Artur Davis on why Black women bear brunt of DEI backlash

Attorney Artur Davis has spent his career fighting for workers who face discrimination. As a partner at HKM Employment Attorneys and former four-term congressman from Alabama, Davis has represented everyone from hourly employees to senior executives. His current case involves Janique Sanders, who was fired from UNC Charlotte after being targeted in a hidden camera video by the right wing group Accuracy in Media. Davis argues that Sanders lost her job not for breaking any rules, but for expressing support for diversity and inclusion values. 

Can you tell us about Janique Sanders and what happened in her case?

Janique Sanders is a brilliant young African American woman who graduated Phi Beta Kappa, the highest academic honor that one can win at an undergraduate university in the United States. She worked for Rutgers doing community engagement, community leadership work. In the early 2020s, she went to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and she was doing what we now call DEI work. She did their work very well, very capably, but Janique Sanders could not control the political climate in this country.

We had a change in this country in 2024 and 2025. Things that were celebrated, things that were applauded in a bipartisan way, things that were seen as a valuable part of building a strong American society, well, the pendulum swung. In the summer of 2024, before Donald Trump was elected, the University of North Carolina Board of Governors made the decision to end that school’s DEI commitment. So, Janique Sanders went on doing her business, performing her work capably.

At some point in either late October or early November 2024, two young people came to her office at UNC Charlotte. They told her they wanted to do DEI work and wanted to know if there are any jobs available on campus. Janique Sanders told them no, we no longer have DEI work that’s available, but there are any number of important community service initiatives that we’re engaged in. She talked about UNC Charlotte’s program addressing local food banks to feed people who are hungry. But these two young people kept pressing her, “we want to do DEI work.” They kept using that phrase.

Janique Sanders told them, while DEI work is no longer part of our footprint, the mission of reaching out to people who feel marginalized or who feel as if they don’t belong because of their skin color, their sexual identity, their gender, or their status as being economically insecure, that’s still an important value. You can still do that work. Janique Sanders thought nothing of this encounter.

All of a sudden, in late May 2025, seven or eight months later, she gets a call from one of the defendants in this case, Karen Shaffer. She’s told, “I’m gonna send you a clip. I want you to look at this clip, and I want you to tell me if this is AI generated or is this you.” Well, Sanders sees an image of herself, very limited, selectively edited clips, but it’s her. She says, “Yes, that’s me.” The Associate Vice Chancellor says to her, “All right, well, we’re gonna have to do an investigation. We’re gonna get back to you tomorrow.”

My client isn’t quite sure what she’s being investigated for, and she’s not told what she’s being investigated for. She doesn’t fear that because she hasn’t violated any policy, hasn’t broken any rule. The next day, she is told, “Forget the investigation, you’re immediately fired.”

To this day, University of North Carolina Charlotte has not identified a single rule that she broke. To this day, they have not provided her written explanation of why she was terminated. To this day, they have not provided her with even a modicum of due process. To this day, UNCC hasn’t seen the videotape. They have acknowledged in several settings that this videotape is something that they’ve never seen, never inspected.

We think that’s wrong. We also think it’s against the law. We have filed a discrimination claim on Sanders’ behalf. We’ve also filed claims under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, because in this country of ours, if you punish an employee who works for the government because they speak on a matter of public concern, you violated their rights under the First Amendment.

What are the rights of people who find themselves in similar situations?

If anyone is working for a public sector entity, they have rights that private sector employees don’t have. If you’re working for a school, K through 12 or university that’s public, if you’re working for a government entity, if you’re working for a municipal government entity, you have rights under the First Amendment of the United States, because our Constitution very specifically says government entities cannot penalize the expression of speech.

If Sanders were working for a private organization, she would not have these claims, because the Constitution doesn’t restrict the ability of private corporations to regulate speech. But the men who framed the United States Constitution believed it important that the government be prevented from suppressing speech. That’s the heart of what this case is about.

