The filing is the latest front in the right’s ever-expanding campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. What began as a challenge to affirmative action in college admissions has grown into a sweeping effort to dismantle diversity offices, race-conscious scholarships, employee affinity groups, and educational programs that acknowledge the continuing significance of race in American life. At every turn, it seems like the mere presence of a Black person or a woman or someone from any number of other identities in a position of authority is “illegal DEI.” It is no longer enough to prohibit universities from making admissions decisions on the basis of race. Now, even voluntary communities that students create for themselves are supposedly suspect.
The UConn programs at issue do not assign students to housing based on race, nor do they exclude anyone from participating in university life. They are voluntary residential learning communities that students opt into because they believe they would benefit from living among peers with shared experiences. But the complaint effectively argues that students cannot be trusted to make that determination for themselves. A group of honors students may decide that living together would foster their academic development. French speakers may conclude that a shared living arrangement would deepen their cultural and linguistic experience. But if Black or Latino students believe there is value in spaces that acknowledge their experiences as members of historically marginalized groups, their decision suddenly becomes so suspect that it is characterized as unlawful segregation requiring government intervention.
Throughout our history, communities built by marginalized groups have been portrayed as divisive, illegitimate, or contrary to universal principles, and again and again, governments and powerful institutions have sought to dismantle those communities in the name of equality, progress, or neutrality. Whether they have been tribal governments, labor unions, Black business districts, or mutual aid societies, institutions that enable vulnerable people to support one another and exercise collective power have been seen as threats precisely because they lessen dependence on dominant institutions. Spaces for building solidarity outside of an ideologically dominant vision of white supremacy and patriarchy are particular targets, with cross-community solidarity efforts being particularly threatening.
Black Americans repeatedly built institutions of their own. After emancipation, Black people were excluded from many white institutions and denied equal protection of the law, and they were still the frequent targets of extrajudicial violence. They created churches, schools, businesses, newspapers, and mutual aid organizations that provided forms of security and independence unavailable elsewhere. Tulsa’s Greenwood district represented one of the most remarkable examples of this process. Known colloquially as “Black Wall Street,” this community was not just a prosperous Black neighborhood. It was a thriving ecosystem of businesses and civic institutions that gave Black Tulsans a degree of collective autonomy in a society organized around white supremacy.
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these extrajudicial forms of repression increasingly became formalized through law. Jim Crow helped maintain a social order in which Black political and economic institutions could be constrained, surveilled, and periodically subjected to violence. Legal rules and extralegal terror worked together to preserve relationships of dependence and limit the development of collective power.
The Dawes Act of 1887 represented a legal culmination of this project. Rather than openly presenting allotment as an effort to weaken Indigenous nations, its supporters framed it as a path toward equality and citizenship. They argued that tribal governments and communal landholding kept Indigenous people from becoming proper, independent Americans. The solution, they claimed, was to divide collectively held lands into individual parcels, transform Indigenous people into private property owners, and replace relationships of collective responsibility with direct relationships between individuals and the federal government.
The importance of allotment is that it demonstrates a recurring pattern in American history. The destruction of marginalized communities often begins by portraying those communities as the obstacle to equality and their institutions as barriers to individual freedom, rather than responses to conditions of exclusion. The solution offered is not greater power for those communities but their dissolution, and the same logic appears in contemporary attacks on affinity spaces.
The question raised by the UConn complaint is therefore much larger than whether a university may offer Black and Latino residential learning communities. It is whether equality requires people to stand alone—or whether people who have historically faced exclusion have the right to build the communities through which they can stand together.
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