Rolling Back the Clock on Racial Justice
Intro
The ACLU's Overall Response
Specific Responses
Conclusion
Download PDF
INTRO
When Donald Trump’s administration left office in 2020, two-thirds of surveyed Americans agreed that Trump had increased racial tensions in the United States. The backdrop for that widespread sentiment was the Trump administration’s sustained assault on political, civic, and legal efforts to promote racial justice; Trump’s consistent use of inflammatory racist rhetoric; and his transparent pursuit of a white supremacist agenda rooted in racial grievance.
When Donald Trump’s administration left office in 2020, two-thirds of surveyed Americans agreed that Trump had increased racial tensions in the United States. The backdrop for that widespread sentiment was the Trump administration’s sustained assault on political, civic, and legal efforts to promote racial justice; Trump’s consistent use of inflammatory racist rhetoric; and his transparent pursuit of a white supremacist agenda rooted in racial grievance.
Trump’s Attacks on DEI Reveal Administration's Agenda for Second Term
The 2024 Trump campaign’s “anti-white racism” rhetoric threatens to unravel decades of progress on racial equality and civil rights. The ACLU outlines
Source: American Civil Liberties Union
Fulfilling promises made during the 2016 presidential campaign, the Trump administration engaged in a wholesale attempt to roll back the clock on racial justice by dismantling efforts to address systemic racism and promote a more equitable and just society. Trump’s legacy on these issues is encapsulated by the “1776 Report,” published by the White House in the administration’s waning days. The report advanced a dystopian vision that demonized attempts at achieving racial equality. Designed to “restore patriotic education in schools,” the “1776 Report” compared progressivism to fascism, claimed that the civil rights movement embraced ideas similar to those held by defenders of slavery, and sought to downplay the legacy of racism in U.S. history. Historians uniformly condemned the report, pointing out that it was littered with factual inaccuracies and partisanship, and lacking serious scholarship.
But the “1776 Report” was not simply a far-right musing; it captured the political and legal agenda the Trump administration pursued for four years. In that time, the administration ordered federal agencies to cease all trainings on systemic racism and unconscious racial bias and, by executive order, banned the U.S. Armed Forces, federal agencies, federal contractors, and recipients of federal grants from providing employees with trainings related to race and gender discrimination. As described in further detail below, the administration also abandoned enforcement of civil rights laws on behalf of historically marginalized groups, and marshaled federal power to ramp up right-wing attacks on equal opportunity initiatives led by both local and state governments as well as the private sector.
The 2024 Trump campaign’s “anti-white racism” rhetoric threatens to unravel decades of progress on racial equality and civil rights. The ACLU outlines
Source: American Civil Liberties Union
Fulfilling promises made during the 2016 presidential campaign, the Trump administration engaged in a wholesale attempt to roll back the clock on racial justice by dismantling efforts to address systemic racism and promote a more equitable and just society. Trump’s legacy on these issues is encapsulated by the “1776 Report,” published by the White House in the administration’s waning days. The report advanced a dystopian vision that demonized attempts at achieving racial equality. Designed to “restore patriotic education in schools,” the “1776 Report” compared progressivism to fascism, claimed that the civil rights movement embraced ideas similar to those held by defenders of slavery, and sought to downplay the legacy of racism in U.S. history. Historians uniformly condemned the report, pointing out that it was littered with factual inaccuracies and partisanship, and lacking serious scholarship.
But the “1776 Report” was not simply a far-right musing; it captured the political and legal agenda the Trump administration pursued for four years. In that time, the administration ordered federal agencies to cease all trainings on systemic racism and unconscious racial bias and, by executive order, banned the U.S. Armed Forces, federal agencies, federal contractors, and recipients of federal grants from providing employees with trainings related to race and gender discrimination. As described in further detail below, the administration also abandoned enforcement of civil rights laws on behalf of historically marginalized groups, and marshaled federal power to ramp up right-wing attacks on equal opportunity initiatives led by both local and state governments as well as the private sector.
Donate to the ACLU
Fight back against bigotry, injustice and inequality. Make your donation to the ACLU today.
Source: American Civil Liberties Union
Meanwhile, the administration alternated between openly vilifying and woefully neglecting communities of color. Trump used racialized, xenophobic dog whistles to attack Black, Middle Eastern, South Asian, Latine, and other immigrants of color, and to justify his exclusionary immigration policy. Trump studiously referred to COVID-19 as “the Chinese virus,” just as bias-motivated attacks against Asian Americans were spiking. He ignored public health experts’ urgent advice to make COVID-19 testing widely available, especially in Black, Latine, and Indigenous communities, despite the dramatic disparities in mortality rates experienced in those communities. He also refused to unambiguously condemn white supremacist groups, telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” at a televised election debate.
The 2024 Trump campaign has doubled down on this commitment to racial grievance. The campaign has promised, for example, to eradicate both public and private diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies. This attack on DEI is part of a larger backlash against racial justice efforts ignited by the 2020 killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, and the nationwide protests — unprecedented in size and diversity — that followed. In the wake of those protests, workplaces, schools, and other institutions announced plans to expand DEI efforts and to incorporate anti-racism principles in their communities. The opposition to these efforts from far-right actors has been dramatic, with anti-DEI activists and political operatives framing their attacks as a strike against “identity politics” and weaponizing the term “DEI” to mean any ideas and policies they disagree with — especially those that address systemic racism and sexism. More broadly, however, the anti-DEI backlash is part of a larger effort by right-wing foundations, think tanks, and political operatives to dismantle civil rights gains made in recent decades.
Even though most of the country supports efforts to address racial inequality, Trump promises to eradicate many of those efforts and thereby worsen racial disparities. To understand the threat posed by a second Trump administration — and plan our response — we examined three strategies Trump will continue to deploy as president to upend and reverse course on racial equality. We also outlined strategies and tactics to fight against such policies and mitigate their harm.
Fight back against bigotry, injustice and inequality. Make your donation to the ACLU today.
Source: American Civil Liberties Union
Meanwhile, the administration alternated between openly vilifying and woefully neglecting communities of color. Trump used racialized, xenophobic dog whistles to attack Black, Middle Eastern, South Asian, Latine, and other immigrants of color, and to justify his exclusionary immigration policy. Trump studiously referred to COVID-19 as “the Chinese virus,” just as bias-motivated attacks against Asian Americans were spiking. He ignored public health experts’ urgent advice to make COVID-19 testing widely available, especially in Black, Latine, and Indigenous communities, despite the dramatic disparities in mortality rates experienced in those communities. He also refused to unambiguously condemn white supremacist groups, telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” at a televised election debate.
The 2024 Trump campaign has doubled down on this commitment to racial grievance. The campaign has promised, for example, to eradicate both public and private diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies. This attack on DEI is part of a larger backlash against racial justice efforts ignited by the 2020 killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, and the nationwide protests — unprecedented in size and diversity — that followed. In the wake of those protests, workplaces, schools, and other institutions announced plans to expand DEI efforts and to incorporate anti-racism principles in their communities. The opposition to these efforts from far-right actors has been dramatic, with anti-DEI activists and political operatives framing their attacks as a strike against “identity politics” and weaponizing the term “DEI” to mean any ideas and policies they disagree with — especially those that address systemic racism and sexism. More broadly, however, the anti-DEI backlash is part of a larger effort by right-wing foundations, think tanks, and political operatives to dismantle civil rights gains made in recent decades.
Even though most of the country supports efforts to address racial inequality, Trump promises to eradicate many of those efforts and thereby worsen racial disparities. To understand the threat posed by a second Trump administration — and plan our response — we examined three strategies Trump will continue to deploy as president to upend and reverse course on racial equality. We also outlined strategies and tactics to fight against such policies and mitigate their harm.
1. Censoring Academic Discussions of Race and Sex-Based Discrimination
A second Trump administration would supercharge efforts to censor discussion of any concepts deemed “divisive” from the nation’s classrooms, by which it means classroom discussions about race, gender, and systemic oppression with which it disagrees. Trump has promised to cut federal funding for schools with curricula that touch on these “disfavored” subjects, eliminate school administrator positions that oversee DEI initiatives, and resuscitate the discredited 1776 Commission.
These policies would, of course, trample on students’ and educators’ constitutional rights. They would also cause palpable harm to educational outcomes and the basic civil liberties of both students and teachers. Research has shown that an inclusive K-12 and college curriculum and environment is a significant contributor to the retention and academic success of not just students of color, but all students. Policies eradicating DEI programming and curricula are not only unlawful; they also actively undermine students’ ability to thrive.
A second Trump administration would supercharge efforts to censor discussion of any concepts deemed “divisive” from the nation’s classrooms, by which it means classroom discussions about race, gender, and systemic oppression with which it disagrees. Trump has promised to cut federal funding for schools with curricula that touch on these “disfavored” subjects, eliminate school administrator positions that oversee DEI initiatives, and resuscitate the discredited 1776 Commission.
These policies would, of course, trample on students’ and educators’ constitutional rights. They would also cause palpable harm to educational outcomes and the basic civil liberties of both students and teachers. Research has shown that an inclusive K-12 and college curriculum and environment is a significant contributor to the retention and academic success of not just students of color, but all students. Policies eradicating DEI programming and curricula are not only unlawful; they also actively undermine students’ ability to thrive.
2. Abandoning Civil Rights Enforcement on Behalf of Historically Marginalized Groups
The Trump administration consistently subverted traditional legal tools and principles designed to combat unlawful discrimination. It ceased to pursue — and attempted to dismantle — disparate impact liability, a bedrock tool for effective civil rights enforcement. The administration also revoked federal guidance designed to address race- and disability-based discrimination in student discipline policies and practices; imposed a sweeping ban on trainings on race and gender discrimination by federal agencies, contractors, and grant recipients; and weakened protections against unlawful discrimination through regulatory action.
A second Trump administration threatens to altogether stop enforcement of civil rights on behalf of individuals from historically marginalized groups. In the regulatory context, the administration would weaken protections in the areas of housing, education, health care, and other essential resources by narrowing the availability of disparate impact liability; adding new legal hurdles to challenging policies and practices that disproportionately harm people of color and other protected groups under major civil rights laws, such as the Fair Housing Act (FHA); and gutting federal rules designed to increase access to housing and other community assets for people of color and other vulnerable and marginalized groups.
The Trump administration consistently subverted traditional legal tools and principles designed to combat unlawful discrimination. It ceased to pursue — and attempted to dismantle — disparate impact liability, a bedrock tool for effective civil rights enforcement. The administration also revoked federal guidance designed to address race- and disability-based discrimination in student discipline policies and practices; imposed a sweeping ban on trainings on race and gender discrimination by federal agencies, contractors, and grant recipients; and weakened protections against unlawful discrimination through regulatory action.
A second Trump administration threatens to altogether stop enforcement of civil rights on behalf of individuals from historically marginalized groups. In the regulatory context, the administration would weaken protections in the areas of housing, education, health care, and other essential resources by narrowing the availability of disparate impact liability; adding new legal hurdles to challenging policies and practices that disproportionately harm people of color and other protected groups under major civil rights laws, such as the Fair Housing Act (FHA); and gutting federal rules designed to increase access to housing and other community assets for people of color and other vulnerable and marginalized groups.
3. Marshalling Federal Power to Ramp up Right-Wing Attacks on Equal Opportunity Initiatives
From 2017-2021, the Trump administration utilized federal legal and policy authority to bolster far-right attacks on educational and economic opportunity initiatives, including efforts led by local and state governments and the private sector. For example, the administration weaponized its investigative and legal authority to target efforts by the private sector and institutions of higher education — including, for example, Microsoft and Yale University — to address inequality, which had a predictably chilling effect across sectors, including government, academia, and corporate America.
A second Trump administration would intensify these attacks by abandoning any efforts to advance and legally defend affirmative action policies at military academies, federal minority contracting programs, and other federal programs proven to open opportunities unfairly denied to people of color. The Trump campaign has also promised to charge the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Education (DOE) with investigating “anti-white” civil rights violations in schools while removing so-called “Marxists” from the DOE; direct the DOJ’s civil rights division to investigate private sector programs designed to “boost the number of people of color in the workplace” (a dramatic departure from its traditional role of protecting marginalized groups); and order the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to use Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to attack DEI programs and trainings.
These attacks would not be restricted to federal government agencies. A second Trump administration would also target local and state government, as well as private sector efforts, to remedy historical discrimination and ongoing inequality. It would also scale up “reverse discrimination” cases to further chill public and private institutions’ efforts to expand access to Black, Latine, Indigenous, and other people of color. Such efforts would build on current attacks from the private bar, including challenging school desegregation efforts and grant, scholarship, and fellowship programs intended to open access to career fields.
Since 2023, emboldened by the Supreme Court’s blow to affirmative action, state lawmakers have introduced over 80 anti-DEI bills seeking to dismantle minority-and women-owned business diversity programs; prohibit certain discrimination and anti-bias training for employees, school staff, and students; prohibit programs to attract a diverse pool of employees, faculty, and students; preclude student scholarships, grants, or financial aid based upon sex, race, and national origin; and/or eliminate DEI programs on college campuses that aim to create inclusive and supportive environments for all students. If Trump is reelected, his administration would intensify this landscape by trying to force diversity programs within local school districts, post-secondary institutions, places of public and private employment, and public contracting to end by using not just DOJ investigations and lawsuits, but also threatening to revoke federal funding. Campaign advisors have promised that a second Trump administration would withhold federal money from any schools, companies, or charities that use DEI principles in their curricula or hiring practices.
The administration’s ultimate goal would be the eradication of all programs designed to address profound and persistent inequalities in American life — with the effect of further entrenching, and indeed worsening, systemic inequalities in access to education, health care, and economic opportunity. And, perversely, a Trump DOJ would employ the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, along with landmark civil rights statutes such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — including Title VI, which prohibits recipients of federal funds from discriminating based on race, color, or national origin, and Title VII, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin — in its efforts.
At this critical juncture in our country’s commitment to equality and equitable access to vital resources, the ACLU stands ready to act.
The ACLU's Overall Response
The ACLU will resist a second Trump administration’s retreat from civil rights enforcement and attacks on efforts to promote racial justice with litigation and legislative and policy advocacy in progressive states and localities.
Courts
A second Trump administration would undoubtedly pose sobering and multifaceted legal threats to efforts to promote racial equality. However, many components of Trump’s radical “anti-DEI” agenda, rooted in racial grievance rather than fact, cannot be achieved without violating the Constitution and federal laws. As was the case in the prior Trump administration, litigation and regulatory advocacy will be indispensable for both stymying these threats and advancing an affirmative vision of racial justice.
The Trump years underlined the practical importance of legal action and engagement. Lawsuits stopped many illegal Trump administration policies designed to undermine anti-discrimination efforts and laws, such as Trump’s unconstitutional ban on federal trainings on systemic racism and sexism, and his administration’s efforts to undermine the FHA. Furthermore, since Trump was voted out of office in 2020, federal courts have already enjoined or struck down the kinds of classroom censorship and anti-DEI policies that he promises to pursue more broadly, and upheld efforts to promote access to educational opportunity that have been challenged by far-right advocates. These court victories will be crucial building blocks to our legal strategy under a second Trump administration.
