A debate between Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and architect of Project 2025, and Cornell William Brooks, former NAACP president, centered on whether diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs remain necessary for racial progress in America. Roberts argued DEI programs now harm social cohesion and that diversity can occur organically, while Brooks emphasized the historical and ongoing need for deliberate policies to combat discrimination.
- Roberts claimed DEI programs were necessary during the Civil Rights era but now do more harm than good to social cohesion.
- Brooks highlighted that racial progress required organized resistance, litigation, and federal enforcement, not organic change.
- The Trump administration has taken actions to eliminate DEI programs and race-conscious policies in federal agencies and education.
- Brooks linked Project 2025 to efforts reducing federal civil rights enforcement, which he argues weakens protections against discrimination.
- The debate reflects a longstanding disagreement over whether equal rights require ongoing government intervention or can sustain themselves.
Former NAACP President Cornell William Brooks Challenges Kevin Roberts’ Claim That America’s Racial Progress Can Continue Without DEI Policies
A debate between a key architect of Project 2025 and a former president of the NAACP is gaining attention after the two offered sharply different accounts of how America achieved racial progress — and whether deliberate efforts to preserve diversity are still necessary.
Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation and a key architect of Project 2025, joined Harvard Kennedy School professor Cornell William Brooks, the 18th president and CEO of the NAACP, for a Sept. 22 debate on diversity in higher education and American life.
The exchange became particularly pointed when Roberts argued that diversity, equity and inclusion programs may have been necessary during the Civil Rights era, but America has progressed enough that diversity can now largely occur organically.
“As a historian, I offer that things change over time,” Roberts said. “In 1964, 1965, did we need programs called DEI in order to level the playing field? Perhaps so.”
Roberts went further, arguing that DEI programs now “do more to harm social cohesion in the United States than they have done to help it in the last decade.”
But the history Roberts invoked also complicates his argument.
America’s Racial Progress Was Not Organic
The racial diversity visible in American universities, workplaces and government today did not emerge simply through changing attitudes.
For nearly a century after slavery, state and local governments maintained systems restricting Black Americans’ access to schools, voting, employment and public accommodations. In 1896, the Supreme Court upheld racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson.
It took decades of organized resistance and litigation — much of it led by the NAACP — before the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 that state-sponsored segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.
Even Brown did not make integration automatic. Southern states resisted desegregation, and federal intervention continued.
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Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing discrimination in public accommodations and employment while strengthening federal authority to confront school segregation. The following year, the Voting Rights Act targeted barriers that had kept Black Americans from voting, particularly in the South.
By the end of 1965, roughly 250,000 new Black voters had registered, according to the National Archives.
“There’s no incidence of democracy being on autopilot or diversity being on autopilot,” Brooks said.
He recalled that his mother attended South Carolina State College and was fire-hosed while protesting segregation as a first-year student.
“I don’t believe that the things that she stood for and the things that she fought for could be secured simply by any organic process or any autopilot,” Brooks said.
Roberts, however, pointed to the diverse Harvard audience sitting before him as evidence of how much America has changed.
“I love the pluralism and diversity in this room,” Roberts said.
“If you took away the [DEI] policies, then you’re going to have a room that looks like this because Americans have made such progress there.”
Brooks rejected that assumption.
“Across this country, diversity has been brought into being by blood, sweat, tears, protests, demonstrations, and assertion of the people’s will,” he said.
Black students did not gain access to previously segregated universities because racial barriers naturally disappeared. Black voters did not overcome literacy tests, intimidation and other discriminatory practices because those systems simply faded away. Workplace discrimination became illegal because the federal government was pushed to act.
America in 2026 is undeniably different from America in 1965, as Roberts argues. But that progress alone does not establish that the mechanisms used to produce it are no longer necessary — the premise Brooks challenged throughout the debate.
Brooks also pointed to contemporary studies documenting racial discrimination in employment.
“We have studies today that demonstrate discrimination in the workplace with respect to people applying for jobs and not being treated fairly,” Brooks said. “There is data.”
Trump Has Put The Anti-DEI Argument Into Practice
The debate is unfolding nearly two years into President Donald Trump’s second term, during which his administration has moved aggressively against DEI programs across the federal government and targeted race-conscious policies in education and federal contracting.
On his first day back in office in January 2025, Trump ordered federal agencies to terminate DEI and DEIA programs, policies and activities. The administration characterized the programs as discriminatory and directed agencies to eliminate DEI considerations from federal employment practices.
A day later, Trump revoked Executive Order 11246, the 1965 order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson that required federal contractors to take affirmative action to ensure applicants and employees were treated without regard to race, color, religion, sex or national origin.
The administration also moved against DEI within the Department of Education. The department removed or archived hundreds of documents and training materials mentioning DEI and placed employees responsible for DEI initiatives on administrative leave.
It later instructed federally funded schools and colleges to stop using racial preferences in admissions, hiring, scholarships, discipline and other programs, warning institutions could face federal civil rights investigations. The Trump administration argues those actions enforce Title VI and protect Americans from race-based discrimination.
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Trump also ordered the elimination of DEI programs within the military, saying the changes would restore a system based on merit rather than race- or sex-based preferences.
Those actions are particularly relevant to the Harvard debate because the federal government is already testing, in practice, a version of the argument Roberts presented that America can preserve equal opportunity while eliminating policies explicitly designed around diversity and racial disparities.
Brooks argues the historical record gives reason to question whether equality sustains itself without deliberate enforcement.
Project 2025 And Civil Rights Enforcement
The disagreement became broader when Brooks connected Project 2025 with changes to federal civil rights enforcement.
“Project 2025 calls for a war against DEI, but it also calls for a war against civil rights protection,” Brooks said.
He pointed to changes within the Department of Education and Department of Justice, arguing that reducing federal civil rights enforcement leaves people facing racial, gender and disability discrimination with fewer protections.
Roberts strongly rejected Brooks’ characterization and objected to connecting Project 2025 with increases in hate crimes or political violence.
“Civility does not require me to sit here as one of the leaders of Project 2025 and hear someone whom I still genuinely respect imply that because a conservative think tank has done what it has done for 45 years, which is propose policy change, that that has contributed to the rise in political violence and hate crimes,” Roberts said.
Underneath the heated exchange was a much older American argument: whether guaranteeing equal rights on paper is enough, or whether government intervention remains necessary when discrimination continues in practice.
Brooks posed the question another way.
“How can you have viewpoint diversity without diversity among those who hold the views?”
More than 60 years after the Civil Rights Act, America is substantially more racially integrated than it was when Black students were barred from schools and universities and Black citizens were systematically prevented from voting.
But the historical record also shows those changes did not simply happen with time.
America did not arrive at the diverse Harvard room Roberts pointed to on autopilot. It took lawsuits, legislation, federal enforcement, protests and people like Brooks’ mother demanding that the doors be opened in the first place.
