Dear Liberal White Neighbor on Nextdoor - You Invited the Anti-Woke War. Now It’s Here to Stay

You Invited the Anti-Woke War—Now It’s Here to Stay

By Nataki Garrett

Dear Liberal White Neighbor on Nextdoor,

I’m tired as hell. I lived in a town filled with you and your Black Lives Matter signs in every window and your MLK day celebrations yearly and your commissions on anti-racism and your memorials to those you allowed to be murdered on your liberal watch.

This is what you invited when you allowed your friends to share their “real” thoughts on your Nextdoor thread:

“There are already laws in place against discrimination on the basis of race, religion, gender, etc. No one should be asking or taking into consideration the sexual orientation of a potential employee. What would you think if an employer wrote, ‘White, straight men are STRONGLY encouraged to apply,’ and how many people would rightly lose their minds over such a statement?”

This is not a quote from a right-wing think tank. It was not spoke from the mouth of the “Beach Blonde Bad Build Butch Body” in congress. It is not a comment from a Fox News segment. This is a direct quote from one of my neighbors on Nextdoor, the hyper-local social media app where community members share everything from missing pets to lawn care tips, their grievances about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and their open disdain for the first black woman to run OSF. The woman who started the thread, Angela Workman, would later write that she had to block some people because she didn’t expect it to get that bad. Apparently, when you flirt with racism, you get racists.

To be honest my beef isn’t with her. In a strange way, she no longer matters. What does matter is what I like to call “the scale of racism” and how liberal whites flirt with that scale. This white woman with her black husband and mixed-race children, learned the hard way, how her own implicit bias racism can be weaponized by those who are overtly and openly racist. She started the thread to complain about me and what she deemed my blindness to the community that surrounded the theater I ran in Ashland Oregon. I couldn’t care less about Angela Workman who regularly used her brown family in her posts to shield her racism. I care about her dedication to liberal whiteness though which she refuses to acknowledge how she benefits from white supremacy. I also care about the door she opened for others spew their racism.

Ashland, Oregon a community grew around OSF was formerly a Podunk town. It became what it is after the early Silicon Valley nouveau-riche decided to use their IBM money to remake Ashland into the quaint sleepy façade of something out of a Hallmark Channel movie. It may have been a town where not too long ago the Klan regularly marched in the annual 4^th of July parade. It remains a town where actors of color are routinely harassed by local whites, police and a group of unhoused the locals affectionally call “the Travelers”. In 2019, A few weeks into my tenure a group of “Travelers” followed me home and woke me up at 5am singing “Dixie songs” at my above window. Even Workman’s own husband was harassed while he was walking home after performing at OSF when a white man in a pickup truck slowed down and turned on his cabin light to reveal that he had a shot gun.

Ashland is now a very wealthy enclave where a large percentage of the 20K residents have their second and third homes and where no minimum wage job worker can afford to rent housing in town or to eat at any of the restaurants. It is the town where Bay Area whites retire and move to get away from people like me. And it was my home for 4 years that included the pandemic which led to the shuttering of the theatre for over a year and the Almeda fire in which 2500 dwellings burned to the ground.

In 2020, while others learned to crochet or to bake sourdough bread during the pandemic I laid off 483 people, gave back millions of dollars in ticket refunds and worked my ass off to save the 85-year-old Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I sacrificed my maternity leave and the witnessing the first year and a half of my daughter’s life; I sat for hours in front of my zoom screen working to to save OSF; I founded an advocacy coalition to help the non-profit theatres across the country gain access to the $15 billion SVOG funding after my donors all but froze me out by holding their donations until they understood the “direction of the theatre” – during a pandemic that caused us to shutter for the first time since WWII. I raised $19million through SVOG, CARES ACT funding, Foundational support and a tiny army of donors – all without a development team.

It was recently shared with me that someone close to the organization said my accomplishments didn’t amount to much because OSF’s development office was used to raising almost as much per year. If you’re reading this please hear me loud and clear when I say GO FUCK YOURSELF! And I pity you, because if you have to raise yourself by discounting me, then we both know exactly where you are right now – I’d wish you luck but it would be of no use to you with your knees on the ground and your nose kissing the ass end of a mule. You’ll need more than luck in your position. But I digress…

Onwards!