Even though Trump has made a significant mark on the judiciary, and it is not difficult to find recent examples where the courts have failed to protect efforts to build a more racially inclusive society, there are still lawful avenues to promote equal educational opportunities and advance racial justice. We must both defend and build upon this precedent. Below, we outline ways in which we will engage in litigation and legal advocacy to oppose unlawful attacks on educational access, classroom censorship, rollbacks of critical federal anti-discrimination protections, and assaults on state and local DEI policy interventions.
Congress
The Trump administration would push Congress to pass anti-DEI bills restricting access to education, employment, and public contracting opportunities. Members of Congress who support racial justice must consistently vote against anti-DEI bills and efforts to strip federal funding from such programs. Committees and caucuses should also utilize subpoenas and hearings to strengthen the factual record and ascertain the status of DEI programs in the public and private sectors, as well as the harmful impacts of current anti-DEI legislation. This information can be used to build the necessary factual predicate for legislation advancing DEI goals, and to educate Congress members about the benefits of lawful DEI practices.
Congress members should also counter the anti-DEI movement by publicly and vigorously pushing back against propaganda that DEI is inherently “racist” and stifles freedom of speech. They must refocus the conversation on the origin of DEI programs and amplify, through hearings and public statements, how such critical programs work. DEI programs became prevalent in public and private sectors following the civil rights movement as a way to combat racism and sexism — two pervasive problems that persist today. A key political aim of the extreme right in their anti-DEI efforts is to divide voter coalitions and advance a partisan agenda. The anti-DEI movement labels DEI programs as discriminatory publicly, but it is the extreme right’s proposed anti-DEI policies and legislation that will make workplaces, schools, and public contracting more discriminatory and less inclusive and welcoming for persons based upon their race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and religious identity.
While arguing that DEI programs inhibit free speech, the anti-DEI movement itself stifles speech and whitewashes discussions concerning the inconvenient truths of systemic discrimination in U.S. history and society by banning books, censoring classroom discussions, and erasing facts from curricula. Congress members should coordinate to build a vigorous offensive strategy to reveal the false attacks made against DEI programs.
The ACLU will resist a second Trump administration’s retreat from civil rights enforcement and attacks on efforts to promote racial justice with litigation and legislative and policy advocacy in progressive states and localities.
Courts
A second Trump administration would undoubtedly pose sobering and multifaceted legal threats to efforts to promote racial equality. However, many components of Trump’s radical “anti-DEI” agenda, rooted in racial grievance rather than fact, cannot be achieved without violating the Constitution and federal laws. As was the case in the prior Trump administration, litigation and regulatory advocacy will be indispensable for both stymying these threats and advancing an affirmative vision of racial justice.
The Trump years underlined the practical importance of legal action and engagement. Lawsuits stopped many illegal Trump administration policies designed to undermine anti-discrimination efforts and laws, such as Trump’s unconstitutional ban on federal trainings on systemic racism and sexism, and his administration’s efforts to undermine the FHA. Furthermore, since Trump was voted out of office in 2020, federal courts have already enjoined or struck down the kinds of classroom censorship and anti-DEI policies that he promises to pursue more broadly, and upheld efforts to promote access to educational opportunity that have been challenged by far-right advocates. These court victories will be crucial building blocks to our legal strategy under a second Trump administration.
Even though Trump has made a significant mark on the judiciary, and it is not difficult to find recent examples where the courts have failed to protect efforts to build a more racially inclusive society, there are still lawful avenues to promote equal educational opportunities and advance racial justice. We must both defend and build upon this precedent. Below, we outline ways in which we will engage in litigation and legal advocacy to oppose unlawful attacks on educational access, classroom censorship, rollbacks of critical federal anti-discrimination protections, and assaults on state and local DEI policy interventions.
Congress
The Trump administration would push Congress to pass anti-DEI bills restricting access to education, employment, and public contracting opportunities. Members of Congress who support racial justice must consistently vote against anti-DEI bills and efforts to strip federal funding from such programs. Committees and caucuses should also utilize subpoenas and hearings to strengthen the factual record and ascertain the status of DEI programs in the public and private sectors, as well as the harmful impacts of current anti-DEI legislation. This information can be used to build the necessary factual predicate for legislation advancing DEI goals, and to educate Congress members about the benefits of lawful DEI practices.
Congress members should also counter the anti-DEI movement by publicly and vigorously pushing back against propaganda that DEI is inherently “racist” and stifles freedom of speech. They must refocus the conversation on the origin of DEI programs and amplify, through hearings and public statements, how such critical programs work. DEI programs became prevalent in public and private sectors following the civil rights movement as a way to combat racism and sexism — two pervasive problems that persist today. A key political aim of the extreme right in their anti-DEI efforts is to divide voter coalitions and advance a partisan agenda. The anti-DEI movement labels DEI programs as discriminatory publicly, but it is the extreme right’s proposed anti-DEI policies and legislation that will make workplaces, schools, and public contracting more discriminatory and less inclusive and welcoming for persons based upon their race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and religious identity.
While arguing that DEI programs inhibit free speech, the anti-DEI movement itself stifles speech and whitewashes discussions concerning the inconvenient truths of systemic discrimination in U.S. history and society by banning books, censoring classroom discussions, and erasing facts from curricula. Congress members should coordinate to build a vigorous offensive strategy to reveal the false attacks made against DEI programs.
State & Municipalities
Particularly in the wake of a federal government turning hostile to civil rights, state and local governments must step in to limit discrimination and defend and promote DEI programs and inclusive curricula at the K-12 level. Public and private sector entities created DEI programs in direct response to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to combat racism and sexism, and to remedy resulting harms by building workplaces, educational environments, and public contracting programs that reflect and benefit the demographics of this country. As DEI programs have evolved, public and private sector entities have sought to create inclusive and welcoming environments where people of all races, genders, sexual orientations, socioeconomic statuses, and religious identities can thrive. Now, far-right actors seek to roll back gains achieved during the civil rights movement and deprive a large population of Americans of equal access to education, employment, and economic opportunities under the law. Ultimately, these attacks strike at a core principle of democracy: equality under the law.
State and local officials can mobilize to protect democracy and continue civil rights gains in the face of a hostile Trump administration. Indeed, since July 2023 state attorneys general have issued two opinions as a coalition to “condemn attempts to correlate diversity measures with racial discrimination, and to remind companies of their obligations to ensure equitable and inclusive environments for their employees and clients.” Governors and mayors can also continue the advancement of civil rights protections in the public sector by issuing executive orders to create and expand state-and locally-funded DEI programs. Finally, state legislators and city council members should thwart attacks on DEI by voting against proposals to restrict funding for DEI programs, holding hearings concerning public and private sector DEI programs and the negative impacts of dismantling them, and proposing bills that advance DEI goals.
Specific Responses
The ACLU will continue to challenge unconstitutional classroom censorship and Trump administration executive actions targeting “divisive concepts.”
Using Trump’s Executive Order 13950, which unconstitutionally banned federal trainings on systemic racism and sexism, as their template, far-right legislators around the country have introduced scores of bills to ban the teaching of so-called “divisive concepts” in K-12 public schools and in public colleges and universities. While these laws vary in their details, they typically censor classroom instruction on race and gender. The Trump campaign has promised to intensify these efforts by cutting federal funding for schools whose curricula touch on these “disfavored” subjects.
Using Trump’s Executive Order 13950, which unconstitutionally banned federal trainings on systemic racism and sexism, as their template, far-right legislators around the country have introduced scores of bills to ban the teaching of so-called “divisive concepts” in K-12 public schools and in public colleges and universities. While these laws vary in their details, they typically censor classroom instruction on race and gender. The Trump campaign has promised to intensify these efforts by cutting federal funding for schools whose curricula touch on these “disfavored” subjects.
Legal Analysis/Litigation Response
These assaults on academic freedom violate the First and 14th Amendments, which prohibit suppression of specific viewpoints and vague legal restrictions. Indeed, in every case where the ACLU has challenged classroom censorship and the teaching of “divisive concepts,” we have prevailed. In November 2022, a federal court granted our request for a preliminary injunction blocking Florida from enforcing HB 7/SB 148, the so-called “Stop W.O.K.E. Act.” The Act is a classroom censorship law championed by Governor Ron DeSantis that severely restricts Florida educators and students from learning and talking about issues related to race and gender in higher education classrooms. Similarly, in May 2024, a federal court agreed that New Hampshire’s classroom censorship law, the “Banned Concepts Act,” is unconstitutional. The law actively discouraged public school teachers from teaching and talking about race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and gender identity inside and outside the classroom. And, in June 2024, a federal court granted a partial preliminary injunction that prevents Oklahoma’s classroom censorship law, HB 1775, from going into effect in university classrooms. The law sought to severely restrict teachers and students in K-12 public schools and public universities from learning and talking about race and gender.
Should a second Trump administration increase its attacks in this area, we will commensurately increase our litigation challenging such efforts, building on the successful blueprint we have already created. These classroom bans do not simply violate students’ and educators’ constitutional rights: they undermine student safety, academic achievement, and student retention. Researchers and educators have recognized that a school-wide approach involving education and training is, for example, necessary to combat harassment and bullying on the basis of race and gender. Laws banning conversations about race jeopardize this important work and create educational environments that are unwelcoming to students of color and other marginalized students.
Additionally, for students of color, the ability to learn about the experiences and viewpoints of people of color and America’s legacy of racism is critical to feeling connected and equally valued. Further, research shows that an inclusive K-12 and college curriculum and environment is a significant contributor to the retention and academic success of not just students of color, but all students. Studies have found that learning about racism and its implications has a positive impact on the development of critical thinking skills and critical consciousness, and contributes to a more complex issue analysis. For example, both white college students and students of color in a racial justice course demonstrated growth in their problem-solving and analytical skills. Other researchers have noted an increase in math standardized test scores of middle school students following implementation of anti-bias education programs. The inclusion of an ethnic studies course for ninth-graders in California was also found to significantly increase student attendance and GPA by 1.4 points. These educational efforts, in other words, can have marked positive effects on educational outcomes, which are critical given persistent retention and achievement gaps between students.
Considering these important goals and constitutional principles, the ACLU will neutralize threats to diverse, inclusive campuses dedicated to creating vibrant educational experiences that are foundational to our multiracial democracy. We will build on our successful legal challenges to unconstitutional state laws in Florida, Oklahoma, and New Hampshire — and to similar unconstitutional crackdowns on academic freedom — we will continue to establish strong precedent, applicable across jurisdictions, that we will use to strike down Trump’s efforts to stifle speech and DEI activities around issues of race and gender in U.S. schools and college campuses.
These assaults on academic freedom violate the First and 14th Amendments, which prohibit suppression of specific viewpoints and vague legal restrictions. Indeed, in every case where the ACLU has challenged classroom censorship and the teaching of “divisive concepts,” we have prevailed. In November 2022, a federal court granted our request for a preliminary injunction blocking Florida from enforcing HB 7/SB 148, the so-called “Stop W.O.K.E. Act.” The Act is a classroom censorship law championed by Governor Ron DeSantis that severely restricts Florida educators and students from learning and talking about issues related to race and gender in higher education classrooms. Similarly, in May 2024, a federal court agreed that New Hampshire’s classroom censorship law, the “Banned Concepts Act,” is unconstitutional. The law actively discouraged public school teachers from teaching and talking about race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and gender identity inside and outside the classroom. And, in June 2024, a federal court granted a partial preliminary injunction that prevents Oklahoma’s classroom censorship law, HB 1775, from going into effect in university classrooms. The law sought to severely restrict teachers and students in K-12 public schools and public universities from learning and talking about race and gender.
Should a second Trump administration increase its attacks in this area, we will commensurately increase our litigation challenging such efforts, building on the successful blueprint we have already created. These classroom bans do not simply violate students’ and educators’ constitutional rights: they undermine student safety, academic achievement, and student retention. Researchers and educators have recognized that a school-wide approach involving education and training is, for example, necessary to combat harassment and bullying on the basis of race and gender. Laws banning conversations about race jeopardize this important work and create educational environments that are unwelcoming to students of color and other marginalized students.
Additionally, for students of color, the ability to learn about the experiences and viewpoints of people of color and America’s legacy of racism is critical to feeling connected and equally valued. Further, research shows that an inclusive K-12 and college curriculum and environment is a significant contributor to the retention and academic success of not just students of color, but all students. Studies have found that learning about racism and its implications has a positive impact on the development of critical thinking skills and critical consciousness, and contributes to a more complex issue analysis. For example, both white college students and students of color in a racial justice course demonstrated growth in their problem-solving and analytical skills. Other researchers have noted an increase in math standardized test scores of middle school students following implementation of anti-bias education programs. The inclusion of an ethnic studies course for ninth-graders in California was also found to significantly increase student attendance and GPA by 1.4 points. These educational efforts, in other words, can have marked positive effects on educational outcomes, which are critical given persistent retention and achievement gaps between students.
Considering these important goals and constitutional principles, the ACLU will neutralize threats to diverse, inclusive campuses dedicated to creating vibrant educational experiences that are foundational to our multiracial democracy. We will build on our successful legal challenges to unconstitutional state laws in Florida, Oklahoma, and New Hampshire — and to similar unconstitutional crackdowns on academic freedom — we will continue to establish strong precedent, applicable across jurisdictions, that we will use to strike down Trump’s efforts to stifle speech and DEI activities around issues of race and gender in U.S. schools and college campuses.
Advocacy Response
Education is primarily a state and local responsibility, and each state constitution mandates the creation of a free K-12 public education system with distinct requirements concerning the quality of education. As a result, states and communities, as well as public and private organizations operating on behalf of those entities, develop curricula concerning what students should learn by each grade level. Because state and local education agencies play a lead role in K-12 education policy and best understand the needs of and climate within their own schools, they are uniquely positioned to effectively mobilize against any efforts by a Trump administration to mischaracterize inclusive education and its value to schools and students. Consequently, the ACLU will lobby state assembly members to enact laws mandating inclusive curricula, and prohibiting the banning, removal, or restriction of books at the K-12 level. In addition, in states where there are constitutional mandates for a minimum quality of education, the ACLU will request opinions from state attorneys general concerning state constitutional mandates for inclusive curricula and/or curricula that accurately reflect historical events and government policies in K-12 schools. On the federal level, the ACLU will work with coalition members to lobby against bills that seek to prohibit inclusive curricula in post-secondary institutions and professional schools.
The ACLU will intensify its role defending access to educational opportunities for students of color, mitigating the impact of a Trump DOJ’s retreat from that role.
Educational access continues to be a key driver of socioeconomic success and stability, and yet educational opportunity in the U.S. too often depends on race and ethnicity, wealth, and geography. Even as our student population across the nation is more diverse than ever, all students — irrespective of race — are more likely to attend racially segregated schools, with Black and Latine students more likely to attend schools that are highly racially segregated and economically under-resourced. In fact, both Black and Latine students are increasingly educated in intensely segregated schools. The confluence of housing segregation and growing income inequality means that, in addition to attending racially segregated schools, Black and Latine students are significantly more likely to attend high-poverty schools. This double segregation occurs because Black and Latine families are disproportionately concentrated, at all income levels, in segregated neighborhoods with fewer resources than predominantly white communities with similar income demographics. Thus, public schools with higher densities of Black and Latine students receive fewer resources on average, despite higher needs. Double segregation of this kind disadvantages students academically, creating performance gaps that have long-lasting effects on Black and Latine students’ future career prospects.
