By Dr. Stacey Patton, re-posted from social media with permission. Dr. Patton is research associate professor at Morgan State University and teaches journalism at Howard University. She is posting these brilliant Black History Month mini-lectures on her Facebook account. Follow her here.

Black History Month 2025 Mini-Lecture #3

I really need Y’all to stop getting upset over the dismantling of DEI initiatives. I need Y’all to shift your thinking about what’s really behind the backlash.

The dismantling isn’t just a political move. Hold your drink . . . The dismantling of DEI is a BIOLOGICAL, EPIGENETICALLY-DRIVEN response to a perceived existential threat among conservatives and rabid white supremacists. This is why DEI isn’t just being resisted, it’s being attacked with a SURVIVAL-LEVEL intensity.

First, let’s start with Donald Trump, how he embodies this moment, and why the MAJORITY of white people in America voted for him.

Trump is the living embodiment of white supremacy’s epigenetic survival response. He is a man whose every action reflects the deep, inherited panic of a system that senses its own decline. His obsession with dominance, his pathological need for control, his paranoia about “replacement,” and his compulsive, irrational aggression are not just deviant personality traits. No, they are the INSTINCTIVE BEHAVIORS of a power structure in BIOLOGICAL DISTRESS.

Let the church say, BIOLOGICAL DISTRESS.

Generations of white supremacy have conditioned its beneficiaries to equate power with survival, and Trump functions as their nervous system on fire, lashing out, rewriting reality, and rejecting all threats to the fragile illusion of racial hierarchy.

Trump’s rise to power was not about policy but about BIOLOGY. Yes, voting for Trump was a BIOLOGICAL RESPONSE. He activated something ANCIENT and REACTIVE, a trauma-conditioned fear of losing control. And the more reality shifts away from white dominance, the more extreme, erratic, and dangerous his and white America’s survival response becomes.

For the white people who voted for him, Trump was not just a leader, their daddy, their savior. He was a BIOLOGICAL REASSURANCE. Trump is a signal to their epigenetically conditioned fear response that the old order can still be preserved.

He spoke directly to their inherited panic, their deep-seated dread of displacement, offering them a way to fight back against the unraveling of a system that had always ensured their dominance. His rise gave them permission to surrender to instinct over logic, fear over reason, and aggression over adaptation, because for the descendants of colonizers, survival has never about coexistence—it has always been about CONTROL and DOMINANCE and zero-sum everything.

In trauma science, when a group feels existentially threatened, they react with:

Fight: Aggressive political action, voter suppression, censorship, increased hate crimes, authoritarianism.

Flight: White flight from urban areas, hoarding resources, isolating themselves in conservative enclaves.

Freeze: Denial, conspiracy theories, avoidance of history.

Fawn: “Colorblind” rhetoric, performative allyship that still reinforces their own comfort.

Now, how is this connected to the dismantling of DEI? Somebody gimme a sip of orange juice …

Listen to me good, Diversity Equity and Inclusion triggers an EPIGENETIC FEAR RESPONSE! It operates at the subconscious level, meaning below conscious awareness.

DEI = a loss of white control, which activates deeply embedded fear circuits that have passed down from generations who lived under existential threats stretching all the way back to Medieval and Early Modern Europe.

This isn’t just about losing jobs or political power. Nah, at an epigenetic level, it feels like losing control over SURVIVAL ITSELF.

White people have been conditioned for centuries, first in the hellholes of Europe—both culturally and biologically—to believe that hierarchy = safety. And so when things like affirmative action or DEI threatens that hierarchy, their bodies and brains interpret it as DANGER! And this triggers panic, aggression, and irrational resistance.

Y’all, DEI isn’t just an “HR initiative” to many white folks. It’s an existential crisis encoded in their genes!!! Epigenetically, their stress response is to reject, suppress, attack, and DESTROY any narrative that threatens their ancestral sense of order. Their genetic survival instincts tell them: “If we lose control, we will be erased!”

