Dr. David E. Kirkland
Love is called hate. Care is called harm. And the act of seeing those whom society has long refused to see—especially young Black men and boys—is now, paradoxically, framed as a form of discrimination. This is not simply a distortion of language. It is a dystopian erosion of truth.
For close to two decades, we’ve built schools and systems to repair what the American experiment has so often broken: the futures of Black boys. Our work—as educators, organizers, and truth-tellers—has never been about exclusion. It has been about restoration. Because no group in this country’s modern history has been so consistently and visibly failed by its institutions than young Black men and boys. And no group has had its pain so loudly denied in the very moment we are trying to address it.
Today, organizations like Kingmakers of Oakland, which center the educational, social, and emotional well-being of Black boys, find themselves under siege—not for failing, but for succeeding. Our model of education, grounded in cultural affirmation, STREAM innovation (Science, Technology, Reading, Engineering, Arts, Math), and community healing, has helped reshape possibilities for thousands of young people. Yet this work is now threatened, not by lack of evidence, but by a coordinated campaign to defund the apparatuses of racial justice upon which Kingmakers was built.
We are watching the very meaning of equity hollowed out by Orwellian doublespeak. Programs targeting the most vulnerable are being dismantled under the false premise that such targeting is itself discriminatory. In Texas, a Black male leadership initiative was shut down for allegedly “violating equal protection” because it named race. In California, equity offices are quietly being scaled back. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights faces funding threats and potential closure. And the Department of Justice’s Office for Access to Justice is once again under scrutiny. Most recently, the Trump administration issued an executive order framing efforts to address racial disparities in school discipline—including disproportionate suspensions of Black boys—as themselves “racist,” arguing that such measures constitute discrimination against white students. In this new political script, confronting racism is now considered an act of racism—a distortion so severe it borders on absurdity, yet it is gaining traction in policy.