These facts illustrate the critical importance of proactively and aggressively desegregating schools around the country. In the K-12 setting, school districts are pursuing constitutionally sound, race-neutral efforts to make access to education more equitable. And, even after the U.S. Supreme Court’s curtailment of affirmative action programs in 2023, institutions of higher education can still lawfully strive to pursue a diverse student body, as the ACLU and our partners have made clear in the wake of that decision.
Nevertheless, the conservative legal movement has targeted even these efforts, and Trump promises to steer the DOJ away from its historical role of defending such policies and programs. This threatens to exacerbate educational disparities across the country and deepen economic and professional inequality.
Education is primarily a state and local responsibility, and each state constitution mandates the creation of a free K-12 public education system with distinct requirements concerning the quality of education. As a result, states and communities, as well as public and private organizations operating on behalf of those entities, develop curricula concerning what students should learn by each grade level. Because state and local education agencies play a lead role in K-12 education policy and best understand the needs of and climate within their own schools, they are uniquely positioned to effectively mobilize against any efforts by a Trump administration to mischaracterize inclusive education and its value to schools and students. Consequently, the ACLU will lobby state assembly members to enact laws mandating inclusive curricula, and prohibiting the banning, removal, or restriction of books at the K-12 level. In addition, in states where there are constitutional mandates for a minimum quality of education, the ACLU will request opinions from state attorneys general concerning state constitutional mandates for inclusive curricula and/or curricula that accurately reflect historical events and government policies in K-12 schools. On the federal level, the ACLU will work with coalition members to lobby against bills that seek to prohibit inclusive curricula in post-secondary institutions and professional schools.
The ACLU will intensify its role defending access to educational opportunities for students of color, mitigating the impact of a Trump DOJ’s retreat from that role.
Educational access continues to be a key driver of socioeconomic success and stability, and yet educational opportunity in the U.S. too often depends on race and ethnicity, wealth, and geography. Even as our student population across the nation is more diverse than ever, all students — irrespective of race — are more likely to attend racially segregated schools, with Black and Latine students more likely to attend schools that are highly racially segregated and economically under-resourced. In fact, both Black and Latine students are increasingly educated in intensely segregated schools. The confluence of housing segregation and growing income inequality means that, in addition to attending racially segregated schools, Black and Latine students are significantly more likely to attend high-poverty schools. This double segregation occurs because Black and Latine families are disproportionately concentrated, at all income levels, in segregated neighborhoods with fewer resources than predominantly white communities with similar income demographics. Thus, public schools with higher densities of Black and Latine students receive fewer resources on average, despite higher needs. Double segregation of this kind disadvantages students academically, creating performance gaps that have long-lasting effects on Black and Latine students’ future career prospects.
These facts illustrate the critical importance of proactively and aggressively desegregating schools around the country. In the K-12 setting, school districts are pursuing constitutionally sound, race-neutral efforts to make access to education more equitable. And, even after the U.S. Supreme Court’s curtailment of affirmative action programs in 2023, institutions of higher education can still lawfully strive to pursue a diverse student body, as the ACLU and our partners have made clear in the wake of that decision.
Nevertheless, the conservative legal movement has targeted even these efforts, and Trump promises to steer the DOJ away from its historical role of defending such policies and programs. This threatens to exacerbate educational disparities across the country and deepen economic and professional inequality.
Legal Analysis/Litigation Response
We will continue to provide critical guidance and support for efforts by institutions and school districts around the country to combat these forms of segregation that are still constitutionally sound, despite aggressive messaging to the contrary. In June 2023, in two cases brought by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), the Supreme Court struck down longstanding affirmative action admissions policies at both Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. Nonetheless, the court left open a number of pathways to increase access to educational opportunity. We will continue to build on our inclusive education assistance for educational institutions, highlighting the tools that still remain available. We will defend the ability of local and state actors to ensure that educational opportunities are open to all, and that addressing societal discrimination remains a legitimate objective under the governing law. At the K-12 level, for example, the ACLU will defend local efforts to address segregation and exclusion based on past and present discriminatory practices — including redlining, predatory lending, and steering — by both state and private actors.
Two illustrative examples are worth unpacking. School districts in both Virginia and Massachusetts have adopted race-neutral efforts to promote equitable access to competitive high schools, and courts have thus far upheld their efforts, consistent with the SFFA decision. For instance, in 2020, in an effort to expand access to the highly competitive Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ), a prestigious public magnet school that serves part of Northern Virginia, the Fairfax County School Board revised the admissions process. They eliminated the need for a standardized test, removed a $100 application fee, and allocated a small number of seats in the incoming class of 2025 to each public middle school in the region, while evaluating students on their grades, essays, and experience factors, including students who are economically disadvantaged, English language learners, special education students, or students who are currently attending underrepresented middle schools. These efforts eliminated barriers to admission for many students across Fairfax County schools.
Despite the fact that the admissions policy was racially neutral, a right-wing group challenged the policy as a form of racial discrimination under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. The challengers contended that “the [School] Board adopted it with a racially discriminatory purpose” – that is, “to racially balance TJ.” With our partners, the ACLU weighed in on the case before the Fourth Circuit, laying out how and why school communities can and should be able to lawfully consider the impacts of admissions policies on diversity and access as schools across the country are increasingly racially segregated and unequal.
Following hotly contested litigation, the Fourth Circuit upheld the admissions policy, finding that its “central aim is to equalize opportunity for those students hoping to attend one of the nation’s best public schools, and to foster diversity of all stripes among TJ’s student body.” In light of the school board’s careful balancing of relevant factors, the court was “satisfied that [its] adoption of the challenged admissions policy fully comports with the Fourteenth Amendment’s demand of equal protection under the law.” The Supreme Court subsequently declined to hear the case, leaving the Fourth Circuit’s decision intact.
Similar strategies to expand access to crucial education resources have survived attacks in Massachusetts. In 2023, the First Circuit upheld an admissions plan for three selective Boston public schools that was based on grades and zip code — with preference given to students with top grades from lower-income zip codes — which was adopted to address persistent racial disparities in admissions. The challengers have requested that the Supreme Court review the First Circuit’s decision, and if the court takes the case, we will weigh in, as we did in the First Circuit, to ensure that equal protection standards are not distorted and that the court is well-informed of the multitudinous importance of diversity and open opportunity in education.
These cases demonstrate courts will still uphold meaningful and effective tools to tackle unequal educational access in order to remedy historical discrimination. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who joined the majority in the affirmative action cases, has acknowledged, “governments and universities still ‘can, of course, act to undo the effects of past discrimination in many permissible ways that do not involve classification by race.’” The Supreme Court has been clear that government actions undertaken to ensure that opportunities are “equally open” to people of all races are still permissible. Indeed, even race-conscious approaches should be upheld if they are designed to remediate “specific, identified instances of past discrimination,” and where they are necessary to “avoid imminent and serious risks to human safety” in specific contexts.
Further, in SFFA, the court left affirmative action policies at military academies intact “in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.” Seeking to expand on the Harvard/UNC decision, SFFA subsequently filed two new lawsuits challenging race-conscious admissions policies at the U.S. Naval Academy and West Point. While the Biden administration has strongly defended those admission policies, the Trump campaign has promised to abandon the federal government’s defense of both lawsuits. Given the Supreme Court’s observations about potential distinct interests at these two institutions, that retreat is unwarranted and the ACLU is prepared to mitigate its effects. We filed amicus briefs in both military academy lawsuits on behalf of Black women military veterans, and we will work closely with current and former military members of color to ensure that their interests are represented in the litigation and any related changes to admissions. The Trump campaign’s promise to abandon military academies’ use of affirmative action would be more restrictive of opportunity than the Supreme Court’s ruling requires. To respond to this unwarranted dismantling of a key tool advancing diversity in military academies, the ACLU and our allied organizations will consider engaging Congress for fairer opportunities for potential military academy applicants of color at other points in the pipeline to admission.
In this new legal landscape, the ACLU will continue to defend vital efforts to counteract historical discrimination and unequal access to educational opportunity around the country in the face of a Trump administration assault. We will continue to pursue litigation on behalf of K-12 students and other stakeholders to defend SFFA-compliant steps taken by school districts to increase access for disadvantaged students, including those disadvantaged by race, and support public high schools offering unique resources and opportunities that are working to redress the systemic racial exclusion caused by deeply flawed, test-only admissions policies. And we will do so even if the DOJ abandons its historical commitments, and itself attacks these programs and policies.
We will continue to provide critical guidance and support for efforts by institutions and school districts around the country to combat these forms of segregation that are still constitutionally sound, despite aggressive messaging to the contrary. In June 2023, in two cases brought by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), the Supreme Court struck down longstanding affirmative action admissions policies at both Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. Nonetheless, the court left open a number of pathways to increase access to educational opportunity. We will continue to build on our inclusive education assistance for educational institutions, highlighting the tools that still remain available. We will defend the ability of local and state actors to ensure that educational opportunities are open to all, and that addressing societal discrimination remains a legitimate objective under the governing law. At the K-12 level, for example, the ACLU will defend local efforts to address segregation and exclusion based on past and present discriminatory practices — including redlining, predatory lending, and steering — by both state and private actors.
Two illustrative examples are worth unpacking. School districts in both Virginia and Massachusetts have adopted race-neutral efforts to promote equitable access to competitive high schools, and courts have thus far upheld their efforts, consistent with the SFFA decision. For instance, in 2020, in an effort to expand access to the highly competitive Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ), a prestigious public magnet school that serves part of Northern Virginia, the Fairfax County School Board revised the admissions process. They eliminated the need for a standardized test, removed a $100 application fee, and allocated a small number of seats in the incoming class of 2025 to each public middle school in the region, while evaluating students on their grades, essays, and experience factors, including students who are economically disadvantaged, English language learners, special education students, or students who are currently attending underrepresented middle schools. These efforts eliminated barriers to admission for many students across Fairfax County schools.
Despite the fact that the admissions policy was racially neutral, a right-wing group challenged the policy as a form of racial discrimination under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. The challengers contended that “the [School] Board adopted it with a racially discriminatory purpose” – that is, “to racially balance TJ.” With our partners, the ACLU weighed in on the case before the Fourth Circuit, laying out how and why school communities can and should be able to lawfully consider the impacts of admissions policies on diversity and access as schools across the country are increasingly racially segregated and unequal.
Following hotly contested litigation, the Fourth Circuit upheld the admissions policy, finding that its “central aim is to equalize opportunity for those students hoping to attend one of the nation’s best public schools, and to foster diversity of all stripes among TJ’s student body.” In light of the school board’s careful balancing of relevant factors, the court was “satisfied that [its] adoption of the challenged admissions policy fully comports with the Fourteenth Amendment’s demand of equal protection under the law.” The Supreme Court subsequently declined to hear the case, leaving the Fourth Circuit’s decision intact.
Similar strategies to expand access to crucial education resources have survived attacks in Massachusetts. In 2023, the First Circuit upheld an admissions plan for three selective Boston public schools that was based on grades and zip code — with preference given to students with top grades from lower-income zip codes — which was adopted to address persistent racial disparities in admissions. The challengers have requested that the Supreme Court review the First Circuit’s decision, and if the court takes the case, we will weigh in, as we did in the First Circuit, to ensure that equal protection standards are not distorted and that the court is well-informed of the multitudinous importance of diversity and open opportunity in education.
These cases demonstrate courts will still uphold meaningful and effective tools to tackle unequal educational access in order to remedy historical discrimination. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who joined the majority in the affirmative action cases, has acknowledged, “governments and universities still ‘can, of course, act to undo the effects of past discrimination in many permissible ways that do not involve classification by race.’” The Supreme Court has been clear that government actions undertaken to ensure that opportunities are “equally open” to people of all races are still permissible. Indeed, even race-conscious approaches should be upheld if they are designed to remediate “specific, identified instances of past discrimination,” and where they are necessary to “avoid imminent and serious risks to human safety” in specific contexts.
Further, in SFFA, the court left affirmative action policies at military academies intact “in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.” Seeking to expand on the Harvard/UNC decision, SFFA subsequently filed two new lawsuits challenging race-conscious admissions policies at the U.S. Naval Academy and West Point. While the Biden administration has strongly defended those admission policies, the Trump campaign has promised to abandon the federal government’s defense of both lawsuits. Given the Supreme Court’s observations about potential distinct interests at these two institutions, that retreat is unwarranted and the ACLU is prepared to mitigate its effects. We filed amicus briefs in both military academy lawsuits on behalf of Black women military veterans, and we will work closely with current and former military members of color to ensure that their interests are represented in the litigation and any related changes to admissions. The Trump campaign’s promise to abandon military academies’ use of affirmative action would be more restrictive of opportunity than the Supreme Court’s ruling requires. To respond to this unwarranted dismantling of a key tool advancing diversity in military academies, the ACLU and our allied organizations will consider engaging Congress for fairer opportunities for potential military academy applicants of color at other points in the pipeline to admission.
In this new legal landscape, the ACLU will continue to defend vital efforts to counteract historical discrimination and unequal access to educational opportunity around the country in the face of a Trump administration assault. We will continue to pursue litigation on behalf of K-12 students and other stakeholders to defend SFFA-compliant steps taken by school districts to increase access for disadvantaged students, including those disadvantaged by race, and support public high schools offering unique resources and opportunities that are working to redress the systemic racial exclusion caused by deeply flawed, test-only admissions policies. And we will do so even if the DOJ abandons its historical commitments, and itself attacks these programs and policies.
Advocacy Response
The ACLU will also advocate on the state and federal level to permit post-secondary institutions to utilize lawful programs and practices to advance diversity goals amongst students and faculty. The ACLU will work with coalition partners to aggressively lobby against state and federal bills that would preclude those institutions from requiring, requesting, or considering any “diversity statements” from current or prospective students or faculty members, given that the Supreme Court has explicitly found that higher education institutions may consider “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute” to the institution. Similarly, statements from prospective or current faculty members explaining how their teaching, research, or service has or would promote diversity are clearly relevant to a faculty member’s professional experiences and scholarship.
The ACLU will also advocate on the state and federal level to permit post-secondary institutions to utilize lawful programs and practices to advance diversity goals amongst students and faculty. The ACLU will work with coalition partners to aggressively lobby against state and federal bills that would preclude those institutions from requiring, requesting, or considering any “diversity statements” from current or prospective students or faculty members, given that the Supreme Court has explicitly found that higher education institutions may consider “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute” to the institution. Similarly, statements from prospective or current faculty members explaining how their teaching, research, or service has or would promote diversity are clearly relevant to a faculty member’s professional experiences and scholarship.
The ACLU will challenge aggressive and unlawful rollbacks of critical federal anti-discrimination protections.