Anyone who loses their job or is threatened with losing their job because they spoke on a matter of public concern, particularly if the speech you engaged in was not a part of your job functions, you have protections under the First Amendment. Organizations do have a right to say, if your job involves a particular thing, we can control your speech on that subject. But if your speech was not a part of your job, you have protections under the First Amendment.

One of the most important pieces of evidence in this case is that after Janique Sanders was fired, the PR person for the University of North Carolina Charlotte said, “Defining DEI programs, it’s not part of Janique Sanders’ job. Her views and her comments about the scope of DEI programs, that’s not part of her job.” So they, in effect, handed us a First Amendment claim.

What are you seeing in terms of the cost of anti-DEI efforts for individual careers?

Presidents of the United States and our constitutional system are not monarchs. Presidents can issue executive orders. They can’t repeal laws. Everyone should appreciate that and understand that. But what presidents can do is they can put pressure on people who receive federal money to toe the party line if they want to keep receiving that money. That is a power presidents have. That’s the power President Trump has relied on to constrain these universities from engaging in DEI work.

Presidents also have another power. It’s the power of the bully pulpit. I very much believe that one of the main reasons the anti-DEI movement has gained a footing in this country is not because it has a strong legal foundation, not because it has majority support in any appellate court in the United States, but because, at the end of the day, the goal is to change conduct and to change incentives to engage in certain conduct. When the President of the United States says to institutions, “Stop believing in diversity or risk losing federal dollars,” he is sending a signal. He’s trying to regulate conduct. He’s trying to, in effect, use the power of fear and the power of the purse to make organizations follow this administration’s tune.

I would invite everyone who listens to this to engage in the following thought experiment. What if a White professor or administrator working at any university in this country said, “I’m against DEI, and I want to see this institution stop it.” Does anybody who just heard me say that believe that guy would be fired in today’s climate? Absolutely not. He’d probably get a promotion. He’d probably get a podcast of his own. He’d probably get a show on Fox. So this is the reality. If that person is protected by the First Amendment, why isn’t Janique Sanders protected by the First Amendment? That’s part of what this case is about.

Despite all of the imperfections of our framers, despite the imperfections in the text of our original Constitution, our Constitution and the Reconstruction Amendments in the 1860s expanded rights that did not exist as a part of the moral architecture in this country. That’s a good thing. Now, we’ve not always lived up to those rights. We’ve more often than not failed to live up to those rights. But there’s an architecture in our Constitution that protects people from the powerful. In this case, UNC Charlotte failed to protect Janique Sanders, and in effect, they made her a sacrificial lamb. That’s wrong. It’s also illegal and unconstitutional, we believe.

Why are Black women disproportionately affected by these DEI attacks?

Let’s put this in the perspective of Janique Sanders again, because her story, her narrative, tells this story. This organization, Accuracy in Media, could have approached any number of people who work for Sanders’ department and asked them the same questions and done the same sting operation in an effort to get them to say something that could be spun against them online. Why did they target Janique Sanders? Janique Sanders didn’t even run her own department, much less run this broader network of programs associated with civic leadership at UNC. Why did they pick someone who was a mid-level person instead of going to a top-level senior person?

So happens that Janique Sanders is Black and she’s a woman. She literally fit the bill. Do some additional research. She’s not the only person who got stung by Accuracy in Media. Have you noticed how many of the people who got stung were Black women? Even though they were not the leaders of their programs in many cases, even though there were White decision makers above them in the food chain, why are these Black women being targeted for these sting operations about DEI?

I have a theory about that. So many people in this country believe that Black women have benefited from DEI initiatives in an unfair, disproportionate way. This is what they’re really saying, that Black women — and they mean Black men too and they mean Hispanic men and women too more often than not — that men and women of color cannot achieve without being given an unfair nudge.

That philosophy and that mindset tells you all you need to know. Of course, Black women are now becoming casualties of that environment, because as any Black woman listening to this can attest, there is probably somebody at her job who wonders: Is she there because of her talent or is she there because of some theory of diversity and equity?

