The following slightly edited comments were made by Eric Brooks at the Black History Month event “Black freedom struggle and the fight for democracy” in NYC on February 23, 2025. The event was organized by the New York District of the Communist Party USA and guest speakers included the Rev. Annie Allen and MaryLouise Patterson.

Rev. Allen, Dr. Patterson, Comrades and friends:

It is wonderful to be together with you today to celebrate Black History Month in a time of turmoil and oppression, and of fierce democratic people’s resistance. We are talking about the Black freedom struggle and the fight for democracy — two necessarily intertwined struggles.

I don’t know how to address the chaos and horror of what is happening today without acknowledging the deep emotional pain caused by the devastation and destruction being wrought upon Black, Brown, LGBTQ, and Asian people, as well as women and children, small farmers, and all workers. Fear stalks the country as immigrants strive to continue living despite the unceasing threats of ICE violence and expatriation. Federal workers face homelessness and starvation after multiple mass firings. Black people are indoctrinated as to their invisibility in for-profit schools at all levels, and as public schools are being dismantled and affirmative action in college admissions are ending, already closing gates against Black youth. Children will not be fed lunch at school or receive vaccinations to spare them from polio and measles. The epidemic of systemic police violence against Black and Brown folks continues today while millions toil as enslaved labor in for-profit prisons.

Under the Trump–Musk administration, bourgeois democracy and civil life are being torn to shreds. Voter suppression and racism, male chauvinism, and anti-LGBTQ ideology were the foundation for Trump’s power grab. Disrespect for the Constitution is a signature of his administration. Rampant lies about his advocacy for working people were disseminated.

We can’t look to the capitalist parties for leadership.

In response, people’s organizations, including this party, are intentionally and thoughtfully organizing protests and building up strategies for fightback, including running Communist Party USA candidates. Democratic people’s movements, in unity with organized labor, are a necessary response. We can’t look to the capitalist parties for leadership. Workers are the people being impacted, and workers in democratic collective struggle can address the attack.

A history to remember

What we are together experiencing today has a history. It is new in form but advances pre-existing racist and anti-worker causes. Mass firings, cutting funding for DEI programs, and destroying public education that teaches from a scientific foundation, are what Trump is implementing.

Waves of social change are constantly stirring the mass of humanity, flowing first this way then that way as the balance of forces shifts.

I was born in 1956, when there were people living in the U.S. who had been born into slavery. The African American children of enslaved people who had fought for and won their liberty were everywhere, along with Jewish survivors of Nazi enslavement and genocide and indigenous survivors of genocide. Slavery was not a distant memory. It was illegal for people to marry across racial lines, or in a same sex union. I am old enough to remember the hoses turned on marchers during the Civil Rights Movement. I remember COINTELPRO and the slaughter of Black activists in their beds. At seven years old, my mother took me to the 1963 March on Washington where Rev. Martin Luther King offered his “I Have A Dream” speech. I marched in protests for peace in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and many other places scourged by U.S. imperialism. I was arrested protesting South African apartheid. I celebrated when John F. Kennedy signed the first affirmative action law to facilitate more Black folks being employed by government agencies and contractors, but also acknowledging the systemic racism that is woven into the fabric of the U.S. economy and social life. I celebrated the first human in space and the first to walk on the moon. Unlike today, it was a time of turmoil but also of joy and hope. Trump has brought a fascistic chaos which smothers hope and provokes fear to the forefront. We can’t succumb. We must come together and resist.

There was a capitalist response, of course, to the civil rights era wins like the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Ronald Reagan in 1986 declared that the U.S. would follow a race-blind policy since, for the white chauvinist capitalists, racism was not an issue.

“We are committed,” Reagan said, “to a society in which all men and women have equal opportunities to succeed, and so we oppose the use of quotas. … We want a color-blind society. A society, that, in the words of Dr. King, judges people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

This formulation ignores the ongoing oppression of Black folks. At the time Reagan was speaking, racism was rampant. Black family median income was 56% of white family income. This differential was not due to different human capacity or Black laziness. It was the result of systematic racism.

The “whiff” of fascism forty years ago has become a stench polluting U.S. economic and community life.

CPUSA Chair Gus Hall talked about a “whiff of fascism” almost forty years ago. That “whiff” has become a stench polluting economic and community life in the U.S. today. People’s democratic resistance movements are the response.

The fantastical view of the world put forward by the MAGA folks is toxic. Erasure of Black people and the attack on DEI conspire to ensure that Black history is not accurately included in the textbooks forming our younger generations’ outlook, envisioning a world without Black folks, not a lively and dynamic mix of peoples of many races and nationalities. People who don’t know their history and who are told every day that they are insignificant may have more trouble understanding themselves as individuals in a social context — individuals in connection to others in collective struggle, rather than as isolated people trying to overcome personal weaknesses or faults.