Trump also threatens to double down and even expand on his prior administration’s attempts to roll back critical federal protections designed to combat discrimination in, and ensure access to, housing, education, health care, and other essential resources.
Trump also threatens to double down and even expand on his prior administration’s attempts to roll back critical federal protections designed to combat discrimination in, and ensure access to, housing, education, health care, and other essential resources.
Legal Analysis/Litigation & Advocacy Response
In 2020, for example, the Trump administration U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued a rule that significantly narrowed disparate impact liability under the FHA by adding new pleading and proof requirements for parties pursuing FHA claims, and new defenses for actors and entities named in those challenges. These actions made it more difficult to establish that policies and practices that disproportionately harm people of color and other protected groups violate the FHA.
The ACLU, with partners, served as counsel for the Open Communities Alliance and Southcoast Fair Housing to challenge the Trump administration’s gutting of the disparate impact standard. In companion litigation, a federal court enjoined the Trump administration’s regressive rule, concluding that its key provisions could not be “found in any judicial decision” and were “inadequately justified.” Ultimately, in 2023, and after we commented on the critical need to do so, HUD reinstated the 2013 discriminatory effects rule in the form of the Restoring HUD’s Discriminatory Effects Standard Final Rule. In so doing, HUD emphasized that the 2013 rule is more consistent with how the FHA has been applied in the courts and by HUD for more than 50 years, and that it more effectively implements the Act’s broad remedial purpose of eliminating unjustifiable discriminatory practices from the housing market.
Similarly, in 2018, the Trump administration suspended the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) Rule, and in 2020 issued a new Preserving Community and Neighborhood Choice Rule, thus repealing the 2015 AFFH Rule. The suspension and eventual repeal of the 2015 AFFH Rule undermined critical fair housing advancements and substantially weakened HUD’s authority and ability to meet its AFFH obligation underthe FHA. The 2015 AFFH Rule represented a critical step to ensure that entities such as HUD, states, local jurisdictions, and public housing authorities fulfilled their AFFH obligations by creating a framework to remove unfair barriers to housing, dismantle housing practices that entrench segregation, and increase access to housing and community assets for people of color and other vulnerable and marginalized groups. The 2015 rule required cities and towns to create a plan to address segregation and discrimination and to lay out concrete goals for bringing fair housing and opportunity to members of all the groups protected by the FHA.
Examples of these goals included building affordable housing in areas well-served by transit and prohibiting landlords from discriminating against people who use a government subsidy to pay rent. In the first few years it was in effect, the AFFH Rule was instrumental in making strides in attacking deeply rooted segregation and expanding access to housing. The AFFH Rule also proved valuable in surfacing harmful fair housing issues that were often overlooked. For example, the city of Ithaca, New York used the AFFH process to prioritize addressing policies and practices that displace victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking.
The ACLU, with partners, represented the National Fair Housing Alliance and other plaintiffs to challenge this suspension of the 2015 AFFH Rule. Like our challenges to the Trump administration’s 2020 disparate impact standard, this lawsuit provided an essential check on unlawful regulatory actions that gutted rules designed to root out discrimination in access to housing and undermined the fight for more inclusive communities – and are critical to ensure that unlawful actions to repeal or otherwise undermine regulations do not go into effect and harm the communities we serve. Should a second Trump administration renew its attacks on key fair housing protections and other essential civil rights protections through rulemaking or other executive action, the ACLU will again forcefully respond, building on the strategies we developed to oppose attacks on these rules and other actions under the prior Trump administration.
We will also file comments on any proposed notices of rulemaking or other federal regulatory action to explain the harms that these anticipated proposals will have on people of color, and other protected and historically marginalized groups, and why such actions are unlawful. These comments often play a critical role in forcing the federal government to consider the implications of their proposed actions on the communities we serve. They are also an essential step in creating the requisite record for successful challenges to these unlawful agency actions in any legal challenges brought under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which authorizes legal action to stop agency rules or other actions that are arbitrary, unsupported by substantial evidence, or otherwise contrary to law. To ultimately defeat efforts to undermine civil rights protections, we must engage in this record-making process.
For example, during the first Trump Administration, the ACLU submitted comments opposing the gutting of the AFFH Rule, and the proposal to substantially weaken HUD’s ability to impose disparate impact liability on bad actors. We have also submitted a comment in support of HUD’s more recent Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that built on steps previously taken in HUD’s 2015 AFFH Rule, while proposing critical improvements to requirements for states, local jurisdictions, public housing authorities, and other entities receiving HUD funding to create and implement equity plans — including with respect to community engagement — transparency, goal-setting, ways in which to measure progress, and accountability. We will work tirelessly to ensure that the AFFH Rule is restored, and to ensure that federal government actors understand how critical it is to combatting segregation and creating more inclusive communities.
The ACLU will insulate state and local DEI policy interventions designed to remedy persistent inequalities in critical areas such as public health and employment from attack.
In addition to fighting the rollback of federal anti-discrimination policies and attacks on racial justice efforts in court, the ACLU will work to insulate state and local policy interventions to address persistent inequalities in critical arenas and expand opportunity — policies that are often the fruits of considerable mobilization and advocacy by affected communities — from Trump administration attacks. In partnership with local affiliates on the ground, we can provide critical legal and strategic advice to ensure that such programs meet current legal standards.
DEI programs and initiatives date back to the civil rights movement. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 enforced school desegregation, outlawed employment discrimination based on race, religion, sex, color, and national origin, and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In response, public and private sector entities began utilizing initiatives and trainings to recruit and retain more people of color and women, and to create inclusive and welcoming educational institutions and workplaces. In addition, federal, state, and local governments used incentives and public contracting programs to expand opportunities for minority- and women-owned businesses. Over time, these initiatives and programs expanded access to education, employment, and public contacting opportunities for women, communities of color, LGBTQ+ communities, active military and veterans, and persons from low-income backgrounds.
These initiatives have also impacted critical fields, such as public health, and programs that provide critical interventions into persistent, deeply rooted inequalities. We know, for example, that there are significant racial disparities in health care that are closely linked to structural racism: According to the CDC, Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women due to variation in quality health care and implicit bias. Meanwhile, there is a significant underrepresentation of Black and Latine people in the medical profession: Research led by the Health Resources and Services Administration concluded that, on average, every 10 percent increase in the representation of Black primary care physicians in certain counties was associated with 30.6 days of greater life expectancy among Black people in those areas. To remedy historical discrimination and address these health outcome disparities, public and private scholarship and fellowship programs have been set up to support pathways to the medical profession for underrepresented medical professionals. In response, an organization named Do No Harm has brought a series of legal challenges to these scholarship and fellowship programs, as well as implicit bias trainings in the medical sector.
Similarly, guaranteed income programs, delivered alongside other material benefits like housing, childcare, and health care, have emerged as important tools to assist people struggling to make ends meet. A guaranteed income can come in a variety of forms such as a periodic cash payment or an expansion of already existing tax credits. The goal is to make these payments significant enough to put those who most need them on a path to economic security and self-determination; and these programs have had great success. Over 100 guaranteed income pilots have emerged in cities and counties nationwide to provide life-changing, direct assistance to over 38,000 households combined. However, conservative legal activists have made increasing demands, backed by the threat of litigation, that local jurisdictions end guaranteed income programs that provide basic economic support for the most economically vulnerable, including people of color and LGBTQ+ people.
In 2020, for example, the Trump administration U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued a rule that significantly narrowed disparate impact liability under the FHA by adding new pleading and proof requirements for parties pursuing FHA claims, and new defenses for actors and entities named in those challenges. These actions made it more difficult to establish that policies and practices that disproportionately harm people of color and other protected groups violate the FHA.
The ACLU, with partners, served as counsel for the Open Communities Alliance and Southcoast Fair Housing to challenge the Trump administration’s gutting of the disparate impact standard. In companion litigation, a federal court enjoined the Trump administration’s regressive rule, concluding that its key provisions could not be “found in any judicial decision” and were “inadequately justified.” Ultimately, in 2023, and after we commented on the critical need to do so, HUD reinstated the 2013 discriminatory effects rule in the form of the Restoring HUD’s Discriminatory Effects Standard Final Rule. In so doing, HUD emphasized that the 2013 rule is more consistent with how the FHA has been applied in the courts and by HUD for more than 50 years, and that it more effectively implements the Act’s broad remedial purpose of eliminating unjustifiable discriminatory practices from the housing market.
Similarly, in 2018, the Trump administration suspended the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) Rule, and in 2020 issued a new Preserving Community and Neighborhood Choice Rule, thus repealing the 2015 AFFH Rule. The suspension and eventual repeal of the 2015 AFFH Rule undermined critical fair housing advancements and substantially weakened HUD’s authority and ability to meet its AFFH obligation underthe FHA. The 2015 AFFH Rule represented a critical step to ensure that entities such as HUD, states, local jurisdictions, and public housing authorities fulfilled their AFFH obligations by creating a framework to remove unfair barriers to housing, dismantle housing practices that entrench segregation, and increase access to housing and community assets for people of color and other vulnerable and marginalized groups. The 2015 rule required cities and towns to create a plan to address segregation and discrimination and to lay out concrete goals for bringing fair housing and opportunity to members of all the groups protected by the FHA.
Examples of these goals included building affordable housing in areas well-served by transit and prohibiting landlords from discriminating against people who use a government subsidy to pay rent. In the first few years it was in effect, the AFFH Rule was instrumental in making strides in attacking deeply rooted segregation and expanding access to housing. The AFFH Rule also proved valuable in surfacing harmful fair housing issues that were often overlooked. For example, the city of Ithaca, New York used the AFFH process to prioritize addressing policies and practices that displace victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking.
The ACLU, with partners, represented the National Fair Housing Alliance and other plaintiffs to challenge this suspension of the 2015 AFFH Rule. Like our challenges to the Trump administration’s 2020 disparate impact standard, this lawsuit provided an essential check on unlawful regulatory actions that gutted rules designed to root out discrimination in access to housing and undermined the fight for more inclusive communities – and are critical to ensure that unlawful actions to repeal or otherwise undermine regulations do not go into effect and harm the communities we serve. Should a second Trump administration renew its attacks on key fair housing protections and other essential civil rights protections through rulemaking or other executive action, the ACLU will again forcefully respond, building on the strategies we developed to oppose attacks on these rules and other actions under the prior Trump administration.
We will also file comments on any proposed notices of rulemaking or other federal regulatory action to explain the harms that these anticipated proposals will have on people of color, and other protected and historically marginalized groups, and why such actions are unlawful. These comments often play a critical role in forcing the federal government to consider the implications of their proposed actions on the communities we serve. They are also an essential step in creating the requisite record for successful challenges to these unlawful agency actions in any legal challenges brought under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which authorizes legal action to stop agency rules or other actions that are arbitrary, unsupported by substantial evidence, or otherwise contrary to law. To ultimately defeat efforts to undermine civil rights protections, we must engage in this record-making process.
For example, during the first Trump Administration, the ACLU submitted comments opposing the gutting of the AFFH Rule, and the proposal to substantially weaken HUD’s ability to impose disparate impact liability on bad actors. We have also submitted a comment in support of HUD’s more recent Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that built on steps previously taken in HUD’s 2015 AFFH Rule, while proposing critical improvements to requirements for states, local jurisdictions, public housing authorities, and other entities receiving HUD funding to create and implement equity plans — including with respect to community engagement — transparency, goal-setting, ways in which to measure progress, and accountability. We will work tirelessly to ensure that the AFFH Rule is restored, and to ensure that federal government actors understand how critical it is to combatting segregation and creating more inclusive communities.
The ACLU will insulate state and local DEI policy interventions designed to remedy persistent inequalities in critical areas such as public health and employment from attack.
In addition to fighting the rollback of federal anti-discrimination policies and attacks on racial justice efforts in court, the ACLU will work to insulate state and local policy interventions to address persistent inequalities in critical arenas and expand opportunity — policies that are often the fruits of considerable mobilization and advocacy by affected communities — from Trump administration attacks. In partnership with local affiliates on the ground, we can provide critical legal and strategic advice to ensure that such programs meet current legal standards.
DEI programs and initiatives date back to the civil rights movement. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 enforced school desegregation, outlawed employment discrimination based on race, religion, sex, color, and national origin, and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In response, public and private sector entities began utilizing initiatives and trainings to recruit and retain more people of color and women, and to create inclusive and welcoming educational institutions and workplaces. In addition, federal, state, and local governments used incentives and public contracting programs to expand opportunities for minority- and women-owned businesses. Over time, these initiatives and programs expanded access to education, employment, and public contacting opportunities for women, communities of color, LGBTQ+ communities, active military and veterans, and persons from low-income backgrounds.
These initiatives have also impacted critical fields, such as public health, and programs that provide critical interventions into persistent, deeply rooted inequalities. We know, for example, that there are significant racial disparities in health care that are closely linked to structural racism: According to the CDC, Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women due to variation in quality health care and implicit bias. Meanwhile, there is a significant underrepresentation of Black and Latine people in the medical profession: Research led by the Health Resources and Services Administration concluded that, on average, every 10 percent increase in the representation of Black primary care physicians in certain counties was associated with 30.6 days of greater life expectancy among Black people in those areas. To remedy historical discrimination and address these health outcome disparities, public and private scholarship and fellowship programs have been set up to support pathways to the medical profession for underrepresented medical professionals. In response, an organization named Do No Harm has brought a series of legal challenges to these scholarship and fellowship programs, as well as implicit bias trainings in the medical sector.
Similarly, guaranteed income programs, delivered alongside other material benefits like housing, childcare, and health care, have emerged as important tools to assist people struggling to make ends meet. A guaranteed income can come in a variety of forms such as a periodic cash payment or an expansion of already existing tax credits. The goal is to make these payments significant enough to put those who most need them on a path to economic security and self-determination; and these programs have had great success. Over 100 guaranteed income pilots have emerged in cities and counties nationwide to provide life-changing, direct assistance to over 38,000 households combined. However, conservative legal activists have made increasing demands, backed by the threat of litigation, that local jurisdictions end guaranteed income programs that provide basic economic support for the most economically vulnerable, including people of color and LGBTQ+ people.
Legal & Advocacy Response
We anticipate these attacks would intensify under a Trump administration and be joined by the federal government itself. In partnership with our network of state affiliates and chapters in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, we will seek to intervene in litigation to defend programs addressing racial disparities and fight further erosion of equal protection standards. We will also ramp up our existing work providing legal and strategic advice on current legal standards to local and state actors administering such programs, making sure that they are in the best position to both advance their mission and defend their work against a potential challenge.
At the federal level, the ACLU will work with organizations and policy researchers to explore and document the harmful impact of current anti-DEI laws. The ACLU will also work with coalitions to lobby the congressional caucuses and committees to investigate and document the dismantling of DEI programs in the public and private sector and the resulting social and economic impact on families and state and local governments. And, at the state and local level, the ACLU will lobby state governors and mayors to issue executive orders to create and expand state and locally funded DEI programs and initiatives.