The current wave of anti-DEI rhetoric and policy rollbacks did not start with this administration. The attacks on DEI in the workplace, in leadership, and in labor structures have been building for years, decades.

Long before the current administration took office, the culture sector—nonprofit arts organizations, the film industry and the academic sector—was the testing ground for these strategies. The backlash against DEI in arts institutions, Hollywood, theaters, universities and museums has provided the playbook for what we are seeing now on a national scale.

I know this firsthand.

I have lived through the backlash—not as an abstract political debate, but as an intensely personal and public campaign against my leadership. It played out in whisper networks among donors, in board decisions, and in openly racist discussions in my own neighborhood. On Nextdoor, people I lived alongside engaged in a full-scale cultural war against me.

This played out through the deliberate reframing of equity work as an “agenda,” the gaslighting of my lived experience, and the suggestion that even trying to increase the visibility of global majority, and younger audiences was somehow a threat to the ‘original heritage’ of the institution I was leading.

When I continued to follow the mandate I inherited from my predecessors—mandates originally designed to expand access and deepen representation through the once famed “Audience Manifesto” which brought OSF into national recognition for its supposed dedication to equity work, the longtime audiences and community members decided that there had already been “enough” diversity.

The very people who had supported my predecessors’ DEI work were now eager to position my leadership as divisive, to insist that my vision was different from the one that had come before me, and to erase the reality that change had already been in motion long before I arrived.

“All her interviews have the same themes expressing this implicit problem with white theatergoers. This is over-sensitivity and hyper-reactivity. She is either looking for an issue so she can apply her political agenda or, more likely, she reads racism into the smallest discomfort she feels around white theatergoers. Basically, she makes mountains out of molehills.”

— Another Nextdoor comment from my neighbors.

This is how racism disguises itself as neutrality. The people who posted about me weren’t using racial slurs, but they were engaging in an age-old tactic: accusing a Black leader of seeing race everywhere to dismiss legitimate concerns about systemic exclusion.

The coded language used to attack me was eerily similar to the language now being used on a national scale to dismantle DEI:

• That DEI initiatives are “alienating” audiences and causing financial instability.

• That prioritizing inclusion is the reason for declining revenue, not broader economic realities or structural failures.

• That naming systemic racism is an unfair attack on white people.

• That Black leadership—no matter how qualified—is inherently political and therefore controversial.

• That the existence of BIPOC leadership and audiences is an erasure of white tradition, rather than an expansion of it.

A 2023 Americans for the Arts study found that 68% of nonprofit arts organizations reported facing backlash for DEI initiatives, with many losing donors who claimed they were focusing “too much” on diversity.

One of the most effective strategies used against DEI in the arts—and now in government—is gaslighting. It is the refusal to acknowledge the reality of racialized experiences, the rejection of structural inequalities as “exaggeration,” and the insistence that things were already fair, inclusive, and welcoming before DEI was introduced.

In my case, people questioned my personal safety concerns in a town that had become openly hostile to my presence. They dismissed my experiences as paranoia, even though I had been threatened. They insisted that the arts institution I led had always been diverse and that my leadership was unnecessarily focused on race, ignoring decades of documented disparities in access, employment, and audience demographics.

This is the same tactic being used now to gut federal DEI programs. By banning words like bias, discrimination, oppression, and racial justice, the government is gaslighting marginalized communities on a national scale. It is saying that if we cannot name systemic barriers, then those barriers must not exist. It is a way of disappearing the work of activists, labor leaders, and civil rights advocates who fought for these words to have power in the first place.

My husband likes to tell a story about being in a local grocery store in Ashland and being recognized by a student who was attending Southern Oregon University in their theater program. The student told my husband that he had wanted to audition for OSF but couldn’t. When my husband asked why he said, “Oh yeah… well… because … you know… EDI”. My husband stood looking at him perplexed, “What do you mean, EDI”. “Well, you know… there are no roles for me because of… well… you know…EDI”. When my husband first told me the story I remember saying out loud “Did he say EDI like it was a disease, really”? “Yup, pretty much” my husband said, “like OSF caught EDI and now he’s forbidden to audition”.

