The Law, Power, and Who Gets to Decide What’s Fair
For centuries, Black Americans have understood a truth that many are only now realizing: the law is not what’s written on paper—it’s what the people in power say it is.
People are shocked at how far Trump has pushed the boundaries of the legal system. They insist, “This isn’t how the rule of law works.” But Black Americans have been saying for generations: Yes, it is. Because it’s been done to us over and over again.
Laws said we were free, but Jim Crow made us second-class citizens.
The Constitution guaranteed equal protection, but redlining, segregation, and mass incarceration told a different story.
We were promised justice, but Emmett Till, Rodney King, Breonna Taylor, and countless others never saw it.
People believed America’s institutions would “hold the line.” But those institutions have never protected us the way they were supposed to protect everyone. So we knew the danger wasn’t just theoretical. We knew that if people in power wanted to bend the law to their will, they would. Because they always have.
And here’s the thing: power shapes everything. It decides whose rights are upheld, whose pain is ignored, and who gets the benefit of the doubt. Which is why so many of us have spent years fighting to shift who holds power—through movements, through representation, through policies like DEI.
Yet even now, I hear well-meaning people criticize DEI. They say it’s gone too far, that liberals overplayed their hand, that conservatives were right to attack it. They reduce it to watching training videos and performative corporate nonsense.
And when I hear that, I realize: You’ve missed the entire point. The whole exercise has been lost on you because you can’t see beyond your whiteness.
DEI was never about just making things a little easier for minorities. That’s the most crude, asinine, simplistic way to think about it. The goal was to put multiple types of people in power, so that power wasn’t concentrated in the hands of those who all look, think, and act alike. Because now, we’re facing a moment where democracy itself is being tested, and what do we see? A system where the same kinds of people still hold all the power—people who are either complicit or too weak to fight back.
We don’t have powerful enough people to go up against these forces because we never empowered them in the first place.
That is why DEI matters.
And honestly, I’m exhausted by the people who love to call others “unqualified” while making some of the dumbest, most shortsighted decisions imaginable. Intelligence is not just your SAT score. It’s not how well you memorize rules. It’s how you apply knowledge to the real world, how you make decisions that recognize patterns, anticipate threats, and act accordingly.
And if your big takeaway from years of conversations about equity is that DEI is just about watching training videos? Well, somebody in that equation is lacking intelligence.
And that’s on you.
P.S. If you’ve convinced yourself that there aren’t Black women or other minorities capable of operating at the level of these tech oligarchs, let me make something very clear to you: people do not like to be in rooms where Black women are smarter than them. Trust me, I know from personal experience.
And while you’re reflecting on that, think about how different our position might be if, instead of Jasmine Crockett being a congresswoman, she was another tech oligarch. We might actually have a fighting chance.