We anticipate these attacks would intensify under a Trump administration and be joined by the federal government itself. In partnership with our network of state affiliates and chapters in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, we will seek to intervene in litigation to defend programs addressing racial disparities and fight further erosion of equal protection standards. We will also ramp up our existing work providing legal and strategic advice on current legal standards to local and state actors administering such programs, making sure that they are in the best position to both advance their mission and defend their work against a potential challenge.
At the federal level, the ACLU will work with organizations and policy researchers to explore and document the harmful impact of current anti-DEI laws. The ACLU will also work with coalitions to lobby the congressional caucuses and committees to investigate and document the dismantling of DEI programs in the public and private sector and the resulting social and economic impact on families and state and local governments. And, at the state and local level, the ACLU will lobby state governors and mayors to issue executive orders to create and expand state and locally funded DEI programs and initiatives.
Conclusion
Should Trump take office for a second term, he will pose an immediate and sweeping threat to our multiracial democracy. In an attempt to silence discussions about race and gender, his administration would attack academic freedom and students’ constitutional right to learn. Foundational legal principles of civil rights and equal protection law would be in the crosshairs, as would policies to reduce racial inequality. In the face of these threats, the ACLU stands ready to use all the tools available to us, including litigation and legislative and policy advocacy, to fight for the promise of our democracy and for full and equal freedoms for all of us, whether Black, Latine, Indigenous, Asian or white.
For information on copyright, usage rights, and privacy, please visit the ACLU Site User Agreement at https://www.aclu.org/about/aclu-site-user-agreement.
For information on accessibility, please visit the ACLU Statement on Website Accessibility at https://www.aclu.org/about/aclu-statement-accessibility.
Download PDF
Citations and endnotes can be found in the full, downloadable PDF.
Should Trump take office for a second term, he will pose an immediate and sweeping threat to our multiracial democracy. In an attempt to silence discussions about race and gender, his administration would attack academic freedom and students’ constitutional right to learn. Foundational legal principles of civil rights and equal protection law would be in the crosshairs, as would policies to reduce racial inequality. In the face of these threats, the ACLU stands ready to use all the tools available to us, including litigation and legislative and policy advocacy, to fight for the promise of our democracy and for full and equal freedoms for all of us, whether Black, Latine, Indigenous, Asian or white.
For information on copyright, usage rights, and privacy, please visit the ACLU Site User Agreement at https://www.aclu.org/about/aclu-site-user-agreement.
For information on accessibility, please visit the ACLU Statement on Website Accessibility at https://www.aclu.org/about/aclu-statement-accessibility.
Download PDF
Citations and endnotes can be found in the full, downloadable PDF.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/white-supremacy-returned-mainstream-politics/
Report: July 1, 2020
How White Supremacy Returned to Mainstream Politics
This report provides a guide to identifying and calling out the white nationalist ideas that are infiltrating U.S. political discourse.
This report provides a guide to identifying and calling out the white nationalist ideas that are infiltrating U.S. political discourse.
In this article:
Introduction and summary
Tracing the origins of white supremacist ideas
How did this start, and how can it end?
Conclusion
About the author
Neo-Nazis and white supremacists march through the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11, 2017. (Getty/Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency)
Introduction and summary
The United States is living through a moment of profound and positive change in attitudes toward race, with a large majority of citizens1 coming to grips with the deeply embedded historical legacy of racist structures and ideas. The recent protests and public reaction to George Floyd’s murder are a testament to many individuals’ deep commitment to renewing the founding ideals of the republic. But there is another, more dangerous, side to this debate—one that seeks to rehabilitate toxic political notions of racial superiority, stokes fear of immigrants and minorities to inflame grievances for political ends, and attempts to build a notion of an embattled white majority which has to defend its power by any means necessary. These notions, once the preserve of fringe white nationalist groups, have increasingly infiltrated the mainstream of American political and cultural discussion, with poisonous results. For a starting point, one must look no further than President Donald Trump’s senior adviser for policy and chief speechwriter, Stephen Miller.
In December 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch published a cache of more than 900 emails2 Miller wrote to his contacts at Breitbart News before the 2016 presidential election. Miller, who began his role in the Trump administration in 2017, is widely considered the president’s most ideologically extreme and bureaucratically effective adviser. Miller has been careful not to talk openly about his political views, so this correspondence proved to be revealing.
In the emails, Miller, an adviser to the Trump campaign at the time, advocated many of the most extreme white supremacist concepts. These included the “great replacement” theory, fears of white genocide through immigration, race science, and eugenics; he also linked immigrants with crime, glorified the Confederacy, and promoted the genocidal book, The Camp of the Saints, as a roadmap for U.S. policy. Anti-Semitism was the only missing white nationalist trope in the emails—perhaps unsurprisingly, as Miller himself is Jewish.
In many ways, this is a return of an old American political tradition rather than a wholly new phenomenon, but it has taken on a new form and uses a language that must be properly understood if it is to be successfully challenged. Concepts of white supremacy were at the heart of the defense of slavery and central to the Lost Cause myth that justified segregation after the fall of the Confederacy.
The fear of immigrants of different religious traditions also has a long history in the United States; it fueled nativist political party the Know Nothings of the 1850s and the racist rules of the 1924 Immigration Act, which among its many outrages prevented immigration from Asia and remained in effect until 1965. The renowned U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was one of the most distinguished proponents of eugenics, and the idea that immigrants bring crime and disorder dates back to the anti-Irish panics that occurred throughout the 19th century. Anti-Semitism, meanwhile, had been an ugly feature of American political discourse well before the 1913 lynching of Leo Frank prompted the founding of the Anti-Defamation League.3
Yet public attitudes thankfully have changed for the better. Recent polling shows that American attitudes toward racial integration and immigration have become more open among liberals and conservatives alike,4 with two-thirds of Americans in a recent Pew Research Center survey saying that “openness to people from all over the world is essential to who America is as a nation.” Intriguingly, the divide on this question is as much a factor of age as of political inclination. Pew’s research finds that
[t]he share of Americans holding the view that newcomers strengthen American society is 11 percentage points higher than it was in the spring of 2016: 57% now say this, up from 53% from March 2018 and 46% in May 2016. Both Democrats and Republicans are now more likely to view newcomers as strengthening the country than they were three years ago. Older Republicans are the least likely to see immigrants as strengthening the U.S. While roughly half of Republicans ages 18 to 34 (49%) say newcomers strengthen American society, just a third of Republicans ages 35 to 49 (33%) and 22% of those 50 and older say the same.5
In such a changing landscape, old-fashioned racist and xenophobic appeals are unlikely to be politically successful beyond a small fringe, so the propagandists of racism have had to develop subtler approaches to stoking fear and hatred for political ends. To do so, they have repackaged racist traditions in language and forms that could more easily enter mainstream political discourse.
This report explores the background of these poisonous concepts—reviewing their origins, development, and diffusion—and explores how white supremacist ideas have seeped into America’s mainstream political discourse, with some examples of politicians who traffic in this language. It then discusses ways to combat the spread of white nationalism in U.S. politics. This report is meant to help readers recognize and call out attempts to smuggle white supremacy into everyday politics and to support civic leaders of all political persuasions who stand up to this poison.
Tracing the origins of white supremacist ideas
There is little new in the ideas that underpin white nationalism, white supremacy, the alt-right, and fascism. At its core, white nationalism is little more than an attempt to cloak white supremacist ideas in the more respectable language of racial separatism, just as the alt-right has tried to repackage fascist thought in a more modern form. All these variants are built on common notions of a white identity and racial superiority. They promote hate and violence as valid political tools, rejecting values of equality, coexistence, and the rule of law in favor of raw power and ethnic division.
Derek Black, a former white nationalist leader who is now an academic who studies the origins of racist ideas, takes a cultural approach to understanding the movement by identifying its most significant symbols of identity. He defines a white nationalist as someone who interacts with information outlets primarily serving the white nationalist movement, is friends with other white nationalists, attends white nationalist events, and supports the cause financially and politically.6 Black explains that white nationalist ideas are totems that white nationalists use to show that they belong in the movement. Members spend a great deal of time defining and arguing about these terms as well as spreading them into mainstream society by trying to insert them into mass media.
Black is pointing to a central tactic in the political strategy of white nationalists and white supremacists. They understand that their cause is not widely popular and that they are losing the battles of ideas and demography. This reality pushes them to try to smuggle their ideas into mainstream dialogue by exploiting so-called fellow travelers and political opportunists. Recently, the movement has had notable success, particularly among American and European politicians who are exploiting fear for electoral ends. Matteo Salvini, the federal secretary of the Italian Northern League party and former deputy prime minister, called for closing the nation’s borders against the dangers of an Islamic invasion7; Victor Orbán aims to “keep Hungary as Hungary” by building a fence to keep immigrants out8 while persecuting the minority Roma community9; and Stephen Miller designs intentionally cruel immigration policies, which a court found risked substantial harm or death to those caught up in them.10 In these, and sadly too many other cases, the fear and hatred of others, be they of a different race, religion, or ethnicity, leads directly to cruel, xenophobic policies.
Most politicians know that being directly associated with white nationalism harms their reputation, so they use dog whistles, or euphemisms, to appeal to white nationalist supporters without alienating more moderate ones. Others have swapped their dog whistles for louder noisemakers; President Trump is perhaps the most notable example of a politician who uses this overt approach. By unpacking the core elements of white supremacist ideas, this report considers how these notions have spread into political conversation in the United States—and how some politicians have made this possible.
Racist rhetoric fueling dangerous ideologies and behavior
French author and far-right activist Renaud Camus coined the phrase “le grand remplacement” in a 2011 book11 to argue that Muslim immigration to France was a form of genocide against the country’s native population that required drastic action in response. This concept is not new. It echoes the ideas of early 20th-century American eugenicists Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, whose work F. Scott Fitzgerald lampooned in The Great Gatsby. The packaging is different, but the fresh language makes Camus’ ideas particularly dangerous.
Mass murderers who are inspired by white nationalism, from Anders Breivik in Norway and Dylann Roof in South Carolina to the Christchurch killer in New Zealand, echo Camus’ catchphrases in their writings. The vagueness of these catchphrases allows murderously minded individuals to apply the idea against anyone they may see as an outsider, including Muslims, Sikhs, Latinos, African Americans, Jews, and left-wing Norwegian activists. Fox News TV hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham regularly promote these ideas.12 For example, Ingraham once claimed that immigrants plan to “replace kind of the old America with a new America,” and Carlson said that he is “for Americans” because “nobody cares about them. It’s like, shut up, you’re dying, we’re gonna replace you.” There is even an environmentalist variant13 that exploits the climate crisis to push a racist agenda of keeping out immigrants and using violence to control increasingly scarce resources.
Perhaps it is because the case for the gains that immigrants bring to society14 is so overwhelming—particularly for the declining rural areas15 that have been the strongest supporters of the anti-immigrant agenda—that the language of its proponents has become so extreme. Only by frightening their supporters with images of uncontrolled migration can the propagandists of hate distract them from the value that immigrants can bring to their communities.
A French contribution to violent modern racism comes from Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel, The Camp of the Saints, which centers around an invasion of Indian refugees on the French coast. In his tale, French society and the military lose their nerve and do not massacre the migrants as they land on French shores, which leads to a total collapse of Western civilization. This book has been a central text for white supremacists since its publication, particularly after Cordelia Scaife May, heiress to the Mellon-Scaife fortunes, paid for its translation into English and its widespread distribution in the United States.16
During the early debate over the Trump administration’s Muslim ban, HuffPost uncovered17 speeches that former Trump adviser Steve Bannon had given in which he described The Camp of the Saints as his favorite book and quoted extensively from it. On an Iowa radio show in March 2017, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) encouraged listeners to read the book, spelling out Raspail’s name so they would not be confused.18
The invocation of The Camp of the Saints to paint any darker-skinned immigrants as an existential threat to white America and Europe combines with a strain of Islamophobia into a particularly toxic mix. Bannon talked about this explicitly in a speech he gave in the Vatican, where he praised the Roman Catholic Church for keeping Islam out of the Western world, referencing the Battle of Tours (A.D. 732) and the Siege of Vienna (A.D. 1529) and suggesting that the rise of the Islamic State group was the beginning of a generational conflict between Islam and Christianity.19 In his words, “There is a major war brewing, a war that’s already global. It’s going global in scale, and today’s technology, today’s media, today’s access to weapons of mass destruction, it’s going to lead to a global conflict that I believe has to be confronted today.” In this kind of apocalyptic scenario, white supremacists argue, any tactics are acceptable.
This is the logic that led to the Trump administration’s Muslim ban in January 2017. The cruel policy has separated families, made it harder for students and visitors to come to the United States, and poisoned diplomatic relations with U.S. allies and friends20—all while doing nothing to make the country safer. The ban makes perfect sense in a political context where stoking fear of the stranger is the road to winning elections. But it is not just Muslims who are the scapegoats this time.
When President Trump deployed U.S. troops to the border with Mexico in 2018, he made an inflammatory statement: “If they want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back. I told them to consider it a rifle.”21 That President Trump’s words echoed the last scene of The Camp of the Saints did not go unnoticed by the American far-right. Neo-Nazi group National Vanguard even wrote an article about the deployment titled, “Camp of the Saints Invasion on the US-Mexico Border: 97% Increase as 2,714 Invade Every Day,”22 in which the group claimed that allowing immigration from Central America would lower the average IQ of Americans. Again, the ideas that underpinned social Darwinism and Nazi ideology are recycled for the modern age.
An obsession with genetics and intelligence has long been a hallmark of white supremacists. It is also one that they share with President Trump, who loves to boast that his good genes and high IQ23 are the secret to his success in life.24
As many commentators have noted,25 President Trump’s claim that immigrants will “infest our Country” directly echoes Nazi propaganda and other precursors to genocidal violence. Most recently, for example, Rwandan state media described the Tutsi population as cockroaches to be eliminated.26 President Trump’s most fervent allies propagate his words. In 2012, Ken Cuccinelli—now the second-highest ranking official at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security—compared immigrants to rats in a recent interview.27
As psychologist Albert Bandura explains,28 dehumanization is a form of moral disengagement that allows people to abandon normal human sympathies toward oppressed minorities. Dehumanization allows politicians and the public to excuse abuses against migrants—and it mobilizes voters through fear. Former Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski described this approach before the 2018 midterms:29 “If you want to get people motivated, you’ve got to give them a reason to vote. Saying ‘build the wall and stop illegals from coming in and killing American citizens’ gives them an important issue.” Fortunately, most Americans retain a basic sense of decency that makes them recoil at the idea of putting kids in cages and separating families,30 but President Trump and his advisers see his approach to immigration as a winning issue. That became clear at this year’s State of the Union speech, where Trump brought a senior U.S. Border Patrol official and falsely claimed that immigrants increase crime and that sanctuary cities threaten American security.
When President Trump announced his presidential run in 2015, his comments about Mexico underpinned the logic of his campaign. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”31 The brutality and clarity of these words were startling and politically effective. Trump is not alone in linking immigration to crime; it has long been a staple of right-wing propaganda. A more recent example comes from Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who in February 2019 told32 the parents of children killed in the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that they were wrong to advocate for H.R. 8, the bill that would have mandated background checks for gun purchases. “I hope we don’t forget the pain and anguish and sense of loss felt by those all over the country who have been the victims of violence at the hands of illegal aliens,” he said. “H.R. 8 would not have stopped the circumstances I raised, but a wall, a barrier on the southern border may have, and that’s what we’re fighting for.”