Now again, flip the script on that. When a White male ascends to a position of leadership, people might question his views or any number of things about him, but rarely do we see his competence questioned. How often, with people of color, is there a threshold question of competence, no matter where you went to school?

Ketanji Brown Jackson, our first African American female Supreme Court justice, went to Harvard Law School. There were people who still questioned whether she was qualified to sit on the United States Supreme Court. We’ve had any number of African Americans hold jobs from President to Vice President to all of the senior positions. There is still always a shadow of a question about competence. 

You can disagree with someone’s political views all you want. That’s the nature of having a robust First Amendment. But when you go from saying, I don’t agree with their politics, to wondering if they’re smart enough, to wondering if they have the intellectual ability, are they where they are because of a nudge? That’s very much a thing that’s happening in our country right now. A questioning of talent among people of color, among women of color. That’s completely unjustified and has no empirical basis whatsoever.

African American women are getting higher education at a faster rate than most other sectors of the population because it has become a necessity for advancement for many African American women. I remember 50 years ago hearing stories from my mother, who was a schoolteacher in Alabama. All of the Black schoolteachers in the early 1970s went out and got master’s degrees. You know why? Because they thought it would protect them from being fired. Many of their White colleagues never felt the need to do that. You’re not required to have a master’s degree to teach public education, but all the Black teachers felt, we need this extra credential. How many African Americans go to graduate school now because they feel they need an extra credential?

There’s something wrong with the picture that makes people of color and women of color have to climb an extra hurdle. Hasn’t that been the story of much of our country’s evolution, people of color having to climb extra steps? So, this narrative that now people of color are being handed leadership positions, that historically fails, and it is the opposite of what the trend line has been in this country of ours.

What power do federal anti-discrimination laws still hold to protect workers?

The entire gamut of federal anti-discrimination laws are still available to protect people of color, and it’s important for that to be understood. All of the noise in Washington, all of the executive orders are changing incentives, but not one federal law in this country has changed with respect to civil rights. And they’re not going to.

We have seen these laws misused in some cases. We have seen Section 1981, a law that is 150+ years old now, used to say to organizations, “you can’t give scholarships to Black kids.” We’ve seen that law used to say to TV networks, “you can’t hire Black screenwriters.” We’ve seen that law misused, in my opinion, but the law still exists in an even handed sort of way. Title VII, Section 1981, the entire gamut of laws that protect against racism and inequality in this country, those laws still exist, and they can still be used.

Now, they’re even-handed. They can be used to protect White persons who face discrimination. They can be used to protect Black persons. But when we see the Chairman of the EEOC, a few weeks ago, literally post on her account that if you are a White person who feels you’ve been discriminated against, call the EEOC. That’s not being even-handed. That’s saying the power of the federal government is being allocated to protect one class of people and not another. That’s the opposite of being even-handed.

Isn’t it remarkable that in the name of being even-handed, we are now seeing open declarations that the government that we have wants to protect some people and to use the civil rights laws to help some people and not others.

Where can people reach you if they’re facing discrimination?

We’re a national law firm, HKM Employment Attorneys. We’re headquartered in Seattle, Washington, but we have offices all around the country. We literally represent clients in every single judicial circuit in the United States of America. We’re the largest plaintiff’s employment law firm in the United States of America. I can be reached at [email protected]. All of our offices are available to provide legal guidance and to assess whether individuals have a legal claim.

My law firm does great work. Many people who work in our space, doing plaintiff’s work in the employment discrimination space, are doing very important work in this country at this point in time. There has been a change in the climate of our country in the last two years. I think we can all agree on that. One of the effects of that change in climate is it’s created a more unstable field in the work environment for many people of color.

Look inside the economic statistics. We see the rate of unemployment among African Americans, which was at a historically low level just five years ago. Now we see it creeping up. Now we see it rising as we go into 2026. And we are now seeing color become more relevant in the job market than ever. Again, we represent clients of every socioeconomic background, every race, all across the spectrum, but we are seeing a shifting of a tide. We’re seeing a shifting of a tide that is disadvantaging people of color and women of color.