In the age of DEI dashboards and performative allyship, too few are asking the most important question: Who still owns the room? The uncomfortable truth is that diversity has been curated—not constructed—for African Americans, offering symbolic inclusion while preserving Euro-American institutional dominance. When MAGA-era politics rolled back DEI initiatives with surgical precision, what was revealed was not just political hostility, but structural fragility. DEI collapsed not because it was too radical, but because it was never rooted in Black institutional power. As African Americans, we must confront a painful irony—we have often celebrated access to systems that still view our presence as peripheral. Pan-Africanism demands more. Not a seat at the table. Ownership of the table. Redesign of the room. And the authority to define the very terms of what justice, equity, and inclusion mean for us. Until then, multiculturalism remains a house built on someone else’s foundation—and the door is never truly ours to open. Continue reading →