Not only did Rep. Gaetz’s assertion do nothing to comfort grieving parents or address the gun violence affecting American schools, but research33 also shows that immigration tends to reduce crime in the United States. Linking immigration to crime serves only as a way to activate a fear of strangers, which can increase support for authoritarian solutions that promise to protect the so-called native population.
The Tree of Life synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh was driven by the conspiracy theory that immigration is a Jewish plot to pollute the white race.34 This core concept of anti-Semitism was popularized in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery created and disseminated by the Russian Imperial secret service that has mutated and changed over time but never fully disappeared. The latest iteration is the Kalergi Plan,35 a conspiracy theory that is particularly popular in the Italian far-right36 that posits a Jewish plan to undermine white European society through miscegenation and mass migration. In the United States, this theory has been promoted by conservative commentator Candace Owens and other Trump supporters.37
Also, on Twitter, the official congressional account of Rep. Gaetz promoted the conspiracy theory that billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros was funding a caravan of migrants from Central America.38 White nationalists frequently invoke Soros, who is Jewish, as the mastermind of policies that aim to corrupt a pure white race by promoting immigration. The 2018 tweet read:
BREAKING: Footage in Honduras giving cash 2 women & children 2 join the caravan & storm the US border @ election time. Soros? US-backed NGOs? Time to investigate the source!
This notion was echoed in the Trump campaign’s 2018 midterm election strategy, which inspired Cesar Sayoc to send pipe bombs through the mail to Democratic leaders, among other prominent figures.39 President Trump once again demonstrated this approach when he spoke at a March 2019 rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on the topic of his border wall. “National emergency it is,” he said. “And if you look at the border and you look at the hundreds of thousands of people that are invading or at least trying to invade our country you would know that we needed and we are building it.”40 After the shock of the shootings in El Paso, Texas, later that year—when the murderer’s writings echoed so clearly the language of invasion frequently used by Fox News and President Trump—Adam Serwer of The Atlantic41 and Robert Mackey of The Intercept provided a useful summary of how the language of invasion42 has become Trump supporters’ default immigration framing. In this context, the border wall becomes an existential defense against a threat of what a pro-Trump armed militia calls “an unarmed invasion”43 that requires a military response.44
Embracing conspiracy theories
President Trump’s campaign rhetoric surrounding immigration and invasion is the point at which he appears to most closely align with white supremacist concepts. Stopping immigration is the central aim of white nationalism, as white nationalists see this as the only way of stopping immigrants from taking power away from a white majority. To achieve their goal, white nationalists have typically tied the diversification of America to a Jewish plot. Again, there is nothing fundamentally new in this approach. Daniel Okrent’s The Guarded Gate45 chronicles the history of the post-World War I anti-immigrant panic, which was fueled by the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and led to the 1924 Immigration Control Act. This law was based on social Darwinist theories positing the racial inferiority of Italians and Jews and remained on the books until the passage of President Lyndon Johnson’s Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. White nationalists see this later law as the beginning of the end of the United States as an Aryan nation.46
These views are what undergirded the chant, “You will not replace us. Jews will not replace us,”47 at the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a white nationalist murdered a woman and injured 35 others. President Trump’s response to the riot— saying that there were “very fine people, on both sides”48—provided implicit support for these positions. Notably, President Trump does not oppose all immigration; for example, he has said that immigrants from Norway would be welcome in the United States.49
A more recent conspiracy theory—one that emerged seriously in the United States after 9/11—seeks to portray all Muslims as threats to Americans, either as potential terrorists or advocates for Sharia. As the Center for American Progress documented in the “Fear Inc.” report in 2011,50 this theory has been promoted by a tight-knit group of donors and misinformation outlets.
This general trend toward Islamophobia—most clearly manifested in President Trump’s Muslim ban—exists in combination with an even more extreme conspiracy theory: that there is a secret plan to impose Sharia in the United States. David Yerushalmi, of the American Freedom Law Center, and ACT! for America have promoted this idea with remarkable success; Texas and Arkansas have enacted model legislation promoted by these groups.51 Since 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center has catalogued52 201 anti-Sharia bills in various states that have stigmatized Islam as a danger to America.
Glorifying a racist past
The fierce debate over the removal of Confederate monuments in 2017 brought to the fore a strain of reactionary political thought in American politics that many assumed had vanished. From the battles against Reconstruction to the Dixiecrats to former Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s (D) presidential campaigns, the glorification of the Confederacy as a cover for racist, antidemocratic policies has a long history. Professor W. Fitzhugh Brundage has studied the history of Confederate monuments,53 finding that they were erected in periods of social change—particularly after Reconstruction and during the civil rights movement—as an explicit reaction against movements for racial equality and as assertions of white supremacy.54
Neo-Confederates claim the status of a noble minority that is oppressed by a federal government that threatens their way of life, which mainly consists of the ability to hold down nonwhite voters. This current approach,55 demonstrated most clearly by the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, dispenses with these circumlocutions. It links support for the Lost Cause directly to an advocacy of racial hierarchy. Tellingly, when President Trump was forced to condemn the actions of the Charlottesville rioters, he was careful to do so in ways that did not challenge the ideas that they had espoused.
The glorification of the Confederacy and of a time in American history that sought to oppress and erase people of color is part of a project to redefine true Americans as only those with European heritage.
Former Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan put the cultural genocide argument clearly when defending President Trump’s categorization of developing African nations as “shithole countries.”56 He explained that nonwhite immigrants tend to vote Democratic and thus are a threat to what he called “America’s vanishing white majority.”57
Buchanan’s 1992 campaign for president was a direct precursor to the revival of white supremacism seen today. As writer John Ganz explained in a brilliant review of this strange race,58 Buchanan carefully studied the unexpected success of neo-Nazi and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke’s gubernatorial campaigns in Louisiana (and then brief presidential campaign). While other Republicans were dismayed by the rise of a former Klan leader in their party, Buchanan saw it as an opportunity to appropriate Duke’s mix of anti-Semitism and Confederate nostalgia in a populist run against incumbent President George H.W. Bush. The formula worked astonishingly well in the 1992 New Hampshire primary; the state had suffered from the economic downturn after the Gulf War, and voters looking for help resented Bush’s focus on international affairs.59
Buchanan launched his campaign with a speech in which he called for “a new nationalism” that would put “America first”—language that Steve Bannon would echo decades later. This, Buchanan argued, would ensure “our Western heritage is going to be handed down to future generations, not dumped onto some landfill called multi-culturalism.”60 In an astonishing reversal for Bush—whose popularity had risen to more than 90 percent only a year earlier—Buchanan won 40 percent61 of the vote in New Hampshire, scrambling the race and encouraging Ross Perot to launch his third-party bid. Although Bush was ultimately victorious, with Buchanan fading as a political force, his campaign nonetheless demonstrated the power of white supremacist ideas allied to economic populism.
Samuel Francis, one of Buchanan’s advisers and intellectual mentors, explained the power of his approach in a 1996 essay62 that prefigures many of the themes of the white supremacist lexicon, using “Ruling Class,” as a euphemism for Jews:
The “cultural war” for Buchanan is not Republican swaggering about family values and dirty movies but a battle over whether the nation itself can continue to exist under the onslaught of the militant secularism, acquisitive egoism, economic and political globalism, demographic inundation, and unchecked state centralism supported by the Ruling Class…
…the economic interests as well as the cultural habits and ideologies of the Ruling Class drive it toward globalization—the managed destruction of the nation, its sovereignty, its culture, and its people—while those of Middle Americans drive them toward support for and reenforcement of the nation and its organic way of life.
Commentators horrified by President Trump’s use of paranoid, xenophobic ideas to distract from his kleptocracy and incompetence should recognize the precedent—even if Buchanan never quite made it to the White House.
In 2019, Rep. King argued, “If we presume that every culture is equal and has an equal amount to contribute to our civilization, then we’re devaluing the contributions of the people that laid the foundation for America and that’s our founding fathers. It is not about race, it’s never been about race. It is about culture.”63
Not only does this assertion attempt to erase the very real contributions of a diverse number of Americans to their nation, but it also unsurprisingly links back to an anti-Semitic trope—cultural Marxism—in which a group of Jewish intellectuals in the Frankfurt School are seen as the architects of a plot to destroy Western civilization by making the case for racial integration.64 Mass shooter Anders Breivik focused on this in his justification for murdering Norwegian social democratic activists in 2011, and the theory recurs in other recent white nationalist writings as well as in the text65 that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.66How did this start, and how can it end?
Ashley E. Jardina’s 2019 book, White Identity Politics,67 examined the rise of a distinctive white identity among Americans by reviewing data that the American National Election Studies (ANES) has collected since 2012. In 2016, the ANES added additional questions to its survey, which Jardina proposed, giving additional insight into white identity and consciousness. Jardina’s core finding was:
For a number of whites, these monumental social and political trends – including an erosion of whites’ majority status and the election of America’s first black president – have signaled a challenge to the absoluteness of whites’ dominance. These threats, both real and perceived, have … brought to the fore, for many whites, a sense of commonality, attachment, and solidarity with their racial group. They have led a sizeable proportion of whites to believe that their racial group, and the benefits that group enjoys, are endangered. As a result, this racial solidarity now plays a central role in the way many whites orient themselves to the political and social world.
Jardina is clear that this does not map to a racist set of beliefs for the great majority of respondents who expressed a heightened sense of white identity, but she warns that such beliefs could become widespread: “These aggrieved whites are a potentially untapped well, one whose resentments are primed, ready to be stoked by politicians willing to go down a potentially very dark path.”
It is worth emphasizing that white identity and nativism are a real lever for a significant minority of whites—and will continue to be for decades. A demographic voting bloc that sees itself losing cultural and then political power—but that holds disproportionate per capita voting power because of its geographical distribution and the antidemocratic features of U.S. governance—is likely to be a long-lasting force against progressivism and multiracial coalitions.
The central political question, then, is how to move away from this latest dark turn in American politics. As Jardina points out, there is a wide distance between voters who feel an activated sense of white identity and white nationalists. Just as politicians and terrorists who traffic in white nationalism work to narrow this gap, defenders of democratic values must work to widen and completely expose it by making clear how racism is used to promote class interests. Ian Haney Lopez, an activist and law professor at University of California, Berkeley, has shown68 that a message that fuses race and class interests can defuse the power of racial appeals. He tested nine versions of such a message, which can be summarized as follows:
No matter where we come from or what our color is, most of us work hard for our families, but today, certain politicians and their greedy lobbyists hurt everyone by handing kickbacks to the rich, defunding our schools, and threatening seniors with cutting Medicare and Social Security. Then they turn around and point the finger for hard times at poor families, black people, and new immigrants. We need to join together with people from all walks of life to fight for our future, just like we won better wages, safer workspaces, and civil rights in our past. By joining together, we can elect new leaders who work for all of us, not just the wealthy few.
Among 2,000-person population samples that had—alarmingly—previously demonstrated receptivity to coded racist appeals, each version of this message scored higher than the most effective messages of racial division.
Constantly emphasizing the inherently violent, antidemocratic, and racist nature of white nationalist ideas can be an effective way of discrediting those who promote these ideologies. Elevating thoughtful voices who have credibility among voters with a strong sense of white identity is particularly helpful; for example, elevating conservative critics of white nationalism with strong security credentials could be a useful technique. In addition, mixing traditional liberal critiques of racist ideas with strong appeals to unifying national symbols and traditions can be a powerful rhetorical device to appeal to traditionalist-minded voters. After all, the United States won the battle against fascism in World War II—the fascists were the enemies of freedom then, and they still are today. The fight against white nationalism should unite activists of the left with those of the nonxenophobic right. Groups who may well disagree on many other issues need to work together against a common enemy that threatens the United States’ democratic foundations for resolving disagreements.
The logic set out in Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland is pithily expressed in the book’s subtitle. The political challenge is to expose the con and help steer a broad, multiracial majority toward a more inclusive politics. The popular revolt in Slovakia69 in April 2018, which led to the downfall of the government there, provides an interesting template. The revolt—against a populist, Russian-influenced and corrupt regime that used anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence to stay in power—used a combination of public pressure and unity between traditional rivals to overthrow what had appeared to be a well-entrenched government. This government used resentment against Roma and traditions of xenophobia to cloak kleptocratic and ultimately murderous motives. Generosity of spirit among former opponents and a concentration on the urgent work at hand, along with activating public disgust against a corrupt, predatory style of politics, was the secret to victory.
A broad coalition of voices in political and civil society needs to ostracize politicians who traffic in white nationalist language for political benefit. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s surprise bestseller, How Democracies Die,70 showed how, in the 1930s, countries such as Belgium whose conservative parties rejected alliances with fascist ones were able to resist the contagion, while countries where mainstream conservatives tolerated fascist ideas or joined in coalitions with them succumbed. The same dynamic remains at play in combating white supremacy, which is why broad coalitions are necessary to set the boundaries of acceptable political discourse and enforce them.
Conclusion
In the U.S. context, the revulsion against white nationalist terrorist attacks, as well as recent serious law enforcement efforts to deal with them, are encouraging signs. Crucially, nonpartisan security forces are holding, for now, against a white nationalist drift in the administration, and movements that reject this agenda are emerging across the political spectrum. More recently, the U.S. military refused to be pulled into repressing legitimate protests following a series of high-profile cases of police brutality against Black people, and the chorus of storied retired officers reminding those currently serving of the meeting of their oath was impressive.71 The story among police forces is more complex—with some worrying signs of white nationalist sympathies72 and susceptibility to QAnon conspiracies73—though it is worth noting that the FBI’s strong counterterrorist capability continues, so far, to avert white supremacist terror attacks.74 The country cannot count on the FBI to always be as successful as it has been so far; a mass casualty white supremacist terror attack could inflame the situation beyond easy repair, which makes it even more urgent to win the ideological debate now, while continuing to hope that no such attack takes place.
The challenge is to expose white nationalist ideologues—and the opportunistic politicians who are appropriating their language—to demonstrate that these ideas are fundamentally un-American and are all too often a cover for corruption, graft, and racism. Politicians, opinion-makers, and public figures from all political traditions have a patriotic duty to stand up to white supremacy and call it out for what it is: a betrayal of the ideals on which the United States was founded and for which Americans have fought and died ever since.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Simon Clark is a nonresident senior fellow for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress, where he leads the work on combating violent white supremacy.
For 15 years, Clark built and led Fidelity’s European venture capital business before moving to Generation Investment Management, the sustainability-focused investing firm, following a career in technology startups, finance, and online media. He retired in 2016.
Clark is the chair of the board of Foreign Policy for America, an advocacy group for principled U.S. engagement in the world, and of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a U.K.-based nonprofit that seeks to disrupt the architecture of online hate and disinformation. He was educated at Westminster School and Wadham College, Oxford, where he read Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE).
