Your Circumstances Are Not Your Destiny

After humble beginnings, Devon Westhill credits his success to being born in America.

Q&A with Devon Westhill

Devon Westhill is currently the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights in the Trump Administration at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). As a biracial black man who was raised in Florida by his single white mother, Westhill describes his circumstances growing up as “hardscrabble.” After an enlistment in the Navy, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Florida. He sat down with TakeCharge editors to discuss his success, which he attributes to two things: an extraordinary mother and being born in America.

You have spoken openly about growing up in poverty. Tell me about your childhood.

We were a broken family, and we were poor. My father wasn’t around. He was incarcerated; he still is to this day, so my mother carried everything. My brother, my sister, my mother and I sometimes lived in housing projects. At one point, we didn’t have stable housing at all.

My mother eventually bought our first home through a Housing Assistance Program. I remember what that meant for a kid who, though the roughest times, had nothing to hold except love and my mother’s hand. That house wasn’t just four walls. It was proof that striving produced results and that you can start from almost nothing and build something real. She taught me that without ever actually saying it. She lived it. We had it hard in some respects. I think the toughest thing was not having a father, but we had a mother who was extraordinary.

When you raise children generation after generation without fathers, most of the boys and girls wind up with predictable results. My brother and sister chose well-trodden paths for people from those situations. My brother ended up following the footsteps of our father and wound up in prison. My sister became a teen mom. They are both doing well now, but unfortunately, they chose the wrong direction early on.

I’m the only one of my siblings who graduated high school. After high school, I got an apartment with roommates, worked at a gas station, and took classes at the local community college.

Because I’d done well in my high school, I had scholarship money to go to college. But I screwed it up. I dropped all my classes and lost my scholarships, grants and all eligibility for student financial aid. At that point, I had to decide what to do with my life. Because I had been in Junior ROTC in high school, I decided to go the military route. I’d see the world, and life would be grand. So, I joined the Navy.

You have credited your mother’s dedication as one of the key elements that shaped the course of your life. How did her influence impact your life?

My mother was extraordinary in many ways. She wasn’t an amazing sage who told me everything I needed to know to be successful. She was a fantastic role model for how to produce success in your life. She taught me how to build something real without ever sitting me down and saying it. One of the most important things when it comes to raising children besides tenacity is love, which she had in spades. Notwithstanding her difficult circumstances, she taught me your circumstances are not your destiny. She showed me that you need to find a standard and hold yourself to it even when no one’s watching. She was intentional about modeling that principle in real life.

She had no guarantee that what she was working towards was going to materialize. She didn’t let that stop her. She realized she had some control over her life. She had agency over creating the present and the future for herself and her kids. I’m certain at times she thought she’d never get there by herself with three kids, having to work two or three fast food restaurants jobs at a time.

She didn’t let defeatism stop her. She didn’t necessarily need to see the light at the end of the tunnel every day, but she chugged along, recognizing that—in this country— there’s a chance. The ability to see past what oftentimes looked like a black hole is one of the amazing things she showed us as kids.

The trajectory for kids who grow up in circumstances like yours is bleak. In addition to your mother’s love, describe pivotal moments in your life.

The things I had an interest in—my talents and my aptitude— didn’t carry over well to street life. I liked books. I liked to learn. Looking back, one of the turning points for me was joining the Navy. It changed my life. I was only in for a short time, but it had a huge impact on me. It provided structure and standards. There were men who held me accountable because they believed I could meet a high bar. That was the expectation in the Navy. Everyone had a high bar, and your job was to clear it. I wasn’t used to those types of standards, certainly not men holding me accountable. In the communities I grew up in, there were no men at all, not in my house, not in my neighborhood. The Navy was a turning point for me because it helped me to think beyond the small world I’d come from. It helped me realize that there’s much more to life.

After I left the Navy, I went straight to college and stayed there until the day I graduated with my law degree.

I also had teachers who took an interest in me in grade school. They stepped in and helped keep me on the straight and narrow when I could have gotten off track and into things that would have been problematic for me. They recognized I had some intellectual aptitude. Back then I was in what they called gifted or advanced placement classes, but I didn’t take school seriously.

When I was in high school, I met a man who volunteered for the Junior ROTC program at my school. He was a male role model for me. He had been in the service during the Vietnam War. He built a house and asked me to help him. I learned how to build a house from scratch—clearing the land, laying the founding, and so forth. That experience did something for me just like the Navy did. It took me out of what was an otherwise small world to see that there was much more available to me. He took the time and brought me into his world. In lunchtime conversations, he was open about some of his service in the military in Vietnam, which really impacted me.

What would you say to a young black boy today who’s growing up with a single mom living in the projects?

I’d like to talk to a young me. I’d say that your circumstances are not your destiny. Hold yourself to a high standard. Recognize that you have an ability to achieve whatever you want to achieve. In the absence of a father, you should be intentional about finding a role model. There are amazing people around you, coaches, teachers. Don’t let the absence of your father become the story you tell yourself about what you deserve. That false narrative is poison.

The enemy of fatherless young men is often not poverty, although that’s a big problem. It’s the falsehood that effort is pointless because the deck is so stacked against you. Do away with that. There are people in this country who are serious about restoring opportunity and recognizing that the foundation of strong communities is strong families.

