"People can take anything from you, but they can never take away your education.” My roots are in Guyana, a Caribbean nation, and this mantra of resilience echoed through generations and followed me from Guyana to Queens, N.Y.
But when President Trump recently bragged he "ended DEI in America," he was openly celebrating the very shift I’ve already felt in my own education.
When I entered college in Fairfield, Conn., I carried more than my own ambition. I carried the unrealized dreams of my grandmother and the women in our village who were told their place was in the home, not a lecture hall. My education isn’t just for me—it’s for my family, my community and every girl back in our motherland who never got the chance and never will.
But higher education in the United States has increasingly transformed from a public good into a private marketplace. The very pathways that made my presence in these institutions possible are now being publicly dismantled through legislation and policy.
Immigrant and first-generation students do not weaken universities. We strengthen them. If we believe education cannot be taken from us, then we must be willing to fight for the conditions that make it accessible in the first place. In a political moment where leaders celebrate the end of DEI as progress, defending its need has never felt more urgent.
The post What Trump’s Rollback of DEI Means for First-Generation Students Like Me appeared first on Ms. Magazine.