His belief that DEI policies prevent him from auditioning is not only false but ignores the reality that professional actors nationwide go through multiple auditions before landing a role ( my husband wasn’t allowed to audition for OSF because we were concerned we would be seen a nepotistic. The notion that this young white man would have been cast if not for DEI is both misguided and revealing. What he’s actually expressing is his sense of entitlement. The assumption that a role was inherently his, and that DEI initiatives somehow robbed him of an opportunity that was never guaranteed in the first place. But entitlement is just the surface; beneath it lies a deeper resistance to a more inclusive industry that no longer centers his expectation of automatic access.

OSF’s Commitment to DEI and the Backlash That Followed

And to be clear, every OSF job description made it explicitly clear that equity, inclusion, and antiracism weren’t just buzzwords—OSF was committed building a workplace ecosystem where diverse voices, identities, and artistic expressions weren’t just welcomed, they were centered.

And yet, the mere existence of these goals—the very thing that should have been a baseline standard in any modern institution—became a target. For those who felt threatened by equity, OSF’s job descriptions weren’t just policies; they were ammunition in their campaign against DEI.

One of the most chilling aspects of the backlash against DEI in Ashland is how some of my neighbors actively sought legal action to dismantle these efforts.

“I reported that statement to America First Legal. I added a donation to further get their attention. I may just send it to the EEOC also.”

This quote from Nextdoor wasn’t just an isolated grievance—it was a calculated move by a neighbor determined to shut down diversity initiatives. They turned to America First Legal, a right-wing legal group dedicated to filing lawsuits against DEI programs and affirmative action, and even donated money to ensure OSF’s hiring statement was challenged.

This is a strategy of the anti-DEI movement: leveraging civil rights laws—originally designed to protect minoritized communities—to make diversity efforts legally impossible. By weaponizing the legal system, these individuals aim not only to eliminate DEI policies in hiring, programming, and leadership but to erase equity work entirely from institutional structures.

Their coordinated attack extends beyond Ashland. In the same Nextdoor thread:

• One poster referenced a national grant insider who claimed that “every theater is having these same issues,” implying a widespread effort to push back against diversity mandates.

• Another dismissed an artistic director’s resignation over racism in a major East Coast theater, reducing the issue to, “That city has a massive Black population, so go figure.”

• A third cited John McWhorter’s Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America as justification for dismantling DEI, misinterpreting his critiques of anti-racism culture as an argument against diversity initiatives altogether.

While McWhorter challenges what he sees as the dogma of modern racial discourse, he does not argue that systemic racism doesn’t exist or that DEI itself is inherently harmful. Yet, this person weaponized his book to claim that inclusion efforts were unnecessary, using McWhorter’s identity as a Black scholar to shield themselves from accusations of bias. This is a common deflection tactic—cherry-picking one dissenting Black voice to invalidate the broader systemic realities of exclusion while refusing to acknowledge their own implicit biases.

…And for the record I dont agree with McWhorter but I have the feeling he and I have experienced similar professional violence, veiled in the cloak of DEI. But I’ll reserve that story for another day.

What happened in Ashland was not random. It was part of a larger, well-funded effort to delegitimize, dismantle, and criminalize DEI work across industries. OSF’s inclusion policies—like those found in the job descriptions, became targets in a national movement designed to block workplace equity. What started in small-town whisper networks has evolved into a full-scale legal and ideological assault against diversity itself.

And people were watching.

“It would be interesting to know how many views this thread has now.” Wrote yet another poster to the Nextdoor thread.

Angela Workman, the original author of the thread, responded:

“The app stops counting at the two-week mark, unfortunately. But last I looked it was over 6,000 views. (Which probably includes scrolled by, but I don’t know, since they don’t break it down.) I’m aware that a lot of people are reading though. The festival might be amazed (and maybe alarmed) at how many people privately reach out to express dismay over what’s been lost, and so little—if anything, which I really doubt—gained.”

This was not just a small-town discussion. This was a highly visible, widely read, and deeply engaged conversation that reflected a national trend. The voices attacking DEI were not isolated—they were organized, coordinated, and reaching an audience far beyond Ashland.

