In the first week of September 2024, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill released the demographics of its new first-year class. The University’s class of 2028 was 7.8% Black and 1.1% American Indian students.1The Associated Press, “Rulings’ Impact Glimpsed in Freshman Classes: North Carolina Lawyers Weekly,” North Carolina Lawyers Weekly , September 6, 2024, Between the class of 2027 to the class of 2028, the number of Black students dropped by 25%, and the number of American Indian students decreased by 33%. This downward trend continued into the following year with the incoming class of 2029, in which with the University is enrolling 7.8% Black students and 1.4% American Indian students.
Immediately after the Supreme Court affirmative action ruling, the University’s Black and Indigenous students enrollment number dropped to less than its numbers in the 1980s.2Nicholas Graham, “Historic African American Enrollment at UNC,” History on the Hill, January 27, 2022, https://blogs.lib.unc.edu/hill/2016/04/21/historic-african-american-enrollment-at-unc/.
This alarming reduction of Black and Indigenous students was not by accident. It is a product of numerous attacks on racial equity. Most notably, in the summer of 2023, after a decades-long battle against Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 6-3, banning affirmative action in university admissions.3Nina Totenberg, “Supreme Court Guts Affirmative Action, Effectively Ending Race-Conscious Admissions,” NPR, June 29, 2023, A year after UNC and Harvard’s affirmative action policies were ruled unconstitutional, the UNC Board of Governors repealed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies in all 17 UNC system schools.4Nicquel Terry Ellis, “UNC System Board of Governors Votes to Repeal Dei Policy,” CNN, May 23, 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/23/us/unc-dei-policy-vote-reaj/index.html.
This national ban on affirmative action and near immediate University system-wide ban on DEI is a retreat from a decades-long precedent supporting racial equity. Furthermore, it is a direct assault on desegregation.
Rather than reviewing these changes in isolation, we need to look back at particular policies central to the work of the civil rights activists. Affirmative action in higher education was a reparative policy meant to “explicitly remediate the ill effects of segregation that produced racial disparities in higher education… sought to undo the deleterious effects of the Jim Crow era.”5Shams, Shahrzad. “The End of Affirmative Action: The Latest in the Court’s Anti-Civil Rights Agenda.” Roosevelt Institute, June 23, 2023. https://rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/the-end-of-affirmative-action/. Affirmative action, alongside DEI policies, advanced equal opportunities in higher education for groups historically excluded from the University, and created a more diverse, non-discriminatory campus environment. These policies were relatively successful.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, colleges and universities around the country introduced affirmative action policies to their admissions processes. By 1982, the United States saw a 164% increase in the numbers of Black students enrolled in higher education institutions, compared to the 1970 national enrollment figures.6Ibid
The University’s choice to gut these long-standing policies is not a new contemporary attack on “wokeness”, but rather part of a prolonged assault on the civil rights movement’s advancement and a symbolic severing of the University’s responsibility to remedy its past.
In reorienting the narrative, we must first reexamine how we understand the civil rights movement. The current narrative of the civil rights movement is oversimplified, often beginning with the Brown v. Board decision and ending with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.7Sanchez, Adam. “What Happened to the Civil Rights Movement after 1965? Don’t Ask Your Textbook – Zinn Education Project.” Zinn Education Project, June 14, 2016. As a result, this limited narrative reinforces structural racism as a “relic of the past” in which the “United States is on an unstoppable path of progress.”8Ibid Instead, scholars like Adam Sanchez and UNC’s Jacqueline Dowd Hall argue that we must adopt a “long civil rights” framework, which offers a longer, wider, and more holistic understanding of the ongoing fight for racial equity. The Long Civil Rights reframes the fight as an “undefeated but unfinished revolution, a world-defining social movement that has experienced both reversals and victories and whose victories are now, once again, being partially reversed.”9Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, The Long Civil Rights Movement and the political uses of the past, March 1, 2005, https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ows/seminars/tcentury/movinglr/longcivilrights.pdf. Implementing Long Civil Rights practices simultaneously acknowledges the achievements of civil rights activists in the 1960s/70s while also forcing us to confront the failure to realize many of those visions.