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Derek Black for his insights into the dynamics of white supremacist radicalization.
The positions of American Progress, and our policy experts, are independent, and the findings and conclusions presented are those of American Progress alone.
American Progress would like to acknowledge the many generous supporters who make our work possible.
The author would like to thank Derek Black for his insights into the dynamics of white supremacist radicalization.
The positions of American Progress, and our policy experts, are independent, and the findings and conclusions presented are those of American Progress alone.
American Progress would like to acknowledge the many generous supporters who make our work possible.
Analysis: At Least 5 Project 2025 Contributors Espouse White Supremacist Views
Trump has embraced Project 2025 as a blueprint for how he will govern if he wins the White House.
by Chris Walker
July 30, 2024
Republican presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump (center) and Republican vice presidential candidate, Sen. J.D. Vance, appear on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 15, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.Andrew Harnik / Getty Images
A new analysis of Project 2025 contributors shows that at least five people associated with the far right roadmap for how a Trump presidency should operate have a history of making white supremacist statements.
These five individuals, who took part in crafting the Heritage Foundation document, expressed racist views against nonwhite groups, demeaned the intelligence of Black and Latinx people, and argued against the idea of birthright citizenship as established in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. Some of these contributors also have connections with GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, having previously worked for him in the White House or been nominated by him to serve in executive branch departments.
The analysis, published in USA Today on Monday, confirms other examinations of Project 2025 that have showcased the document’s white supremacist agenda. The missive, for example, frequently derides liberals for supposedly pushing “woke” culture, with one author in the document baselessly complaining that rules and regulations aimed at reducing racial disparities have “spread throughout the federal government with identity politics and ‘social justice’ advocacy replacing such traditional American values as patriotism, colorblindness, and even workplace competence.”
The USA Today analysis showcases how five specific contributors have repeatedly expressed white supremacist sentiments. It includes:
These five individuals, who took part in crafting the Heritage Foundation document, expressed racist views against nonwhite groups, demeaned the intelligence of Black and Latinx people, and argued against the idea of birthright citizenship as established in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. Some of these contributors also have connections with GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, having previously worked for him in the White House or been nominated by him to serve in executive branch departments.
The analysis, published in USA Today on Monday, confirms other examinations of Project 2025 that have showcased the document’s white supremacist agenda. The missive, for example, frequently derides liberals for supposedly pushing “woke” culture, with one author in the document baselessly complaining that rules and regulations aimed at reducing racial disparities have “spread throughout the federal government with identity politics and ‘social justice’ advocacy replacing such traditional American values as patriotism, colorblindness, and even workplace competence.”
The USA Today analysis showcases how five specific contributors have repeatedly expressed white supremacist sentiments. It includes:
- Richard Hanania, who wrote racist essays under a pseudonym for years until his writings were discovered by HuffPost last year. Hanania wrote in support of eugenics and forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, which he suggested in his arguments were mostly Black people;
- Corey Stewart, a failed GOP Senate candidate from Virginia. Stewart made attacks against nonwhite immigrants and defenses of Confederate symbols centerpieces of his campaign in 2018;
- Michael Anton, a former senior national security official in the Trump White House. Anton also wrote essays under a pseudonym in 2016 that complained about a “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty,” and has called for an end to birthright citizenship, with at least one academic noting that his writings were “very racist”;
- Stephen Moore, who, in 2019, was considered for a position on the Federal Reserve Board by then-President Donald Trump. Moore withdrew his nomination after past racist and misogynistic statements and jokes resurfaced;
- And Jason Richwine, a right-wing political commentator. In his PhD thesis in college, Richwine argued that Latinx people inherently had lower IQs than white people, stating that, “The prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”
The far right manifesto has become a talking point for Democrats, who argue that Trump will implement much of Project 2025’s agenda if he’s elected to office again. Trump has desperately attempted to distance himself from Project 2025.
“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it,” Trump claimed earlier this month.
But Trump does have connections to contributors to Project 2025, as well as to the Heritage Foundation, which spearheaded the creation of the document. According to one examination, at least 140 people who were involved in crafting the document have worked for Trump in the past.
Trump has also previously embraced Project 2025. Speaking at a Heritage-sponsored event in 2022, Trump spoke glowingly about a project the organization was working on, vowing to use it as a blueprint for his second term in office should he win in 2024.
The document, which later became known as Project 2025, will “lay the groundwork” for the future of conservatism, Trump explained, adding that it would generate “detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025 may be due to a recognition that many of the proposals it contains are strongly opposed by American voters. But promoters of Project 2025 have contradicted Trump’s claims that he’s not associated with the document.
“The general sense is this is a PR gesture for [Trump] to provide himself maximum room to maneuver and avoid making any commitments at this point,” an anonymous person on the Project 2025 advisory board told NBC News. “He wants to avoid having to answer questions about anything he doesn’t want to answer questions about. Most people I know who are involved with it don’t seem overly worried that this actually constitutes a repudiation and is going to mean anything on January 20.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Chris Walker
Chris Walker is a news writer at Truthout, and is based out of Madison, Wisconsin. Focusing on both national and local topics since the early 2000s, he has produced thousands of articles analyzing the issues of the day and their impact on the American people. He can be found on most social media platforms under the handle @thatchriswalker.
"What's Past is Prologue..."
https://capitalandmain.com/the-white-supremacist-house-extremism-in-the-trump-administration-video
Featured Video
The White Supremacist House: Extremism in the Trump Administration
At least 12 past and present Trump administration staffers have ties to neo-Nazi and anti-immigrant hate groups:
https://vimeo.com/449984673?fl=pl&fe=sh
https://capitalandmain.com/presidential-white-power-0825
CAPITOL AND MAIN
Investigating Money, Power, and Society
Investigating Money, Power, and Society
Latest News
Presidential White Power
At least a dozen White House figures have ties to racist and anti-immigrant groups. But there’s a long history of this.
by Marco Amador
August 25, 2020
Capitol and Main
White supremacy is as American as the Constitution – and as presidential as the marbled halls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The White House, constructed with the labor of more than 200 African-American slaves, shows that from the very beginning, the phrase “all men are created equal” applied only to white male citizens. Unfortunately, white supremacy within this building is not only part of its foundation, but of its legacy.
Watch Video — “The White Nationalist House: Extremism in the Trump Administration”
Most of our “founding” fathers, including our first president, were slave owners. But these important white men were more than mere products of their time. They laid the intellectual groundwork of American white nationalism. For example, Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. president and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, also authored white supremacist theories. Jefferson, in his only published full-length book, Notes on the State of Virginia, wrote: “The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by everyone, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life.” Jefferson also pushed Congress to pass the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves in 1808, ending the international slave trade — while legalizing domestic slave commerce.
“This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government for white men.”
— President Andrew Johnson
In 1830, the seventh president of the United States, Andrew Jackson, signed the Indian Removal Act. Jackson, who owned more than a hundred slaves, also felt that Native Americans were inferior to white men. Nearly 50,000 Native Americans were forcibly removed from their land via the law. He said: “Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear.” The Indian Removal Act further solidified the cotton and slave industry in the South by opening up millions of acres of land to white settlers. More than 15,000 Native Americas died in the removals.
The American Civil War catapulted the nation into direct conflict with some of these founding principles and early statutes by eradicating slavery. These advances were stopped immediately after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln; his successor, President Andrew Johnson, wrote: “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government for white men.” Johnson returned seized Confederate land to its rebel owners.
A half century later, President Woodrow Wilson hosted a screening of Birth of a Nation in the White House. The film is a cinematic adaptation of The Clansman, the second novel of a trilogy that depicts Ku Klux Klan members as romantic heroes who save the nation from freed African slaves and the chaos they unleash upon their former masters. The film and the book promoted the “Lost Cause” movement, whose pseudo-historical ideology claimed that the Civil War was not primarily about slavery and its abolition but was about Southern “states’ rights.”
Herbert Hoover supported and encouraged the illegal deportations of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. His administration used the slogan,“American jobs for real Americans.”
The film and the trilogy inspired the revival of the Klan months after the screening. But Wilson’s embrace of the film was not the only sign that his administration believed and supported white supremacy. Wilson’s Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels was an outspoken white supremacist and segregationist. Daniels was known as one of the perpetrators of the Wilmington massacre of 1898, a white race riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, in which 2,000 armed white men killed at least 60 African-Americans.
* * *
After World War I, white supremacists within the federal government turned their attention to immigration. President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924, legislation co-authored by Congressman Albert Johnson, a eugenicist who opposed interracial marriage and immigration. The bill was inspired by eugenics race theories that heavily favored migration from the “racially superior” Northern European countries. In his first address to Congress, President Coolidge said: “America must be kept American.”
The Great Depression would offer yet another opportunity to mix white supremacist thought and immigration policy. Due to soaring unemployment rates throughout the country, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were targeted and blamed for the economic crisis. In 1929, President Herbert Hoover’s administration helped forcibly repatriate as many as 1.8 million Mexican and Mexican-Americans to Mexico; about 60 percent were American citizens.
Although most of the “repatriation drives” were executed by local and state officials, President Hoover supported and encouraged them. “American jobs for real Americans” was his administration’s slogan to justify these illegal deportations. Hoover’s Secretary of Labor, William N. Doak, said, “My conviction is that by strict limitation and a wise selection of immigration, we can make America stronger in every way, hastening the day when our population shall be more homogeneous.”
In 1953, Dwight Eisenhower launched “Operation Wetback,” a military-style deportation campaign aimed at Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, allowing the U.S. government to forcibly relocate and incarcerate more than 117,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans in concentration camps after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The executive order was challenged as unconstitutional in the U.S. Supreme Court, but it was ultimately upheld. Associate Justice Hugo Black wrote the majority opinion in favor of supporting the order. Black, a Roosevelt appointee, had belonged to the Ku Klux Klan before his political and legal career. Dissenting Associate Justice Frank Murphy wrote that the executive order “falls into the ugly abyss of racism” and represented the “legalization of racism.” The concentration camps remained in operation until 1946.
* * *
Even after some historic victories against Jim Crow laws, President Dwight Eisenhower refused to endorse Brown v. Board of Education. Eisenhower allegedly told Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren that white Southerners “are not bad people” and that they were concerned that “their sweet little girls [are not] required to sit in school alongside some big black buck.” Eisenhower’s public protest only continued to delay the court-mandated desegregation of schools. But this was not the only example of Eisenhower’s administration showing its sympathy for white supremacist ideas. In 1953, Eisenhower launched “Operation Wetback,” a military-style deportation campaign aimed at Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service reported that 1.1 million people had been deported or removed under the operation.
In 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the historic Civil Rights Act challenged decades of white supremacy; unfortunately, we now know that many of LBJ’s private and off-the-record conversations were laced with racial slurs to describe African-Americans. Almost at the same time, Johnson’s administration ordered the FBI to run surveillance of African-American civil rights leaders and organizations. LBJ’s administration saw the expansion of programs like COINTELPRO (created in 1956 to track the Communist Party’s activities), whose attention was shifted almost entirely to the Black freedom movement. Johnson’s support for then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s efforts to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” these individuals and organizations are historically unquestionable. Hoover and his COINTELPRO program continued to wreak havoc on African-American, Indigenous, Puerto Rican and Mexican-American communities during the Johnson and Nixon administrations.
Donald Trump’s administration seems to be resurrecting the long historical line of blatant, unabashed support for white supremacy.
As the United States drew closer to the 21st century, White House support for white supremacy was muted into racially coded policies, including presidents Nixon’s and Reagan’s “War on Drugs.” These policies led to generations of mass incarceration and racial stereotyping that are still affecting communities today. Recently rediscovered taped conversations between then-California Gov. Reagan and President Nixon captured Reagan musing, “To see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!”
Today, President Donald Trump’s administration seems to be resurrecting the long historical line of blatant, unabashed support for white supremacy. From the day of its launch in 2015, Trump’s first presidential campaign reverberated with the wailing of anti-immigrant xenophobia. “They’re bringing drugs,” he said of Mexican immigrants. “They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Trump’s then-chief strategist was Steve Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, the self-proclaimed “platform for the alt-right” – a term created by white nationalist Richard Spencer to describe a far-right movement centered on white nationalism. Although President-elect Donald Trump would disavow the alt-right movement and Bannon denied being a white nationalist, the stage was set for the Trump administration’s acceptance of white supremacy and white supremacists.
* * *
Capital & Main has found that at least 12 current and past vital officials and staffers within the Trump administration have ties to neo-Nazi, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant nativist hate groups. Stephen Miller, President Trump’s senior policy adviser, is deeply connected with a known hate group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). He was the principal architect of Executive Order 13769, otherwise known as the Muslim Ban, and the Trump administration’s family separation policy. In September 2019, hundreds of Miller’s private emails were leaked to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit organization known for its identification of hate groups and other extremist organizations.
The emails were direct communications with Breitbart News editors from March 2015 through June 2016, with the majority exchanged before Miller joined the Trump campaign team. The emails show a pattern of sympathy for white nationalism and anti-foreigner conspiracy theories — all while referencing a “white genocide”-themed novel called The Camp of the Saints. The book was written in 1973 and is considered a racist, xenophobic and anti-immigrant classic. The Camp of the Saints is a favorite among white nationalist websites like VDare and the American Renaissance. The French novel depicts the end of modern Western civilization due to immigration. The book was promoted by Steve Bannon, Republican Congressman Steve King, France’s National Rally leader Marine Le Pen and by Special Assistant to President Trump Julia Hahn.
When COVID-19 began to rage through the United States, its citizens looked to the administration for hope and unity. Instead, they found xenophobic policies and statements by the president and his staff. As the virus took hold, President Trump intentionally coined the term “Chinese Virus”; not soon after, harassment and crimes targeting Asian-Americans began to rise. The organization Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center recently released a report documenting more than 800 incidents of discrimination and harassment in the last three months in California against Asian-Americans. But instead of apologizing and changing course, the president doubled down. At his highly criticized campaign rally in Tulsa, the president called the coronavirus the “Kung Flu.” And during the first night of the 2020 Republican National Convention, Trump said, “We are doing an incredible job on the China virus!”
The president’s words recall the xenophobic environment created by another president, Chester A. Arthur, who signed, in 1882, the infamous “Chinese Exclusion Act,” which stopped Chinese workers from migrating to the United States. On the policy level, instead of confronting the COVID-19 crisis head on, the Trump administration tried to use the coronavirus to further its restrictive immigration agenda. In April, the president vowed to halt all immigration to the United States. The executive order eventually fell short of that pledge but it continues to be updated, with more restrictions being added.
Today the United States is the epicenter of the global pandemic, while racial inequalities have made themselves very apparent – we see that Black and Latino Americans are affected by COVID-19 at disproportionately higher rates than whites. But we have also witnessed a reckoning against the inequalities that the virus has exposed, from mass marches to end the police killing of Black people to the toppling of Confederate and other historical statues that represent white supremacy. History reveals that white supremacy in America is older than the White House, but current events show that many Americans, especially the young, seem ready to fight it.
