LET’S CALL IT WHAT IT IS – RACISM PURE AND SIMPLE

In the earliest days of Trump Regime 1.0, MAGA—a racist organization par excellence—tried to explain away Trump’s embracing of white nationalist organizations with facile arguments  about “reverse racism”. Reverse racism is, if we’re honest, a made-up term that racists employ to argue that they are not racist. Their argument is that they “have nothing against black and brown people,” but are simply trying to protect themselves and their loved ones against “discrimination”, not that they are seeking to discriminate against minorities, and especially not against blacks in America.

I hate to be the one to break it to everyone, but “reverse racism” is not a thing, and the cat is out of the bag: Trump heads a racist regime, supported by a persistent core of racist voters and donors. Period. These are people who, no matter how damaging the Trump regime has been to their own interests, continue to lean into his authoritarianism because it is based on hating and fearing the same people they hate and fear. And hate and fear are their key motivators.

Now, before you start stamping your feet, ringing your hands and ripping your garments, let me make my case, with facts, not “feelings”. First, I will propose the following: The Trump regime, from the very start, and much more so in its second iteration, has systematically targeted African Americans, and has deliberately dismantled major Civil Rights-Era protections against racial discrimination and segregation. Full Stop.

With his policy-backed support for white Christian nationalists and other white supremacists—amply represented in the congressional majority, and in the majority of the Supreme Court—Trump has sought to turn back the clock, not just to the immediate pre-Civil Rights Era, but to long before. All the way to World War I and Woodrow Wilson, whose administration was, perhaps—before Trump—the most racist in modern history. 

Despite its progressive rhetoric, Wilson’s administration actively reversed decades of federal workforce integration by re-segregating federal offices, restrooms, and workplaces in Washington, DC. In the most notorious of cases during his administration, one black official was forced to work behind screens so that his white colleagues “wouldn’t have to look at him.” Other African American federal workers were forced to work inside cages so that they couldn’t mingle with the rest of the staff. Wilson’s administration suggested that white female staffers felt uneasy in the presence of black male staffers. Restrooms and water fountains were segregated as Men, Women and Colored, and separate lunchrooms were established for whites and blacks.

Just as Trump spoke in his first term of white nationalist neo-Nazis marching in a violent 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “very fine people,” Wilson had no compunction about notoriously screening the highly controversial, pro-Ku Klux Klan film The Birth of a Nation at the White House—an indication that his administration embraced the violent anti-black, anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish philosophy of that segregationist cult. Trump has talked openly about predominately black or brown nations as “shithole countries”, and has wondered aloud why the US can’t have “better quality” immigration from “places like Norway.”

"Very fine people..."

Granted, racism is the only thing Wilson and Trump have in common. Wilson was, otherwise, a reform-minded progressive Democrat, who, during his two terms as the twenty-eighth President of the United States, championed a “New Freedom” platform. His policies focused on progressive economic reforms like lowering tariffs, breaking up corporate monopolies, and establishing the Federal Reserve. Trump, instead, has used tariffs as a foreign policy bludgeon, championed the monopolies of his billionaire cronies, and done everything he could to undermine the independence of the Fed.

There is clear and compelling evidence that the Trump regime has intentionally and materially undermined years of hard-fought and harder-won advancement in dismantling systemic racial discrimination in the US. But although Trump himself and members of his Cabinet have arguably said some really stupid, infuriating and hurtful things about diversity, equity and inclusion, the regime’s anti-civil rights stance cannot be fully encompassed in a specific policy speech or even controversial remark. This is a case of actions speaking louder than words, since the regime’s discriminatory bent can be observed in a cumulative pattern of policy changes.

Measured by that standard, the Trump administration has engaged in the most significant rollback of the Civil Rights Era revolution since the nineteen-fifties.

My argument doesn’t require me to prove racial animus inside the minds of policymakers. I don’t presume to see into their minds and  observe the racism there—although, truth be told, it is there, and quite often seeps out in public like vile green pus. But all I need to do is point to how the regime has consistently and provenly weakened the legal, institutional, and administrative safeguards created during and after the great Civil Rights Era to combat discrimination, expand equal opportunity, and enforce constitutional rights. And Trump’s record demonstrates precisely that.

The Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s were never intended to simply outlaw explicit segregation. Congress—which actually functioned back then—also created an enforcement system. Among other things, these congressional actions included aggressive Department of Justice investigations, affirmative federal oversight, disparate-impact regulations, and strict voting-rights enforcement, fair-housing enforcement, and equal-employment enforcement.