Describing his experiences in academia, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote:

“In graduate school at Harvard and again in Germany … race became a matter of culture and cultural history. The history of the world was paraded before the observation of students. Which was the superior race? Manifestly, that which had a history, the white race … and consequently in America and Germany, Africa was left without culture and without history.”

As the CPUSA African American Equality Commission has observed, “if racism is a weapon utilized by the ruling class, historical and cultural erasure is one of its most reliable forms of ammunition.”

The ultra-right “conspiracy of forgetting and cultural erasure is not new to Black folks, but it must be resisted now,” Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU) President Terry Melvin noted at the organization’s 2023 convention. “We will not let our history go untold in this country. …

“We are told Black resistance is a threat to the white privilege or comfort zone. Well so be it. Not my problem. We are not content to witness Black people not breathing, or not being allowed to learn about our ancestors’ bravery or achievements. Or not have a seat at the table where our lives and future are at stake. No, Sisters and Brothers, CBTU don’t roll like that.”

DEI attacked

In 2024, soon after being elected “on the margins” and without even a whiff of a mandate, wanna-be dictator Trump signed bills called “Ending Illegal Discrimination And Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” and “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” These bills codify the racist ideology that Trump supports, including the lie that affirmative action contradicts merit-based hiring.

The history that needs to be remembered must be a scientifically true history that centers the contributions of African Americans, indigenous peoples and migrants, LGBTQ people and women, Asians and workers, and of course Communists. Denying access to scientific Black history distorts the understanding of youth. How widespread is information about Claude Lightfoot, Claudia Jones, Harry Belafonte, Esther Cantor, Ben Davis Jr., or many other leaders in the struggles to end systemic racism and for democratic rights and socialism?

The Trump administration’s attack on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is an attack on intentional and affirmative action to correct existing systemic racism and chauvinism. It is an ugly, inhumane attack on the dignity and ability to thrive of Black, Brown, indigenous, LGBTQ, and Asian peoples, and women: working and oppressed peoples.

Trump is advancing the claim that a “color-blind” society exists today that requires no action to address, while conveniently keeping in place the economic systems of exploitation that make him and Elon Musk rich.

With Trump, what is real becomes fake and what is fake becomes real. His anti-DEI claims attempt to cover up the violence and oppression of workers at the core of U.S. social life, and posits a fake meritocracy as today’s reality. There is no effort, in Trump’s world, to intentionally correct the objectively existing social problems plaguing working and oppressed people, including women in the U.S. Instead, he works to end birthright citizenship, strip women of autonomy, destroy government initiatives that are helpful to workers, abrogate treaties with indigenous tribes, and end organized labor, advancing a claim that a “color-blind” society exists today that requires no action to address inequities or systemic problems while conveniently keeping in place the economic systems of exploitation that make him rich and Elon Musk richer.

The White House, exhibiting its normal lack of historical accuracy and disconnection from working class reality, claims the Administration’s anti-DEI activism “protects the civil rights of all Americans and expands individual opportunity by terminating radical DEI preferencing in federal contracting and directing federal agencies to relentlessly combat private sector discrimination.”

The administration goes on to say its anti-DEI actions are “Restoring the values of individual dignity, hard work, excellence” by ending the Biden–Harris Administration’s so-called “anti-constitutional” and “deeply demeaning” equity mandates, and is “protecting civil rights” by terminating DEI.

Whose civil rights are protected?

Trump’s false view is supported, pushed like ideological crack by the billionaire oligarchs in control of the White House today, including Elon Musk and Donald Trump. When one compares their statements with objective reality, it is clear that none of the billionaires setting policy today know anything about the individual dignity of working people, of Black and other oppressed peoples, or of women.

Their attack on DEI is part of a larger anti-democratic, anti-people, fascistic plan, codified in Project 2025, a plan designed to enrich their already obscenely overflowing coffers at the expense of working people.

The billionaires’ goal for the attack on DEI is to continue “the progress made in the decade since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 toward a colorblind and competence-based workplace.” They charge that “radical DEI has dangerously tainted many of our critical businesses and influential institutions, including the federal government.”

“Billions of dollars are spent annually on DEI,” they claim “but rather than reducing bias and promoting inclusion, DEI creates and then amplifies prejudicial hostility and exacerbates interpersonal conflict.”

That is the distorted, false view of the billionaires. Workers are committed to defending DEI because they want their families to thrive. DEI must be restored now. Efforts at erasure must end now. The attack on science-based education and healthcare must end now. Workers, farmers, all oppressed peoples, including women, must stand united for democracy, against fascism, and for socialism.

Reject and resist fascism now!

Images: Book Banning Protest, Atlanta, GA by John Ramspott (CC BY 2.0); People march for voting rights by NAACP Legal Defense Fund (Facebook); Science strengthened by diversity by Becker1999 (CC BY 2.0);