In 1968, the Black Student Movement (BSM) translated their visions into a list of 29 demands and presented them to then-Chancellor Sitterson.10Black Student Movement Demands, December 1968 in the Black Student Movement of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Records #40400, University Archives, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Although the first Black undergraduates and graduate students – Leroy Frasier, John Lewis Brandon, Ralph Frasier, Gwendolyn Harrison Smith, and Oscar Diggs – were admitted a decade earlier, the University in the 1960s continued to be a violent and antagonistic place for Black students.11“I Raised My Hand To Volunteer,” UNC Libraries, accessed December 12, 2025, Black students took it upon themselves to enact change on campus. Their first immediate demands to Chancellor Sitterson concerned admissions. In 1960, four undergraduate Black students enrolled at UNC-CH; in 1963, only 18 Black students enrolled.12Gene Nichol, “Losing Carolina,” Southern Cultures, April 21, 2024, https://www.southerncultures.org/article/losing-carolina/.
Although the first Black undergraduates and graduate students – Leroy Frasier, John Lewis Brandon, Ralph Frasier, Gwendolyn Harrison Smith, and Oscar Diggs – were admitted a decade earlier, the University in the 1960s continued to be a violent and antagonistic place for Black students.13“I Raised My Hand To Volunteer,” UNC Libraries, accessed December 12, 2025, These students took it upon themselves to enact change on campus. Their first immediate demands listed to Chancellor Sitterson were about admissions. In 1960, four undergraduate black students entered Chapel Hill; in 1963, only eighteen Black students enrolled.14Gene Nichol, “Losing Carolina,” Southern Cultures, April 21, 2024, https://www.southerncultures.org/article/losing-carolina/.
To create a path for a more racially inclusive campus, BSM demanded that the administration consider Black students on the “basis of high school performance and recommendation and not by the SAT” and to have more extensive programs for recruitment for Black students.15Black Student Movement Demands, December 1968 in the Black Student Movement of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Records #40400, University Archives, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 55 years later, their demands have been unmet writ large. In the years leading up to the University implementation of the affirmative action ban, the student body makeup was only 10.8% Black, despite the state being 22% Black.16Christine Zhu, “UNC Chapel Hill’s Incoming Class Is Less Diverse after Supreme Court Affirmative Action Ruling • NC Newsline,” NC Newsline, September 6, 2024, https://ncnewsline.com/briefs/unc-chapel-hills-incoming-class-is-less-diverse-after-scotus-affirmative-action-ruling/. While students today continue to fight for virtually the same demands as their movement predecessors from half a century earlier, the University administration in the 2020s began to wipe out the achievements made during the civil rights era, reaffirming inequities from the 1960s. Students sought to expose and hold the University accountability once again .
UNC’s discriminatory shift reflects broader national politics in the 2020s. Over a decade after the first Black president was elected into office, the United States continued to fiercely grapple with its deep-seated racial history. In 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe led protests against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline on Indigenous lands. In 2020, the police murder of George Floyd sparked a national Black Lives Matter movement, with protests erupting across the country. 2021 saw the rise of the national Stop Asian Hate movement and the beginning of the Atlanta Forest Defenders resistance to the construction of Cop City. This era is marked by contestation centered around structures and emblems of racial oppression in the 2020s.
University campuses, like UNC, have always been and continue to be a site for racial awakening and a battleground for debates over equality and justice. As the 2020s began, students at the University were tackling these issues directly in fighting for Nikole Hannah-Jones’ tenure in the aftermath of the toppling of Silent Sam. These student-led movements at the University are situated within this larger, national, and unfinished historical project to remedy systemic racial disparities and transform the country into a just place for all.
To understand the University administration’s opposition against student movements, we must also contextualize the response within national politics, alongside reactionary political, intellectual, and racial movements.
In 2014, the Census Bureau calculated that by the year 2044, white American population would fall below half the population and lose its majority status.17Census Bureau, Source: 2014 national projections, 2014, https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/releases/2015/cb15-tps16_graphic.pdf.
