John Marshall, Chief Equity Officer for Jefferson County Public Schools, posted to X about conversations he’s had recently with other Black professionals after the election of Donald Trump for a second term. The comment also related to recent decisions for companies and institutions to abandon or step back from previous commitments to diversity equity and inclusion efforts.
Marshall’s post made the rounds after right-wing social media account Libs of TikTok posted his comment and salary information to nearly 4 million followers.
Some Republican lawmakers and incoming lawmakers signed a statement calling for Marshall to resign from his post, which he’s held since 2012.
The lawmakers’ statement called for his resignation and ouster for making an “outrageously inflammatory public statement,” and was signed by 14 lawmakers and lawmakers-elect.
“As an officer of the government, speaking in an official capacity at taxpayer expense, such reckless speech inciting hatred based on skin color should be grounds for immediate termination. In the current heated political climate of America, it is absolutely unacceptable for a senior JCPS leader to stoke the fires of hatred and division rather than set an example of bringing students together in peace.
This is not an isolated incident; Dr. Marshall’s X account contains numerous divisive statements,” the statement read.
In defense of Marshall, Professor Ricky Jones, who was honored at a JCPS event, named the lawmakers and lawmakers-elect who signed the statement, calling them “white supremacists.” He said to the audience, "the greatest threat you face right now is white supremacy, which is in disguise as the anti-DEI movement in this state. That's what it is. So when you see people attack our dear brother, John Marshall, like last week, you understand what they're doing."
This year, the Republican-led General Assembly attempted to pass Senate Bill 6 targeting public universities' diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The House and Senate failed to reach an agreement, which effectively killed the bill.
LPM’s Divya Karthikeyan spoke to Ricky Jones, University of Louisville professor and Baldwin-King scholar-in-residence at the Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute, about his defense of Marshall, his comments on “white supremacist” legislators and how the backlash to anti-DEI efforts and legislation is reminiscent of backlash to actions and policies through history that gave Black people more rights.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Divya Karthikeyan: Can we get into why you thought people felt upset or felt a kind of discomfort around Marshall’s statement?
Ricky Jones: Well, they felt discomfort around the statement because Kentucky in general, Louisville in particular, has a very serious problem with dealing with the reality of white supremacy in this space. And I'm not, you know, talking about some elementary, cartoonish definition of white supremacy. You know, with the Ku Klux Klan running around in robes, or white nationalists marching through Charlottesville saying Jews will not replace us. I'm talking about whites who feel that they and only they, at the end of the day, are the only ones who have the right to think, know and decide, think about what the problems in the area are, know what the proper solutions are, and then decide what's going to be done.
The terminal decision makers here are almost all white. No Black person really comes to mind outside of you know, Black churches, Simmons College of Kentucky, places like that. The decision makers are white, and the reality of it is that Blacks in the area live in a state of fear. They do feel that if they ever say anything of any consequence that pushes back against the reality of white dominance in the city, that they'll be punished. And so, the John Marshall situation was simply an example of that. And I, for one, was not willing to allow him to be out there by himself.
DK: The anti-DEI legislation that has come up, and the way it's been popularly framed is, it’s a backlash to 2020. And because you did call it a white supremacist legislation, could you contextualize that in terms of what you meant?
RJ: Yes, I mean, it runs back, and people say, “Okay, this is a backlash to 2020.” Okay, maybe to some degree when you look at it on the micro level, but when you look at it on the macro level, it's really a continuation of white backlash that we've seen in the country since its founding.
You look at 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment. That was backlash. Three years later, the 14th Amendment, backlash. You look at reconstruction backlash, civil rights movement backlash. I mean, we constantly see white backlash in different iterations.
So that's why, when people bring up DEI, which is really just another term that people use to try to fight for racial equality, and folks talk about the harm of DEI. So remember, this stands for diversity, equity and inclusion. So folks are saying, we are against that, and they talk about the evils of DEI, that the country is somehow a merit based country, like whiteness has never benefited them. I refuse to have conversations about DEI. I refuse to frame it in that way, because what this really is is the reaffirmation of white supremacy in American education.
So that's why it's very, very hard to believe when people in Kentucky, whether it's the governor or the mayor of any city, or business leaders say, “we want change, we believe in diversity,” when they don't say a word when these things happen. And the same with college presidents and university presidents, they don't say a word, they'll shut down their diversity offices, or they'll put diversity officers in place who won't resist. So to me, that's the quintessence of evil to behave in this way, right, to allow this type of stuff to go on and not even have legitimate conversation about it.
DK: As a call back to what John Marshall said, and the response to it by legislators was that this was stoking division, I'm curious what we lose when we don't get curious or actually interrogate, maintaining that status quo?
RJ: Well, what you lose, put simply, is the possibility for progress, possibility for change, the possibility for equality, the possibility of becoming a truly cosmopolitan city or state that is welcoming to all you know, you're going to be stuck in an ideological mire that is not going to change now.
