America’s Future Depends on Protecting Black Women

There is a different kind of fatigue moving through this country right now. It is not just about being overworked or underpaid. It is not just about the rising cost of everything or the stress of daily life. What so many of us are carrying is deeper. It is grief.

This grief comes from watching everything our ancestors fought for and everything we have built be quietly dismantled. Not with fire this time but with hiring freezes, budget cuts, policy reversals, and corporate silence.

The National Urban League’s 2025 State of Black America report put it plainly. We are in a state of emergency. Civil rights protections are being rolled back. Equity programs that were supposed to close gaps are being stripped away. The report warns of a coordinated effort to dismantle the progress of the last fifty years, targeting not only DEI programs but the very laws that protected voting rights, education equity, and worker protections. This is the climate we are living in. It is not symbolic. It is structural.

The data tells the same story. In the last three months, more than three hundred thousand Black women have been forced out of the workforce or pushed to leave. Add that to the five hundred eighteen thousand who never returned since the pandemic, and you see the depth of the crisis. The unemployment rate for Black women spiked from five percent in March to six percent in May. It dropped slightly to five point eight percent in June, but remains almost double the rate for white women, which stayed near three point one percent. This is not just a labor statistic. This is an economic alarm.

Black women have always been the backbone of this economy. We are the most active participants in the workforce and the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in this country. We have carried public sector jobs, built businesses, and sustained education, healthcare, and frontline services. When private industry shut us out, we built our own institutions. When banks denied us funding, we funded ourselves.

Now, as economic policies shift, DEI programs disappear, and federal downsizing takes hold, Black women are the first to be displaced. Every week, I learn of another Black woman-owned business closing its doors. These closures are not random. They are the result of shrinking access to capital, vanishing contracts, and customers who have been steered back to corporate chains. When our businesses go, neighborhoods lose more than storefronts. They lose the economic anchors that keep communities alive.

We are already seeing the consequences. T-Mobile stripped all DEI language from its corporate materials to secure a nine billion dollar FCC deal. Home Depot deleted its diversity commitments under political pressure and called it an evolution. Public figures who speak out are being silenced. Brand ambassadors, athletes, and entertainers are being dropped. Many of the companies that promised equity in 2020 have quietly walked away from those commitments.

Meanwhile, Project 2025 is no longer a theory. It is here. It is being pushed by powerful conservative think tanks and is reshaping the federal workforce from the inside. Civil rights offices are being defunded, diversity roles are being eliminated, and agencies like Education and Labor are being stripped of equity mandates. Programs that once protected underrepresented workers are now being redefined as discriminatory. These moves are calculated, not accidental.

On August 1, 2025, Donald Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after the July jobs report showed only 73,000 new jobs and major downward revisions that erased 258,000 previously reported jobs. He accused her without evidence of rigging the data. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers warned that this kind of political interference is really scary stuff. Even some Republicans admitted it undermines public trust in the data that drives policy.

This is what happens when facts themselves are attacked. The truth becomes political, and the people lose.

I have seen this shift up close. As the founder of Buy From A Black Woman, I have built one of the most visible national platforms supporting Black women entrepreneurs. I have worked with corporations that claimed equity mattered, only to watch them retreat when the pressure faded. I have led research studies that exposed how most DEI programs created in 2020 were not built to last. They had no goals, no funding, and no intention of making lasting change. Now the proof is in front of us. The programs are gone, and so is the urgency that created them.

Communities are still fighting. We are fighting for access to capital, contracts, visibility, and jobs. Organizations like the U.S. Black Chambers are pushing bold economic goals for 2025, from strengthening Black media to increasing capital access. These goals matter, but they cannot succeed without structural support and political protection.

This is the moment to get serious. It is not the time for symbolic gestures, hashtags, or performative outrage. It is about the future of the labor force, the survival of small businesses, and the strength of the middle class.

Leadership in this moment requires building coalitions that protect the people who do the work. It means funding what works and protecting who builds. It means refusing to accept policies that weaken our communities and instead demanding policies that strengthen them.

When you remove Black women from the table, you weaken the table for everyone.

When Black women are pushed out, the country gets weaker. When Black women lead, everyone rises.

This is not just about Black women. It is about all of us. And it is time we act like it.