But here’s why we need to stop wasting energy being upset about the dismantling of DEI—their delusional, frantic responses prove that white supremacy is dying. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but it is. The fact that white conservatives are fighting this hard proves that their epigenetic survival mechanism is in overdrive.

Y’all, this is panic, not power.

If white supremacy were truly strong, it wouldn’t need to erase DEI—it would be confident in its dominance. Systems that are strong do not need to erase history, ban words, or suppress progress. This is not the confidence of a ruling class—it’s the desperation of one that knows its time is running out.

Our natural instinct has been to fear these moments, to brace for impact, to go into defense mode. Centuries of trauma have conditioned us to expect that whenever whiteness feels threatened, it retaliates—through violence, through policy, through destruction. But that conditioning has also trapped us in reactivity, keeping us focused on their movements instead of our own power.

But we are not the ones who should be afraid. They are. Their unraveling is not our emergency—it is our confirmation. White supremacy is not tightening its grip. It is losing control. The only question left is: what will we build while they burn?

Let me emphasize this again and listen to me good, Y’all: The dismantling of DEI isn’t about policy! It’s a biological reaction to the unraveling of a centuries-old power structure. White supremacy, as an epigenetic survival strategy, is now maladaptive, which means it no longer ensures survival, and instead, it is fueling its own destruction. This isn’t just a culture war. It’s a neurological, biological, and historical reckoning playing out before us in real-time.

White America is in full-blown survival mode. What’s fascinating to me as I sip my orange juice is that their perception of survival is completely detached from actual reality. They think the world is hunting them. It ain’t. There ain’t no orchestrated plan to “erase” them, and yet they are reacting as if they are on the brink of extinction. That’s because their nervous systems, their epigenetics, and their entire cultural conditioning have wired them to believe that dominance = survival.

But what’s actually killing them isn’t diversity, isn’t immigration, isn’t DEI—it’s their own fuggin’ racist, capitalist, unsustainable systems eating them alive. The economic instability, the crumbling middle class, the opioid crisis, the rising deaths of despair—all of it is the fallout of a machine built to exploit, extract, and discard.

Meanwhile, Black and Brown people, Indigenous people, the very ones they swore couldn’t survive without them, have been adapting to these systems of violence for generations. We know how to navigate instability, build in the margins, and create new possibilities out of destruction. We were never the ones on the brink of extinction—they were. And now, instead of confronting the failures of the world they built, they are lashing out at the people who have outlived every system designed to erase them.

This is why they are becoming more desperate, irrational, and extreme. Their survival instincts are malfunctioning. And in evolutionary terms, maladaptive behaviors lead to extinction.

They cannot stop the demographic shifts. The world is changing regardless of their fear response. They cannot suppress the truth forever. DEI is a symptom of a larger reckoning—one they cannot control. The harder they fight, the more they will accelerate their own decline. This is why we are seeing more extreme measures, because their old survival strategies are failing.

Y’all, what we are witnessing is not just a political moment. It is a biological, historical, and evolutionary turning point. White supremacy is a trauma-driven survival response that is no longer useful in a modern world where hierarchy is being dismantled. And when a species—or in this case, a power structure can no longer adapt, it collapses.

Black people cannot afford to react to white people’s panic in ways that exhaust us, retraumatize us, or trap us in their delusions. Their fear is not our problem to solve. Their unraveling is not our burden to manage.

Our responses must be strategic, not emotional. This is not the time for convincing, explaining, or extending grace. It is time for Black people to focus on our own survival, our own expansion, and our own liberation. Black people are not therapists for white fragility. Let them sit in their own panic.

Black liberation has never come from reaction—it comes from foresight.

Instead of begging for inclusion, we need to build independent economic, political, and media power. Fund Black businesses. Support Black institutions. Educate our own children. Own land. Control narratives. If you really know anything about Black History then you’ll draw on the lessons from the past. We have done all these things in the past and in the face of the most sadistic genocidal violence. We can do this shit again!

We are the descendants of the survivors of the Middle Passage. Do not forget this!

Let them panic. We have work to do.