REP. JOSH WILLIAMS: The Woke Left Pimped Out The Civil Rights Movement — And Betrayed Black America

Affirmative action began as a just and well-meaning attempt to give black Americans equal opportunities after centuries of enslavement, oppression, and state-sponsored racism. As President Lyndon B Johnson said in 1965:

“You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

Those words captured the moral heart of affirmative action: a focused effort to uplift black Americans — the only group in this country whose entire history is rooted in slavery, segregation, and systemic oppression.

Affirmative action was supposed to be a remedy, a chance to level a rigged playing field. But it carried a poison pill from the start: trying to fix racism by practicing more racism. It empowered one race by penalizing others. It replaced the dream of equality with a system of racial favoritism. It abandoned the vision of a colorblind society and taught a generation that skin color, not character or merit, would decide opportunity. We didn’t kill Jim Crow — we rebranded it. We poured the same poison back into the veins of American life and called it “progress.”

TOPSHOT – Protesters jump on a street sign near a burning barricade during a demonstration against the death of George Floyd near the White House on May 31, 2020 in Washington, DC. Thousands of National Guard troops patrolled major US cities after five consecutive nights of protests over racism and police brutality that boiled over into arson and looting, sending shock waves through the country. (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP) (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)

For decades, America wrestled with this contradiction. Could a nation built on equality justify racial discrimination, even in the name of righting past wrongs? Many excused it, believing the ends — more diversity, more “representation” — justified the means. (RELATED: Is The Left Gearing Up For Another Summer Of Destruction?)

But rather than stay focused on the true victims of American injustice — black Americans — the Democratic Party got greedy. They saw the civil rights movement not as a moral cause, but as a political hustle. They climbed onto the shoulders of black America, hijacked our sacrifices, and cashed them in for political power.

The modern woke left mutated affirmative action into “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” — a catch-all scam designed to manufacture new victims and grow their voter base. Every imaginable group was roped into the hustle: liberal white women, immigrants, LGBTQ activists, even wealthy elites who cried “marginalization” on cue. Affirmative action, paid for with the blood of black Americans, ended up fast-tracking privileged white women into boardrooms and universities. Today, women dominate higher education while black students are still left behind. That’s the legacy the Democrats gave us.

And they weren’t done selling us out. The DEI racket ballooned to include every new identity fad — a never-ending alphabet soup of grievances. A slip of a pronoun or a Twitter spat was treated like Selma or Birmingham. The horrors of slavery and Jim Crow were trivialized into hashtags and safe spaces. Being “oppressed” became a fashion statement — a VIP ticket to privilege, handed out by the woke gatekeepers of the left.

Meanwhile, the real civil rights struggle — the bloody, painful fight that black Americans waged — was buried under mountains of academic jargon, virtue signaling, and political pandering. The Democratic Party didn’t just abandon black Americans — they pimped out our history for profit. (RELATED: CHARLIE KIRK: It’s Time To Finish Undoing The Legacy Of 2020: Get Rid Of The Floyd Monuments)

But the American people started to catch on.

They saw a never-ending grievance parade where everyone — except straight white men — claimed victimhood. They saw a system that handed out preferences not based on real injustice, but on identity politics. They watched as even white women — who quietly reaped the biggest benefits — turned against affirmative action. What started as a tool for justice became a circus of quotas, tokenism, and resentment.

And finally, the reckoning came.

In 2023, the Supreme Court struck down race-based college admissions. After decades of abuse and distortion, the courts — and the American people — had seen enough. But make no mistake: this collapse didn’t come because conservatives hated black Americans. It came because the Democrats bastardized affirmative action into a grotesque DEI hustle.

The tragic part? It’s black Americans who will suffer most. We’ve already seen it. When California banned affirmative action in the 1990s, black enrollment at top universities dropped by nearly 40% overnight. And now, because the left couldn’t stop playing identity games, the same doors that affirmative action once pried open are slamming shut again.

And who’s to blame for this debacle? It’s easy to point at conservative judges or angry white parents, but we must hold liberal Democrats accountable. It’s the left-wing activists, the woke college administrators, and the DEI industrial complex. They hijacked what some would call a righteous cause, watered it down, and sold it for political gain. They rode Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy like a cheap carnival ride — and crashed it into the ground.

The woke left killed affirmative action, not the courts. They mistook quotas for justice, victimhood for virtue, and grievance for progress. And in doing so, they betrayed the very black Americans whose blood built the foundation of the civil rights movement.

The Democrat Party must answer for this. They owe more than an apology; they owe accountability.