Ex-NAACP president Cornell William Brooks challenges ‘Project 2025’ architect in heated debate over DEI
TheGrio...
During a moderated discussion earlier this month, Brooks challenged Heritage Foundation leader Kevin Roberts over race, discrimination and the Trump administration’s DEI rollback.
Earlier this month, former NAACP president and CEO Cornell William Brooks opted to debate Kevin Roberts, the president of the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, whom many consider the architect of “Project 2025,” which was implemented in full during the first 18 months of the second Trump administration.
Brooks, who specifically asked the Harvard Kennedy School to debate Roberts, argued for the benefits of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), while questioning what racial progress would have actually been achieved without the merit and fight of Black and brown people.
“What have we gotten wrong? I think we’ve gotten it wrong when we conflated diversity with the acronym ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.’ It is far greater than that,” Brooks said.
Roberts referred to DEI as a totem created by “rotten fruit” that “stifles civility” and a “real belief in diversity.” While he held firm that there had been some progress made since the civil rights movement and there might have been a need to create programs to shepherd diversity across the country, he felt that the progress made since then was being ignored and such programs actively harmed “social cohesion” in the United States rather than helped it.
“It suggests that America has the same challenges in 1965 as it does in 2026; we actually have to expand them. We’re spending more money per capita on diversity, equity and inclusion programs than we ever did on Affirmative Action programs in the 1960s,” Roberts said. “That’s a limited view on what’s trying to be achieved.”
Under the Trump Administration, DEI programs across federal and state government agencies, as well as colleges across the country, were virtually wiped out by various executive orders, many of which were laid out in “Project 2025,” which Roberts co-authored. Roberts denied that Project 2025 was responsible for the changes in how civil rights are being enforced.
Brooks scoffed at the notion that DEI caused true division in the country (“that’s like confusing aspirin with the headache”) while citing continued lawsuits and data points that reveal that discrimination in the workplace, the overpunishment of Black students in classrooms and more as examples of how discrimination and inequality aren’t mere figments of the past, but constantly occurring over time. In Brooks’ eyes, diversity couldn’t be “left on autopilot,” thus underscoring the need for continued fight and evolution amid the sidelining of more than two-thirds of the lawyers in the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
When questioned by the moderator, Washington Post journalist Laura Meckler on the Trump Administration’s application of “Project 2025,” Roberts argued that the administration was “trying to correct what we see as, at the very least, bad policy, and what has been an injustice.”
Roberts, who once refused government funds when he was president of Wyoming Catholic College in order to uphold the school’s beliefs regarding same-sex marriage and birth control—based on religious freedom—championed race-neutral diversity policies at universities, based on factors such as geography, income, and first-generation status. Brooks, while agreeing with portions of Roberts’ statement, argued that they still would eliminate the need to advocate for racial diversity.
“I’m not casting aspersions or calling into question anyone’s merit—I’m simply saying we have to have an honest conversation,” Brooks said. “There’s a tendency under this administration to talk about merit only when it comes to Black and brown people.”
Both men exchanged pleasantries with one another after the hour-long discussion, with Brooks continuing to advocate that the desire to establish a racially diverse democracy was an “every day fight.”
Roberts, who believed that diverse programs should be established on categories other than race said that “It’s not to deny the injustice that has happened in this country’s history,” but concluded that his conversation with Brooks was “an honest-to-goodness policy disagreement about the kinds of policies that work.”