And in essence they voted for all of the policies they are now complaining about…the firing of the federal workforce, the Muskbros and Maggot Narcissists…the stock market losses… They voted for this because they mistakenly believed that it would only continue to affect everyone else… Not them. They believed there was a peepee side of the pool.

But again I digress…

At the heart of this backlash is a battle over labor and power. DEI initiatives have always been dedicated to creating greater access to leadership, ensuring fair hiring practices, and dismantling exclusionary power structures. The same people who have fought against DEI in the arts are the ones fighting against DEI in government, education, and corporate spaces.

The idea that workplace protections for BIPOC workers, LGBTQ+ employees, disabled people, and other marginalized communities are unnecessary or harmful is a way of reinforcing the existing labor hierarchy. If workers cannot talk about implicit bias, they cannot challenge hiring discrimination. If employees cannot name health disparities, they cannot demand equitable healthcare benefits. If organizations do not have to commit to equity, then leadership can remain overwhelmingly white, male, and wealthy without consequence.

The War on Words Is a War on Labor

If culture sector was the testing ground, The whole country is the battlefield.

Last week, The New York Times published a comprehensive list of terms banned by the orange POTUS, including “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” “gender,” “transgender,” “pregnant person,” “LGBT,” “non-binary,” and “assigned male at birth.” According to The Washington Post, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was directed to remove these terms from internal documents, leading to the suppression of critical public health research. Similarly, The Guardian reported that the National Park Service erased references to transgender individuals from the NY based Stonewall National Monument’s website, effectively rewriting LGBTQ+ history. These sweeping restrictions are part of a broader effort to control language and, by extension, suppress discussions on systemic discrimination—a move that echo past authoritarian strategies of narrative control.

The war on DEI is a war on labor, and the war on words is part of that larger battle.

When the government bans words like equity, bias, oppression, and health disparities, it is not just engaging in a culture war—it is engaging in a coordinated effort to strip workers of their ability to name, address, and fight against systemic discrimination.

• If equity is erased, then employers no longer have to commit to fair wages, equal opportunities, or inclusive hiring practices.

• If we cannot use the word bias, we cannot identify hiring discrimination.

• If health disparities no longer exist as a term, then workers with disabilities and chronic illnesses lose the language to demand accommodations.

These bans are not symbolic; they have real-world consequences, shaping who receives medical care, who gets counted in data, and whose existence is recognized in government policies. This is not just a war on words—it is a coordinated effort to redefine reality itself by eliminating the language necessary to fight for justice and equity.

A 2024 Economic Policy Institute report showed that states with anti-DEI laws are also the least likely to support union protections and worker rights, revealing a deep connection between the DEI backlash and anti-labor efforts.

The backlash against DEI has moved beyond simple denial and into a more insidious phase—rewriting reality in real-time. This is the next level of gaslighting: not just dismissing lived experiences, but actively erasing the words and frameworks that allow us to name injustice in the first place.

Now they are no longer focused on telling minoritized communities that racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism are “not that bad” or “not real.” Now, it’s about eliminating the very language that makes discrimination visible. If you can’t say “equity,” you can’t demand it. If you can’t say “transgender,” then trans people cease to exist in the policy realm. If you can’t say “bias,” then hiring discrimination becomes an individual grievance rather than a systemic issue.

This next level of gaslighting isn’t just about silencing dissent—it’s about reshaping the entire landscape so that minoritized people can’t even name what’s happening to them. It forces individuals into a reality where they are not only being denied opportunities but are also being told that the structures preventing them from thriving do not even exist.

This strategy is effective because it further shifts the burden onto the people most affected. Instead of confronting systemic issues, those fighting for justice are forced to constantly re-explain, re-prove, and reframe their experiences, all while their language and frameworks are being systematically dismantled.

The final stage of gaslighting is not just denying the truth—it is erasing the ability to speak it at all.

The forces that have been attacking DEI are not just attacking representation; they are attacking workplace protections, pay transparency, and collective bargaining. They are attacking the very idea that workers—especially Black, Brown, Indigenous, disabled, LGBTQ+, and other historically excluded workers—should and will continue to have the power to demand better.