It is clear that, across each of these areas, the Trump regime has reduced or eliminated enforcement, or at least attempted to eliminate it. Trump’s government has even rescinded some of the most basic of social norms. While racial discrimination remains illegal under federal law, Trump has weakened many of the tools for enforcing compliance. For instance, the Trump regime has revoked the Johnson Era Executive Order 11246 that prohibited federal contractors and subcontractors from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

Trump’s regime has also done away with the “Segregated Facilities Clause” that forbade federal contractors from maintaining “segregated facilities” such as waiting rooms, work areas and water fountains for whites and racial minorities. Indeed, under Trump, the General Services Administration (GSA) specifically directed federal agencies to drop this very explicit clause. 

Of even greater concern, Trump’s Department of (in)Justice has also actively worked with state officials in formerly Confederate states—most notably in Louisianna—to end decades-old “school desegregation consent decrees”. These were court-ordered agreements arising from litigation during the Civil Rights Era. They were aimed at forcing an end to racial discrimination in public schools. The Trump regime’s excuse for aiding and abetting the re-segregation of Southern schools is that the court-ordered agreements “imposed an unnecessary burden on local school systems.”

Trump’s Catch-22 argument for all of these basically unlawful and  discriminatory policies is that “the Constitution is color-blind” and that he is in no way discriminating. On the contrary, he is avoiding racial discrimination (the understood elliptical phrase here being “against whites”). Rather than expanding civil-rights protections, the Trump regime has consistently argued that many of these mechanisms constitute unlawful racial “preferences.” The practical result is that federal agencies investigate discrimination less aggressively than ever before under previous administrations.

One of the regime's defining domestic priorities in its 2.0 phase has been the elimination of initiatives that promote Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) throughout the federal government. In doing so, the regime has actively sought to make these once positive and progressive terms into dirty words to be eliminated from the official and popular lexicon. Instead of accepting the positive significance of these terms—who but a bigot could argue that diversity, equity and inclusion could be anything but affirmative values?—the regime argues that DEI, in and of itself, constitutes discrimination.

Truth be told, DEI programs emerged precisely because traditional anti-discrimination laws proved insufficient to overcome decades of deeply entrenched racial inequality. The great Civil Rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King once wrote, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.” Simple but clear in its concept, this dictum has been the basis for anti-discrimination rules and regulations throughout the more than half-century of the post-Civil Rights era. In short, making a sweeping law that says, “from now on blacks and whites are equal” clearly isn’t enough. Complimentary norms must be forcibly imposed to ensure that this erstwhile federal policy is applied in practical terms across the board.

The Trump regime has not only not done this, but has also actively assaulted DEI. Among other things, it has abolished numerous federal DEI-related offices, prohibited federal diversity training programs, threatened to suspend agreements with federal contractors that support DEI policies, and fostered investigations into universities and corporations that have maintained race-conscious programs despite the regime’s obsession with eliminating them. In effect, this has reversed decades of federal equal-opportunity programs first developed following the ground-breaking Civil Rights Act of 1964.

NAACP President Derrick Johnson has described attacks on diversity initiatives as, “An attempt to erase the history of discrimination while preserving its effects.”

One of the least appreciated achievements of the Civil Rights Era was recognition that discrimination does not always require explicit racist intent. This is truly significant and also patently applicable to the Trump regime. Many modern civil-rights laws prohibit practices that disproportionately disadvantage minorities even when ostensibly neutral. This doctrine is known as “disparate impact”, and it has been a gold standard for housing discrimination cases, employment discrimination, equal education, equal bank-lending, and policing for decades.

But Trump officials have repeatedly attempted to narrow or eliminate disparate-impact enforcement completely. This is important, because, in the absence of  disparate-impact standards, anyone bringing a civil rights suit must frequently prove intentional racism—which sets a significantly more challenging legal burden for the plaintiff. Many civil-rights scholars argue that such a change renders modern discrimination law toothless and  substantially less effective.

Perhaps the most visible and significant rollback—I mean, if we don’t count the fact that Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense, for example, has not only summarily removed from their posts a list of general officers, including the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for no reason other than the color of their skin, but has also demonstrated similar discrimination on the basis of gender by removing women from the upper ranks in the Armed Forces—has come in the suppression of black voting rights.

Rather than seeking restoration of Voting Rights Act protections, the regime has consistently supported stricter voting rules, designed to make it harder and harder for minorities to vote and to get a fair shake. Trump’s voter repression actions have included expansion of voter-ID requirements, active gerrymandering, reduced federal oversight at elections in areas where there is a high concentration of minority voters, opposition to expanded early voting, opposition to broader mail-in voting, reduction of polling places in areas of high minority concentration, and support for litigation that narrows federal voting protections. Civil-rights organizations argue that all of these measures disproportionately burden black voters because of long-standing socio-economic disparities.

