Resistance to policies aimed at reducing racial inequities in employment, particularly among demographic majority group members, represents a significant barrier to addressing racism in the workplace. Americans are divided on how much progress has been made toward racial equity since the Civil Rights Era and what should be done to further it. These divides often fall along racial lines, such that White Americans overestimate the amount of racial progress achieved in recent decades, relative to both reality and the perceptions of Black Americans. The current work investigates how beliefs that racial inequities in employment are primarily a problem of the distant, rather than more recent, past undermine majority group members’ support for workplace DEI policies. Bridging insights from construal-level theory and social identity theory, White Americans may be especially likely to distance themselves from past moments of racial reckoning—specifically, the Civil Rights Movement—because these events highlight intergroup transgressions committed by in-group members. Results from two studies (an online survey and an experiment) suggest that White Americans subjectively perceive the Civil Rights Movement as farther in the past than Black Americans. Further, among White respondents, greater temporal distance from the Civil Rights Movement indirectly affects support for diversity policies by facilitating overly optimistic perceptions of how much racial progress has been achieved since the Civil Rights Movement. The findings advance research on the cognitive underpinnings of majority group members’ attitudes toward diversity policies by highlighting the critical role of subjective temporality in racial attitudes. Together, these studies offer a novel lens for understanding majority group resistance to organizational diversity policy.