This is why my work is not just focused leadership—it is about systems change. We can no longer rely on infiltrating their systems and retooling them to be more accessible and equitable, as was the case during the early days of the Civil Rights Era. Now we must dismantle the “master’s tools” as referenced by Audra Lourde. Now we must ensure that new leaders are not just surviving under hostile conditions but actively building new infrastructures that cannot be dismantled by the whims of the white elite. It is about shifting the power away from the hands of those who profit from keeping the workforce divided.

Heres the big secret: THIS HAS BEEN HAPPENING FOR YEARS. The cultural sector has been a battleground where the forces resisting DEI strategies have tested their messaging and tactics. According to a 2022 American Alliance of Museums survey, 43% of museum employees of color said they had experienced discrimination at work, and nearly half of them considered leaving the field due to racial hostility. The same study found that arts institutions that made major DEI investments post-2020 saw their funding models threatened, with donors pulling out or shifting priorities away from equity.

The culture sector was the testing ground for this backlash, but it does not have to be where it ends. We have a choice. We can accept this regression, or we can build something better.

This will not be easy. The coordinated attack on DEI is not just ideological—it is strategic. The state-level bans on DEI funding, the reduction of DEI roles, and the language censorship around equity and justice are all designed to make it harder for leaders to advocate for systemic change.

In states like Florida and Texas, where some of the most aggressive anti-DEI laws have been passed, universities and nonprofit institutions have already begun eliminating diversity-related positions (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2024). According to a 2024 study by the American Association of University Professors, one in five DEI professionals in higher education have lost their jobs in states with these policies. The same report found that in arts organizations, philanthropic funding for racial equity work has declined by 16% since 2021.

This is why leaders need coaches. They need improved leadership development frameworks, because leadership strategies must evolve. The traditional models of leadership, fundraising, and organizational strategy were built to maintain existing systems, not to dismantle and rebuild them.

My vision for leadership is rooted in systems change. Leadership that refuses to be silenced, that understands that words hold power, and that recognizes that fighting for a just workplace is the same as fighting for a just world.

To counter the rollback, we need leaders who:

• Understand power—who recognize how systems of exclusion operate and actively work to dismantle them.

• Center labor and worker rights—who see that the fight for economic justice is inseparable from the fight for racial and gender justice.

• Redefine leadership—who refuse to conform to outdated models of success that prioritize the comfort of white-dominated donor bases over the reality of a changing world.

• Invest in collective care—who recognize that resistance is unsustainable without well-being and that radical honesty, mentorship, and sustainability must be built into leadership models. And that leaders need more than themselves. The need the collective for motivation, support and drive.

This is not just a moment of backlash—it is a moment of transition. The way forward is not just about preserving DEI—it is about moving beyond it toward something even stronger.

It is about building a new paradigm of leadership that is not beholden to outdated power structures, that embraces intersectionality, and that centers collective success over individual gatekeeping.

A Call to Action: Funders, Philanthropy, and the Urgency of Now

The philanthropic community needs to act with urgency.

The anti-DEI movement is well-funded, well-coordinated, and strategically dismantling decades of progress—and it is doing so without significant resistance from major funders who once championed diversity in the arts.

If funders are serious about inclusion, they must:

• Increase unrestricted funding for organizations led by women of color and gender-expansive leaders.

• Stop retreating at the first sign of backlash. The cultural sector needs long-term investment in leadership that is building new systems.

• Fund research that proves how invaluable the arts are to the health and well-being of this country. There is already evidence that federally funded health centers are using social prescribing methods to improve mental and physical health through the arts—but we need more funding to expand and sustain these models.

• Reject neutrality—there is no neutral ground in this fight. To sit back and wait is to allow the dismantling of hard-won gains in the arts, labor, and leadership spaces.

• Support leadership development and coaching for visionary leaders—both those just entering the into leadership and those who have sustained longer careers.

Honestly, I do believe that my former neighbors on Nextdoor believed they were protecting something. However, what they were really doing was fighting to preserve an old paradigm, one that had already begun to shift.

and for the rest of us please remember:

The backlash is strong, but history tells us that transformation is stronger.

The next paradigm of leadership will be defined by whether we choose to fight back—or whether we build something better.

Sincerely,

Your Neighbors!