In the same year, social scientists Maureen A. Craig and Jennifer A. Richeson published research that found that the perceived loss of majority status by white Americans is linked to increased hostile attitudes and racial bias. Their research findings align with previous studies on group size theory, which “suggests that prejudice toward racial minorities stems from perceived threat to the dominant racial group’s status or privilege.”18Maureen A. Craig and Jennifer A. Richeson, “More Diverse yet Less Tolerant? How the Increasingly Diverse Racial Landscape Affects White Americans’ Racial Attitudes,” Personality & social psychology bulletin, March 13, 2014, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24625658/. In tandem with the onslaught of national movements to address and rectify ongoing injustices, the 2044 projected increase of the racial minority population arguably threatens White Americans’ perceived societal status, evoking racial hostility and support to reassert social dominance. David Theo Goldberg spoke about this trend of protecting white majority rule.
“Within the next 15 to 20 years, whites will no longer constitute a majority of Americans. While whites continue to control economic, social, and legal arrangements in the U.S., they sense they are at risk of losing political power. Hence the undertaking dramatically to curtail voting rights of those not white. In his lone dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) (the case rendering segregation constitutionally viable), Justice John Harlan emphasized that formal segregation is unnecessary to maintain white dominance in America. Whites were so advanced over Blacks and others economically, educationally, socially, and culturally, Harlan insisted, that colorblindness would suffice always to maintain that competitive advantage. Colorblindness, given the legacy of domination and control, would suffice to sustain white power”
The attacks on affirmative action and DEI, I argue, represent a white reactionary backlash against the perceived threats to the racial caste system on which the entire U.S political and economic social order depends. While proponents for the end of affirmative action and DEI – like Edward Blum – evoke the language of “colorblindness,” “fairness,” and “equality,” the material outcome of their actions and policies says otherwise. In the wake of these civil rights rollbacks, the enrollment of Black and Indigenous students plummeted, and there has been a rise in hate crimes on campus.19Maria Sullivan, “UNC Saw Increased Reports of Stalking and Hate Crimes in 2024, Security Report Shows – Daily Tar Heel,” The Daily Tar Heel, November 11, 2025, https://www.dailytarheel.com/article/university-data-security-fire-safety-report-2025-20251111.
So what, then, is driving this agenda? To answer that, we must look closely at what has unfolded since the end of affirmative action.
Following the 2023 SCOTUS ruling, Edward Blum sent over 150 colleges a letter intimidating institutions from using race in any program, which is a complete departure from the Supreme Court’s ruling.
In response, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law wrote that Blum’s letter was “an effort to overstate the reach of the decision and stoke fears through implicit and explicit threats of litigation” because the Supreme Court decision “alters, but does not ban, the permissible scope of race-conscious admissions programs for public and private higher education institutions.”21Liam Knox, “SFFA President on Affirmative Action Ban’s Growing Impact,” Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs, February 19, 2025, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2025/02/19/sffa-president-affirmative-action-bans-growing-impact. Nevertheless, Blum’s letter successfully created a chilling effect, and many universities began rolling back race-based scholarships and initiatives.22Ibid
This letter also provided insight into the master plan to use affirmative action as a catalyst for a larger anti-civil rights project. As Michael Collin explains, affirmative action was a “massive legal missile launched at UNC and Harvard” by a conglomerate of right-wing activists working to weaponize civil rights language to blur the work of civil rights activists with a contemporary anti-civil rights movement. He writes, “the willful blurring of the lines between the two movements often captured by its opponent, zombified, and sent back to bite the original movement’s heirs.”23Michael S. Collins, The Anti-Civil Rights Movement: Affirmative Action as Wedge and Weapon (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2024).
