth group, visiting Carlisle sparked a whole (Lakota) nation down here," she added.
Rachel Janis, Asia Ista Gi Win Black Bull, Malorie Arrow and Akichita Cikala
Hoksila Eagle Bear (left to right) are some of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe's youth
council members who encouraged tribal leaders to negotiate the repatriation of
children buried at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
Next week, a delegation of relatives, tribal leaders and members of the youth council will travel with the remains as they made their journey to the reservation.
Tribal members will then hold a ceremony near the Missouri River, which is the place where officials believe the children took a steamboat and began their trip to Pennsylvania, said Eagle Bear, the historic preservation officer said.
"That's the last time they saw their parents and relatives, not knowing where they were going or what was happening to them," he said.
After relatives and tribe members pay their respects and pray for the children during a wake, the remains of seven of them will be buried at the Rosebud Sioux Tribe Veterans Cemetery and two in their family's land, according to Eagle Bear.
US officials will investigate more boarding schools
The children's homecoming is an opportunity for their descendants to heal but also a realization of how many more children are left to be found, Indigenous rights advocates and tribal members say.
The Department of Interior will review its past oversight of the school program, assess how it has impacted generations of families and identify boarding school facilities and burial sites across the country, Haaland said.
While the unmarked graves discovered in recent weeks were in Canada, Christine Diindiisi McCleave, chief executive of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, says similar discoveries could also take place in the US.
"If you look at the numbers here from the United States, we had twice as many schools. You can basically just estimate that our numbers will be double what they found in Canada," McCleave said.
Because the coalition has been working for more than a decade in collecting records for the more than 300 boarding schools across the country, McCleave says federal authorities are taking on a challenging task.
For McCleave, the recent discoveries of unmarked graves have brought up pain and trauma for many Indigenous communities, reminding them of their families' grief and how they lost their language and culture over the years.
As the Sicangu Lakota prepare for the children's homecoming, they know there's much more to be done.
"This is the very start of the fire," Black Bull says. There are many children that remain unaccounted for and many former boarding schools that should be investigated, she said.
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