It is easy to disingenuously argue that these consequences are not intentional. But whether they are or aren’t is neither here nor there, since the practical consequence is reduced minority electoral participation and clout.

The Trump regime’s other pet peeve has been “affirmative action”, and Trump has consistently argued against and sought to dismantle this and other race-conscious remedies. Here again Trump has gotten a hand from his hijacked Supreme Court whose decision has effectively ended race-conscious university admissions. The Court has thus upheld the Trump regime’s skewed and spurious argument of “colorblindness”.

Again, this is based on the false claim that the Trump government is seeking to avoid, rather than encourage discrimination. But, in practice, a so-called “colorblind” system operating atop centuries of unequal racial and ethnic treatment simply preserves historical inequalities. Former Justice Thurgood Marshall warned of exactly this outcome: “The position we seek to defend is not preferential treatment but equal opportunity.” The racist Trump regime self-servingly rejects that clear comprehension of cause and effect.

And then there is the question of housing. It’s worthwhile pointing out that Trump, best known as a real estate developer, has several times run afoul of federal non-discrimination laws in seeking to keep blacks out of his luxury living projects. So there is clearly racist self-interest involved in this case.

The Fair Housing Act was enacted following the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Again, this was federal legislation that went far beyond prohibiting overt discrimination. It also sought to dismantle implicit residential segregation.

The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, introduced during the Obama Era, required any local government receiving federal funds to both identify and address patterns of segregation. Trump has unilaterally rescinded the rule. The regime argues that zoning decisions belong to local communities, not to the federal government. But civil-rights advocates counter that removing affirmative obligations effectively guts one of the federal government's main tools for reducing racial segregation in housing.

In education, the Trump regime has not only dismantled that department of government entirely, but has also, mostly through its corrupt DOJ, opposed race-consciou
s admissions to colleges and universities, race-conscious scholarships, DEI programming and diversity-promoting offices, as well as race-based mentoring initiatives.

Trump has fundamentally reversed sixty years of federal action to ensure an equal playing field for minorities and particularly for African Americans. Increasingly under Trump, the focus of federal investigations into universities has ceased to be discrimination against black students, and instead is being placed on punishing institutions for even considering race in admissions or programming.

This is a direct reversal of the historical purpose of federal civil-rights enforcement. And it is based on another false white-supremacist supposition, the gist of which is that young people in inner-city black and Latino neighborhoods are already afforded exactly the same advantages as suburban whites. This is a lie on the face of it, and multiple government studies in the past have made it clear just how false it is. Without federal civil rights protection, minorities are condemned to languish. Remedying that is precisely what the social upheaval of the Civil Rights Era was all about. 

In racially-focused criminal justice action, the passage during Trump’s first term of the bipartisan First Step Act provided his government with the opportunity to point to successful justice reform on his watch. But since then, in practical terms, the regime’s rhetoric and policies have focused on more aggressive and far less accountable policing, the restructuring of ICE as a paramilitary that answers to Trump—not to the Constitution or to the taxpayers—vastly expanded prosecutorial powers, reduction or suspension of federal oversight on police departments in accordance with the Constitution and federal law, and the severe limiting of consent decrees, originally negotiated to prevent racially discriminatory practices by local police.   

  The Department of Justice has substantially reduced or eliminated the use of pattern-or-practice investigations into police departments accused of systemic racial or ethnic discrimination. This has substantially weakened accountability mechanisms developed after repeated findings of unconstitutional policing procedures in local police forces.

Clearly civil-rights progress depends not only on statutes passed into law, but also on the integrity of leadership. Presidents from John F. Kennedy through Joe Biden have generally framed racial equality as a priority national objective.

Trump, meanwhile, has instead consistently portrayed anti-racism initiatives, Diversity Equity and Inclusion, affirmative action, critical race theory, and diversity policies in general as threats to American society—read: white American society. That characterization represents a profoundly racist rhetorical and practical departure from decades of bipartisan presidential language and actions.

No matter how nefarious the racist actions Trump and his Cabinet have imposed, or how pernicious the effect of dismantling each Civil Rights Era conquest that he has ripped out by the roots, the overall pattern tends to be more significant than any individual policy. One way that MAGA tries to take the focus off of the blatantly racist bent of the regime is by defending each policy separately, in terms disingenuously designed to make it appear that the measures are more egalitarian, not less—a tactic into which the white supremacist base can easily lean. Once again, this is the “colorblind” argument that, in any reasonable mind, doesn’t fly any higher than a penguin.