This tactic to weaponize and “zombify” civil rights language was publicly exposed in January 2024, when the New York Times got access to thousands of documents revealing a loose national network of conservative figures and think tanks strategizing a crusade against DEI.24Nicholas Confessore, “‘America Is under Attack’: Inside the Anti-D.E.I. Crusade (Published 2024),” New York Times , January 20, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/20/us/dei-woke-claremont-institute.html. At the center of this movement is the Claremont Institute, whose chairman, Mr. Klingenstein wrote to another Claremont official, “Rhetorically, our side is getting absolutely murdered…We have not even come up with an agreed-on name for the enemy.”25Ibid Scott Yenor, a Claremont official, lays out their plan straightforwardly in an email, writing “the core of what we oppose is ‘anti-discrimination’. That is too much of a sacred cow.”26Ibid Instead, he argues, “I obviously think social justice is what we should call it. We should use the term that is most likely to stigmatize the movement that is accurate and arises from common life.”27Ibid Their goal was to stigmatize and make a boogeyman out of “social justice” so that “when people hear it, they can act on their suspicions.”28Ibid
This particular series of correspondence is relevant to the University because these tactics and playbooks have been adapted and applied to Chapel Hill’s campus. A year before the public exposure of emails, Yenor, in 2022, created a master plan titled Critical Social Justice in the UNC System. This document was created to challenge the “Critical Social Justice D.E.I Complex” (CSJ DEI) that was expanding into the UNC school system and posed “a threat to higher education and to the American way of life.” Yenor argues that the CSJ DEI complex “sets about a rolling revolution in university life, where one reform always demands another. Resentment, hatred, and self-hatred reign in the meantime,” and they argue their goal is to “overturn the victim-oppressor framework, making the former victims the new rulers and the former oppressors the new victims.” In coining the CSJ DEI, they were able to manufacture an abstract adversary and produced a 56-page document dissecting the “threats” within the UNC system school of DEI personnel, curriculum, policies, budgets, and other aspects of student life. Using this data, Yenor and Miller provided policy recommendations that in 2026 largely have largely have been met or are in the process of being implemented.
This crusade against CSJ-DEI is one of the many manufactured crises to stoke panic and fear about the growing presence and influence of minority voices on college campuses. When compared to the 1969 demands of the Black Student Movement, these policy recommendations can be interpreted as disguised attacks to reverse BSM’s demands and gains made in the 1960s. Scott and Miller listed out the initiatives of slashing DEI budget funding, discontinuation of identity-based centers, ending general education requirements, ending diversity preferences in hiring, and requiring bias training and the mandatory requirement for professors to publish CVs and syllabi publicly. These initiatives demonize BSM’s long-standing demands for a racially diverse campus that meets the educational needs of Black students. For example, these policies reverse (or attempt to) marginalized students’ achievements in demanding a racially conscious admissions process and outreach; a cultural center of Stone Center; and campus space allocated for Black student life. Ultimately, Scott and Miller’s policies create a racially hostile campus for marginalized students and nullify attempts to create a more inclusive campus.
There is often a misconception of linear progress: time moves towards constant social improvement. However, because the legacy of the Confederacy has been imbued into the University’s foundation, there is a constant desire to return to its roots. So what we are witnessing is not new; in fact, as Gordon Fraser argues, we are witnessing “ a backlash…an energized racism overlapping with and subsequent to the administration of the first black president and the renewal of emancipatory movements for justice,” a racist violent aftermath similar to the post-Reconstruction era.30Gordon Fraser, “The End of Reconstruction, Again: Dylann Roof, Thomas Dixon Jr., and the Transhistorical Structures of Racist Feeling,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, May 10, 2018, https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/article/693143/pdf.
The overturning of affirmative action and slashing of DEI policies is another iteration of racially exclusionary policies attacking racial integration, disguised in academic jargon and think tank journals.
In order to combat this anti-civil rights movement and move towards an anti-racist future, we must be precise with our language about what this conservative takeover of higher education is and what it aims to do. These policies are an attempt to resegregate the University. This iteration of segregation evokes the language of “colorblindness” because, as Judge John Harlan in his lone dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson writes, given the legacy of domination and control, colorblindness would suffice to sustain white power.31David Theo Goldberg, “The War on Critical Race Theory: Or, the Remaking of Racism,” School of Social Sciences Wordmark, August 14, 2023, https://www.socsci.uci.edu/newsevents/news/2023/2023-08-14-golberg-the-war-on-critical-race-theory.php. This means that University’s policies do not explicitly outline their intentions to resegregate but rather suggest their intentions for upholding white dominance through covert language.
Thus, it is the responsibility of the people of the University to continue critically examining these policies and identifying these historical parallels to understand how structures of oppression attempt to evolve, reinvent and disguise themselves.