(Louisiana Illuminator) — They always tell you exactly what they’re doing. Right out loud.
On Feb. 23, Gov. Jeff Landry sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights asking it to expand an existing federal investigation from the Louisiana Board of Regents to every public college and university in this state. He declared that Louisiana is “done with woke DEI policies” and that “discrimination against ANY student will not be tolerated,” framing his move as fixing diversity, equity and inclusion practices that began under the previous governor and “restoring fairness.”
We need to slow down on that word: fairness. The Regents’ budget language that triggered this investigation set goals to increase enrollment and graduation for “underrepresented minorities,” defined in state documents as “all races other than white [and] Asian.”
Imperfect as that definition is, it sits in a country where white and Asian students have long been the primary beneficiaries of structural advantage — in schooling, housing, hiring, wealth — decades before anyone said “DEI” out loud. To call programs designed to partially offset generations of deliberate exclusion “discrimination” is not a neutral legal claim. It is an inversion of reality.
This is not fairness. This is the pattern.
Louisiana did not build its universities for everyone. That is not opinion; it is written into the history of segregation, court orders and the very locations of our campuses.
For decades, Black students were barred from the state’s flagship institutions by law, not just neglect. Grambling, Southern, Dillard, Xavier — our HBCUs — were not lifestyle choices. They were survival structures built because the state said “not here.”
When explicit segregation became legally indefensible, the commitment to stratification didn’t disappear; the mechanism changed. Literacy tests and poll taxes gave way to underfunded Black schools, redlined neighborhoods and ZIP‑code school assignments that still determine who shows up “college ready.”
The outcome stayed consistent. Whole communities have been locked out of the full promise of public education.
DEI programs are a late, incomplete attempt to address what those mechanisms produced. The Board of Regents did not write “underrepresented minorities” into its master plan because someone had a sudden woke epiphany. It did so because the data were screaming that Black, Latino and first‑generation students were enrolling and not graduating. The system was never built for them.
Now we are being asked to accept that the remedy is the problem.
Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla‑Silva calls this colorblind racism, the ability to perpetuate racial inequality through an insistent claim that the playing field is already level and that the real problem is noticing race at all.
Landry’s maneuver is colorblind racism at gubernatorial scale with federal backing. He invokes civil rights law to investigate programs designed to remedy civil‑rights violations, labels race‑conscious remediation “discrimination,” and positions white and Asian students as the harmed parties.
Picture a 19‑year‑old at Southern University at New Orleans. She’s from the Lower 9th Ward. She is working 25 hours a week in a hospital cafeteria while taking classes. She is the first in her family to pursue a degree.
A retention counselor funded through a diversity initiative keeps her on track to graduate. A first‑generation workshop exists because someone wrote “underrepresented minorities” into a budget line. That thin bridge is why she has not dropped out.
When you cut DEI, you cut her first. You do not cut the students whose families can buffer every policy shock with savings accounts, social networks and private tutors. You cut the students for whom a single adviser or scholarship is the difference between a diploma and a dropout.
When states choose, again and again, to deny education and economic opportunity to Black and brown communities, the downstream results have repeatedly included concentrated poverty, desperation and violence.
The state that is near the top in incarceration, near the bottom in education, and near the very top in child poverty is now training its legal fire on programs that help the very students its history has most harmed. That is not an accident. It is a choice.
The question is whether Louisiana will let one governor define fairness as tearing down the only bridge some of our children have — or whether enough of us will say, clearly and collectively, that we know the difference between justice and a wrecking ball dressed in civil‑rights language.
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Andrea Hagan is a faculty member at the Loyola University New Orleans in its Department of Criminology and Justice. Her perspective is grounded in years of direct experience with youth in secondary education as a social studies teacher. Her research focuses on the intersections of youth, society and the justice system. Her primary areas of focus include the abuse-to-prison pipeline, juvenile delinquency, gang violence and criminal justice reform.
