What if the real threat isn’t loud? What if it’s slow, deliberate, and dressed up as reform?

Across the country, we’re witnessing a coordinated rollback of policies and protections that gave black communities even a foothold in a system never built to include us. It’s not a storm. It’s a slow dismantling — measured, strategic, and mostly ignored by the headlines.

This isn’t about politics or partisanship. It’s about pattern. It’s about calculated assaults on our power, our voice, and our legacy. These are not simply policy changes — they’re erasures. Quiet. Methodical. Disguised as neutrality.

Here’s what’s happening right now:

  • Affirmative action requirements for federal contractors have been eliminated. Executive Order 14173 stripped away employment safeguards meant to level the playing field.
  • Federal diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) programs are being shut down. Executive Order 14151 led to the termination of offices, staff, and long-standing efforts to build equitable workplaces.
  • Teaching about race and systemic injustice is being targeted. Executive Order 14190 casts anything resembling critical race theory as “radical indoctrination” and orders investigations into schools that teach it.
  • References to Black history are disappearing from public archives. Mentions of the Tuskegee Airmen, civil rights leaders, and other foundational black contributions have vanished from government websites.
  • Medicaid faces $880 billion in proposed cuts, along with new work requirements that would push many black Americans off essential health coverage.
  • The age for work requirements is being lowered. Adults as young as 54 would have to meet new criteria to qualify for Medicaid and SNAP, threatening access to food and care for many older black Americans.

None of these actions are isolated. They are pieces of a quiet but coordinated campaign. One that works through executive orders, agency directives, and legal rollbacks. It doesn’t shout. It chips away — consistently, and often without resistance.

There is no reason black leadership in Cleveland … or anywhere else can’t begin to think and act as a regional block — sharing power, building infrastructure.

These rollbacks hit black women first and hardest — the ones holding families together, leading classrooms, running nonprofit clinics, voting in every election, and organizing when the system fails us again. When Medicaid is gutted, it’s our children and elders who lose basic care. When DEI programs disappear, the tools that gave us even a fighting chance at workplace equity are gone. When our history is scrubbed from the archives, it’s our daughters and sons who grow up without seeing themselves reflected in the narrative of this country.

Yet somehow, we’re still expected to carry it all. And while many do, exhaustion is the unspoken cost.

Some will say this is about trimming budgets or restoring neutrality. But the outcomes are clear: what’s being cut, erased, or undermined are the very systems that protected black lives, made opportunity possible, or helped tell the truth about how we got here.

So what do we do?

We stop playing defense. We stop thinking in silos — housing over here, education over there, mental health off in the corner. We stop expecting systems that were never designed to sustain us to somehow save us now.

And we start moving together.

This is political—because it’s about power and survival. We need black city council members, ward leaders, state representatives — anyone elected to serve a predominantly black district — to stop operating in isolation and start moving as a unified front. Not as rivals. Not divided by district turf or ego. They need to meet regularly, align their goals, and speak with one voice when state or federal policies threaten our people. The charge is not just to represent, but to protect.

We can see this kind of unity at work right now. In Burkina Faso, fifteen West African nations have come together to form the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). That alliance gives them negotiating power against foreign interference, corporate extraction, and destabilization. They’ve created regional courts, coordinated economic plans, and deployed peacekeeping forces. And they did it by understanding one thing: when your struggle is shared, your strength should be too.

That’s the blueprint. We just haven’t used it here.

There is no reason black leadership in Cleveland, Detroit, Atlanta, or anywhere else can’t begin to think and act as a regional block — sharing power, building infrastructure, and making sure no one fights alone.

Here’s what that could look like right now:

  1. Hold regular Black Leadership Summits across city lines — not symbolic events but working sessions with shared policy goals and joint responses to harmful legislation.
  2. Create real resource-sharing networks between black-led organizations. Grant writers, legal teams, communications support — shared infrastructure instead of duplicated effort.
  3. Develop independent monitoring systems to track and flag policy shifts across every level of government. When something moves against us, we mobilize fast and together.
  4. Build economic cooperatives that circulate resources inside our own communities. Credit unions. Collective purchasing networks. Black-led incubators that don’t collapse when the external economy turns against us.
  5. Invest in community education that tells the truth. Not just fighting curriculum bans but building and distributing our own. Training educators. Preserving our history. Teaching our children what textbooks won’t.

This isn’t about dreaming. It’s about surviving with intention. If they’re organized enough to dismantle us quietly, we’d better be organized enough to build loudly.

Black men and women must hold the line and move the needle. Mobilize now.

The blueprint for erasure is clear.

But so is the blueprint for resistance.

We just have to stop waiting for permission to use it. Because no one’s coming to save us. But we can save each other.

 

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• • •• • •

Dr. Tim Goler is Associate Professor of Sociology and Urban Affairs at Norfolk State University. He also serves as the Director of Research at NSU’s Center for African American Public Policy. A native Clevelander, he hails from the city’s Glenville neighborhood and is co-founder of PolicyBridge.