The narrative that is pumped into the communities like the one that I grew up in—poor black communities of the South— is that white men are holding you down. You cannot rise above it. It becomes an indoctrination. Unfortunately, sometimes it comes from leaders in the community and the downstream consequences in education and economics, health, and public safety are catastrophic and entirely predictable. You can rise above it. I’ve got a tiny microcosm, anecdotal life story that proves it.

What’s the motivation in advancing the “victimhood” narrative in poor communities?

The most charitable view is that people really believe it. People believe there are roadblocks at every turn because you’re of a particular race or ethnicity, and those roadblocks are erected by bad actors. Even if you make it out, you’re so steeped in the fact that you overcame stacked odds at every turn that you want to make sure others are aware that they must gird themselves for what’s to come.

On the less charitable side, people can become fabulously wealthy and powerful by serving up grievance. You can build a heck of a coalition of people who are downtrodden if you tell them what their problem is, who to go after, and how you can help them attack that problem. Shelby Steele coined the term “grievance elite.” There are elite actors in society who have the biggest bull horns and live in the biggest houses who promote this narrative that you are a victim, and you always will be because somebody’s holding you down. They’re fabulously wealthy and powerful because of the grievance industry they’ve created.

As Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights for the USDA, what do you actually oppose when it comes to DEI?

Talking generally about DEI is a dangerous exercise. On the one side, you’ve got things that are considered DEI that have been around for a long time- reasonable accommodations for employees with disabilities, for example. Those accommodations are not only good; they are required lawfully. It’s the far end that I’m opposed to when it comes to DEI initiatives. The vast middle has to do with things that are good for a workplace or for college or university campuses. The far end of the spectrum, which is what I oppose categorically, is flat out discriminatory on protected characteristics like race or ethnicity.

When it comes to race discrimination- -which is what we see with some DEI initiatives- we both cannot do under the law but also, besides the legal requirement, we just should not do them. We have a history in this country of race discrimination and oppression, things we should be moving away from, not moving closer toward. And one of my major problems with DEI at the worst end of the spectrum is that it is taking us in the wrong direction-in my view, toward more discrimination, not less.

A lot of DEI frameworks reduce people to racial categories or “oppressed versus oppressor.” It drives this victimhood narrative, which is not necessarily illegal, but is problematic, particularly for those kids who have been pumped full of this message their whole lives. Their communities have accepted this narrative that we’re never going to get anywhere because we’re oppressed. That is problematic, even if it doesn’t rise to the level of being unlawful. I push back on that quite vigorously. They at the highest levels prioritize that two-parent households as the absolute best model for bringing up children.

How do you take a culture that has gone so far in the wrong direction and turn it around?

We went from nearly 80% two parent households to nearly 80% fatherless homes in black communities in roughly two generations. We’ve had no national initiative to reverse it, slow it down, or stop it. There are downstream consequences from education to economics to health and public safety. We don’t want to put our finger on what the actual problem is at high levels because we’re afraid to hurt people’s feelings. The consequences have been catastrophic, and entirely predictable. With the right narrative at the highest levels this message will percolate to the communities where leaders can act on them.

We must have a national initiative to pinpoint directly what the problem is. We must say it as plainly as TakeCharge does: the single greatest driver of hardship in black communities is not racism; it’s family collapse. We must get the right players together and be prepared to make the case.

What would you like to see in happen in black America?

You can’t get the outcomes you want without the process. I’d love for black, and poor, American-communities to recognize that getting to success is by and large the same for you as it is for Americans of any background. That’s the beauty of America. It really is possible for you through education, family, stability, faith, and hard work. Look at most successful black people as a model. Look at their background. Recognize that almost invariably, they did the exact same things—graduate high school, get a job, get married then have children. It’s the same for any American of any background to succeed. It’s available to you.

I know that answer frustrates people who want me to lead with talking about the obstacles and grievances, but I’m a civil rights attorney. I don’t dismiss the failures or that our systems need to be better in many ways, but I’ve spent my career confronting real discrimination. I’ve seen what happens when a community organizes around grievance versus when a community organizes around aspiration. Aspiration almost always wins. Grievance wins for some of the elite. The communities that are growing are not waiting for someone outside the community or in Washington to fix their problems for them. They’re the ones who decide that the policy environment matters, but their children’s future is their responsibility.

It’s one of the reasons I like the TakeCharge mission. It speaks to the heart of the issue by saying the promise of America is available to everyone, regardless of race or social station. That’s not a platitude. It’s true. It’s one many people have lived. But you must make sure the defeatist mindset that is sometimes reinforced within certain communities is rejected. You recognize that you have an ability to affect your future. Even if you don’t see it, you know it’s possible to achieve it.

How did your experience motivate you to be intentionally involved with your family to break the cycle?

Growing up without a father does something to you that you carry for a long time—maybe your whole life. You notice the absence at the moments that matter most: in the stands at a game, at a graduation, at the dinner table. But I never let that define me or my worth. I let it clarify what I owed my own children and their incalculable value to me.

I knew long ago that once I became a husband and then a father, I would be present. Both physically in our home and engaged as a core member of the family. My children never have to wonder whether papa thinks they matter. That’s the floor. The ceiling is being someone they can come to with anything, someone they see showing up for their mother, someone who models what a man is supposed to look like when he’s doing the job well. My own father never had the chance to model that for me. I don’t hate him for it. In fact, my experience made me determined to ensure my children will never need to look for that support anywhere else.

Marriage is not a minor detail in the formula for raising good kids. It is the foundation upon which everything else is built. It comes first, then comes the baby in the baby carriage. And hopefully, marriage is still there all the way to the end.