“Justice, Like Beauty, is in the Eye of the Beholder”*: A Critical Historical Reimagining of Justice Possibilities in an Anti-DEI Higher Education Landscape

This paper engages Critical Race Theory and composite counter-storytelling to analyze the racialized implications of the University of North Carolina (UNC) system's 2024 policy resolution targeting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). The protagonist in our story, Rachel Justice, rooted in fugitive pedagogy, is faced with the dilemma of participating in the implementation of this UNC DEI ban. We develop and apply a fugitive critical policy analysis to identify and present five interrelated dynamics enacted by the policy and lived by racially minoritized individuals: regressive legalism, institutional gaslighting; epistemic exile; contradictory advocacy; and narrative shelter-making. These dynamics illuminate the afterlives of anti-DEI policy in institutional structures and in the voices and imaginaries of those it seeks to silence. Through encounters with spirit guides embodying epistemic exile across institutional boundaries, we illuminate interpretive reimagination: a justice-driven alternative to regressive legalism that navigates legal ambiguity with radical creativity. In doing so, this paper refuses erasure, affirms memory, and demands more than survival in an era of white institutional reconstruction.