But systematic change is rarely effected by means of a single law, decree or gesture. It takes place on the strength of consistently coordinated actions. Through his essentially racist actions, in his five-and-a-half years as president, and MAGA’S decade of white supremacist support, Trump has managed to effectively weaken civil-rights enforcement, narrow or eliminate anti-discrimination doctrine, reduce federal diversity oversight, dismantle DEI infrastructure, oppose and disband race-conscious remedies, curtail ethnic voting-rights protections, weaken fair-housing initiatives, and reduce federal police oversight, while bolstering an extra-constitutional paramilitary force that answers directly to him and that is, at its core, flagrantly racist. Viewed collectively, these actions represent the most sweeping retreat from the majority Civil Rights consensus in more than sixty years.

Detractors will try to tell you that the Trump regime opposes discrimination against all races equally. But this is basically a racist argument. It is based on the white supremacist “replacement theory”, which essentially posits that there is some sort of conspiracy on the left, through support for black communities and through liberal immigration from brown and black nations, to replace white Americans as the nation’s dominant ethnicity. This is the fever-dream conspiracy theory of an Anglo-centric segment of the population that believes intrinsically and religiously (whether they realize it or not) in the philosophy of iconic white supremacist scholar Madison Grant, whose theory of eugenics proposed that whites were placed on earth to rule and that all other races and ethnicities were inferior and should be dominated by white power. Whites were, Grant proposed, the master race.

Legend has it that when Adolf Hitler was arrested following his failed beer hall putsch in Munich, as he was being led away to prison, he carried a thick book under his arm. When somebody asked what it was, he reportedly held it up and said,  “die Bibel” (“The Bible”). That book that he was carrying to read in prison was The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History by American white supremacist Madison Grant—a work that fully encompassed Grant’s theory of eugenics and that posited that whites needed to re-embrace their “destiny” as the master race and as world rulers.

Truth be told, demographic changes are clearly trending toward a world in which whites will no longer be the predominant ethnicity in most places—including the United States. This is not some anti-white plot, but a fact of life in a world where, just in my own nearly eight decades of life, the world population has burgeoned out of control from two-and-a-half billion to more than eight billion. And as that enormous and exponentially growing population occupies all available space on earth, in spite of any and all political borders and attempts to stem the flow, the tendency will be toward ever more mixed and blended races and ethnicities, with anything like racial “purity” eventually being a thing of the past. And good riddance.

That said, this fact encompasses quite another problem: that of the population explosion, a concern that kept the most aware of my own generation up nights, and that led us to champion contraception and responsible abortion for women and vasectomies for young to middle-aged men, making having a family a choice, not an obligation. In the run-up to the nineties, in their song entitled The Miracle, Queen had an uplifting message for the world: “That time will come, one day you'll see / When we can all be friends.” Whether that message pans out, or whether Humankind continues to engage in xenophobia, racism, territorial isolationism, war and environmental destruction remains to be seen, and depends on future generations, since my own fast-fading demographic has become a lost cause. But one thing is certain. We as humans will either get out of this alive together, or we will perish as the only race there is: the human race.

The historic Civil Rights Movement did not simply outlaw segregation. It built an institutional architecture designed to prevent discrimination before it happened. The defining characteristic of the Trump regime, however, has been the systematic dismantling of that architecture. Whether viewed through the lens of voting rights, fair housing, education, employment, policing, or equal-opportunity enforcement, the direction of Trump’s regime has been remarkably consistent and intentionally racist.

Without a doubt, it is only logical to conclude that the Trump regime has formally undertaken, as an overarching policy, the most comprehensive rollback of Civil Rights-era protections in modern American history. And the practical effects of that rollback have fallen disproportionately on black and brown American communities.

In her dissent in the Supreme Court's anti-affirmative action decision (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 2023), Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that the Court was dismantling tools developed in the post-Civil Rights Era to specifically address persistent discrimination. “Ignoring race,” she wrote, “will not equalize a society that is racially unequal.”

In that same Supreme Court case, in which the hijacked conservative majority once again chose to undermine six-decade-old protections for minority rights, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson argued that constitutional colorblindness cannot erase the continuing effects of centuries of discrimination. More to the point, she wrote: “Deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”

And that is precisely the crux of the issue. The Trump regime’s so-called “equality-based” measures are a farse, that ostensibly pretend one thing while championing another. Whatever the letter of these policies might seek to reflect, their end-effect is perniciously racist, and designed to feed and nurture a cult of white supremacy that lies at the very foundation of the entire MAGA movement.