Copyright 2020 Capital & Main
Related Topics:
Donald Trump
hate crimes
Immigrationracism
https://www.nuorigins.com/trump-has-declared-war-on-black-america/
Trump has Declared War on Black America
March 20, 2025
Nu Origins
Featured News
Politics & Society
In recent months, the U.S. government has enacted a series of policies and executive orders that disproportionately and adversely affect Black Americans. These measures span various sectors, including criminal justice, civil rights, education, and employment, collectively signaling a systemic undermining of progress made towards racial equality.
Rescission of Policing Reforms
One of the most significant actions has been the revocation of Executive Order 14074, initially signed in 2022 to promote accountable policing and enhance public trust, particularly within Black and brown communities. This order sought to reform policing practices by restricting no-knock warrants, banning chokeholds, and establishing a national database for police misconduct. The rescission of this order on January 20, 2025, removes critical federal oversight designed to protect Black Americans from discriminatory and violent policing practices.
The absence of these protections may lead to an increase in unchecked police misconduct and a deterioration of trust between law enforcement and Black communities. Historically, Black Americans have been disproportionately affected by aggressive policing tactics. Eliminating federal guidelines aimed at curbing such practices could exacerbate these disparities, resulting in further marginalization and injustice.
Promotion of Punitive Criminal Justice Policies
The administration’s endorsement of Project 2025 introduces an extremely punitive approach to justice, based on the erroneous assumption that harsher punishments lead to less crime. This initiative calls on the Department of Justice to do “everything possible” to execute individuals currently on federal death row and expands the number of cases that qualify for a death sentence. Given the racial disparities in the application of the death penalty, with Black individuals disproportionately represented, this policy shift threatens to exacerbate existing injustices within the criminal justice system. The Thurgood Marshall Institute at LDF+1The Thurgood Marshall Institute at LDF+1
Deportation Practices: The administration has utilized the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, despite judicial orders halting such actions. This approach has raised legal and ethical concerns, especially regarding due process and the treatment of marginalized communities. The Guardian
Disbanding of Misconduct Database: In February 2025, the Department of Justice eliminated its national database that tracked misconduct incidents among federal law enforcement officers. This database had recorded 4,790 cases of misconduct between 2018 and 2023. Its removal raises concerns about the transparency and accountability of federal law enforcement agencies.
Dismantling Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Initiatives
Another significant action has been the issuance of executive orders mandating the termination of all Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) programs within federal agencies, labeling them as “illegal and immoral discrimination programs” and “public waste.” The immediate consequences of these orders have been profound. Federal agencies were directed to dissolve offices dedicated to DEI efforts, terminate related contracts, and remove DEI content from official websites. This purge extended beyond the intended scope, leading to the erasure of historical acknowledgments of contributions made by marginalized groups. For instance, the Department of Defense deleted profiles of notable Black military figures, such as Sergeant William Carney, the first Black Medal of Honor recipient, under the guise of complying with the executive order.
The elimination of DEI programs not only erases the recognition of Black contributions but also hampers efforts to address systemic biases within federal institutions. These initiatives were instrumental in promoting inclusive hiring practices, equitable workplace environments, and the dismantling of institutional racism. Their removal signifies a regression in the pursuit of workplace equality and diversity.
Educational Reforms Undermining Black Advancement
The administration’s educational policies also raise concerns regarding their impact on Black students and educators. The signing of an executive order aimed at dismantling the U.S. Department of Education signals a significant shift in federal involvement in education. While critical functions like managing student loans and Pell grants are retained, the downsizing of the department could lead to reduced enforcement of civil rights protections in schools.
Additionally, the reinterpretation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include supposed discrimination against whites represents a shift towards an educational framework that may neglect the historical and ongoing challenges faced by Black students. This reinterpretation could create a climate of fear around teaching Black history or discussing systemic racism, potentially considering these teachings as discriminatory.
Such policy changes threaten to reverse decades of progress in educational equity, limiting opportunities for Black students and stifling critical discussions about race and history in educational settings.
Educational Reforms
Significant changes in educational policies have potential implications for Black students and educators: Reduction of the Department of Education: On March 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order to significantly shrink the federal Department of Education. This move has raised concerns among educators and civil rights organizations about the potential impact on federal funding and support for marginalized communities. The Guardian
University Policy Changes: Facing pressure from the administration, universities such as Columbia University, the University of California, and Dartmouth College have begun altering their policies to align with conservative demands. These changes include cutting progressive initiatives, scrapping diversity policies, and restricting student activism, potentially affecting the support systems and representation of Black students and faculty.
Impact on Employment and Economic Opportunities
The executive orders targeting DEI programs extend into the private sector, particularly affecting federal contractors. Prohibitions against implementing DEIA employment programs for jobs created by federal contracts effectively prevent affirmative action measures by government contractors, potentially reducing employment opportunities for Black professionals in sectors reliant on federal contracts.
Furthermore, the ripple effect of these policies has led major corporations to reassess or terminate their diversity initiatives. Companies such as Salesforce, Amazon, Google, and Meta have announced the end of DEI programs, citing alignment with the new federal directives. This trend threatens to reverse the modest gains made in diversifying corporate America, thereby limiting economic advancement opportunities for Black individuals. Business Insider
Increased Climate of Racial violence
Since January 2025, there have been several incidents in the United States highlighting racial tensions and violence, particularly affecting Black communities. These events encompass police-involved shootings, the resurgence of white supremacist activities, and targeted attacks against marginalized groups.
Police-Involved Shootings and Misconduct
Several incidents involving law enforcement and Black individuals have occurred:
January 5, 2025 – Rock Island, Illinois: Jakarta Jackson, a 21-year-old Black man, was fatally shot by police during an attempted detention. Jackson allegedly fled and dragged an officer with his car, leading the officer to open fire. Wikipedia
January 6, 2025 – Houston, Texas: An unidentified 35-year-old Black male was shot and killed by police responding to reports of tire slashing. During a struggle, the man reportedly reached for an officer’s weapon, prompting another officer to shoot him. Wikipedia
February 5, 2025 – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Maurice Jones, a 33-year-old Black man, was shot and killed by police under circumstances that have not been fully detailed publicly. Wikipedia
Resurgence of White Supremacist Activities
There has been a notable increase in white supremacist actions:
Ku Klux Klan (KKK) Activity in Kentucky: In January 2025, the KKK distributed racist flyers across Kentucky, urging immigrants to “leave now.” These flyers, featuring offensive caricatures and contact information, were condemned by local authorities and are under investigation. The Guardian+1The Guardian+1
Patriot Front’s Legal Repercussions: On January 13, 2025, a federal judge ordered the white supremacist group Patriot Front to pay approximately $2.7 million in damages to Charles M. Murrel III, a Black musician they attacked during a march in Boston in 2022. Wikipedia
Neo-Nazi Plot in Baltimore: Brandon Russell, a 29-year-old neo-Nazi, was convicted in February 2025 for conspiring to attack Baltimore’s power grid. His plan targeted the predominantly Black city, aiming to cause widespread disruption. People.com
Targeted Violence Against Black Individuals
Specific acts of violence have targeted Black individuals:
The Death of Sonya Massey: In February 2025, the family of Sonya Massey, a 36-year-old Black mother, received a $10 million settlement after she was fatally shot by a police deputy in her Illinois home nearly a year prior. The deputy involved faces first-degree murder charges. The Guardian
The Killing of Tahiry Broom: On February 9, 2025, Tahiry Broom, a 29-year-old Black transgender woman, was shot and killed in Detroit. The suspect, Robert Ridges III, allegedly targeted Broom after an argument escalated during their meeting.
Civil Unrest and Legal Actions
Communities have responded to these incidents through legal channels:
Springfield, Ohio Lawsuit: In February 2025, Springfield filed a lawsuit against the neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe, accusing them of racially motivated harassment and intimidation against the city’s Haitian community. This legal action seeks to halt further threats and recover damages. AP News+1The Guardian+1
Conclusion
The recent policies and executive orders enacted by the U.S. government in 2025 collectively undermine the civil rights and progress of Black Americans. From rescinding critical policing reforms to dismantling DEI initiatives and altering educational and employment frameworks, these actions disproportionately harm Black communities. Such measures not only reverse decades of hard-fought progress but also perpetuate systemic inequalities, signaling a concerning trajectory for racial justice in the United States. Trump in only 3 months has also increased the level of racial tensions in America. What are we to do ?
Featured News
Politics & Society
In recent months, the U.S. government has enacted a series of policies and executive orders that disproportionately and adversely affect Black Americans. These measures span various sectors, including criminal justice, civil rights, education, and employment, collectively signaling a systemic undermining of progress made towards racial equality.
Rescission of Policing Reforms
One of the most significant actions has been the revocation of Executive Order 14074, initially signed in 2022 to promote accountable policing and enhance public trust, particularly within Black and brown communities. This order sought to reform policing practices by restricting no-knock warrants, banning chokeholds, and establishing a national database for police misconduct. The rescission of this order on January 20, 2025, removes critical federal oversight designed to protect Black Americans from discriminatory and violent policing practices.
The absence of these protections may lead to an increase in unchecked police misconduct and a deterioration of trust between law enforcement and Black communities. Historically, Black Americans have been disproportionately affected by aggressive policing tactics. Eliminating federal guidelines aimed at curbing such practices could exacerbate these disparities, resulting in further marginalization and injustice.
Promotion of Punitive Criminal Justice Policies
The administration’s endorsement of Project 2025 introduces an extremely punitive approach to justice, based on the erroneous assumption that harsher punishments lead to less crime. This initiative calls on the Department of Justice to do “everything possible” to execute individuals currently on federal death row and expands the number of cases that qualify for a death sentence. Given the racial disparities in the application of the death penalty, with Black individuals disproportionately represented, this policy shift threatens to exacerbate existing injustices within the criminal justice system. The Thurgood Marshall Institute at LDF+1The Thurgood Marshall Institute at LDF+1
Deportation Practices: The administration has utilized the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, despite judicial orders halting such actions. This approach has raised legal and ethical concerns, especially regarding due process and the treatment of marginalized communities. The Guardian
Disbanding of Misconduct Database: In February 2025, the Department of Justice eliminated its national database that tracked misconduct incidents among federal law enforcement officers. This database had recorded 4,790 cases of misconduct between 2018 and 2023. Its removal raises concerns about the transparency and accountability of federal law enforcement agencies.
Dismantling Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Initiatives
Another significant action has been the issuance of executive orders mandating the termination of all Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) programs within federal agencies, labeling them as “illegal and immoral discrimination programs” and “public waste.” The immediate consequences of these orders have been profound. Federal agencies were directed to dissolve offices dedicated to DEI efforts, terminate related contracts, and remove DEI content from official websites. This purge extended beyond the intended scope, leading to the erasure of historical acknowledgments of contributions made by marginalized groups. For instance, the Department of Defense deleted profiles of notable Black military figures, such as Sergeant William Carney, the first Black Medal of Honor recipient, under the guise of complying with the executive order.
The elimination of DEI programs not only erases the recognition of Black contributions but also hampers efforts to address systemic biases within federal institutions. These initiatives were instrumental in promoting inclusive hiring practices, equitable workplace environments, and the dismantling of institutional racism. Their removal signifies a regression in the pursuit of workplace equality and diversity.
Educational Reforms Undermining Black Advancement
The administration’s educational policies also raise concerns regarding their impact on Black students and educators. The signing of an executive order aimed at dismantling the U.S. Department of Education signals a significant shift in federal involvement in education. While critical functions like managing student loans and Pell grants are retained, the downsizing of the department could lead to reduced enforcement of civil rights protections in schools.
Additionally, the reinterpretation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include supposed discrimination against whites represents a shift towards an educational framework that may neglect the historical and ongoing challenges faced by Black students. This reinterpretation could create a climate of fear around teaching Black history or discussing systemic racism, potentially considering these teachings as discriminatory.
Such policy changes threaten to reverse decades of progress in educational equity, limiting opportunities for Black students and stifling critical discussions about race and history in educational settings.
Educational Reforms
Significant changes in educational policies have potential implications for Black students and educators: Reduction of the Department of Education: On March 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order to significantly shrink the federal Department of Education. This move has raised concerns among educators and civil rights organizations about the potential impact on federal funding and support for marginalized communities. The Guardian
University Policy Changes: Facing pressure from the administration, universities such as Columbia University, the University of California, and Dartmouth College have begun altering their policies to align with conservative demands. These changes include cutting progressive initiatives, scrapping diversity policies, and restricting student activism, potentially affecting the support systems and representation of Black students and faculty.
Impact on Employment and Economic Opportunities
The executive orders targeting DEI programs extend into the private sector, particularly affecting federal contractors. Prohibitions against implementing DEIA employment programs for jobs created by federal contracts effectively prevent affirmative action measures by government contractors, potentially reducing employment opportunities for Black professionals in sectors reliant on federal contracts.
Furthermore, the ripple effect of these policies has led major corporations to reassess or terminate their diversity initiatives. Companies such as Salesforce, Amazon, Google, and Meta have announced the end of DEI programs, citing alignment with the new federal directives. This trend threatens to reverse the modest gains made in diversifying corporate America, thereby limiting economic advancement opportunities for Black individuals. Business Insider
Increased Climate of Racial violence
Since January 2025, there have been several incidents in the United States highlighting racial tensions and violence, particularly affecting Black communities. These events encompass police-involved shootings, the resurgence of white supremacist activities, and targeted attacks against marginalized groups.
Police-Involved Shootings and Misconduct
Several incidents involving law enforcement and Black individuals have occurred:
January 5, 2025 – Rock Island, Illinois: Jakarta Jackson, a 21-year-old Black man, was fatally shot by police during an attempted detention. Jackson allegedly fled and dragged an officer with his car, leading the officer to open fire. Wikipedia
January 6, 2025 – Houston, Texas: An unidentified 35-year-old Black male was shot and killed by police responding to reports of tire slashing. During a struggle, the man reportedly reached for an officer’s weapon, prompting another officer to shoot him. Wikipedia
February 5, 2025 – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Maurice Jones, a 33-year-old Black man, was shot and killed by police under circumstances that have not been fully detailed publicly. Wikipedia
Resurgence of White Supremacist Activities
There has been a notable increase in white supremacist actions:
Ku Klux Klan (KKK) Activity in Kentucky: In January 2025, the KKK distributed racist flyers across Kentucky, urging immigrants to “leave now.” These flyers, featuring offensive caricatures and contact information, were condemned by local authorities and are under investigation. The Guardian+1The Guardian+1
Patriot Front’s Legal Repercussions: On January 13, 2025, a federal judge ordered the white supremacist group Patriot Front to pay approximately $2.7 million in damages to Charles M. Murrel III, a Black musician they attacked during a march in Boston in 2022. Wikipedia
Neo-Nazi Plot in Baltimore: Brandon Russell, a 29-year-old neo-Nazi, was convicted in February 2025 for conspiring to attack Baltimore’s power grid. His plan targeted the predominantly Black city, aiming to cause widespread disruption. People.com
Targeted Violence Against Black Individuals
Specific acts of violence have targeted Black individuals:
The Death of Sonya Massey: In February 2025, the family of Sonya Massey, a 36-year-old Black mother, received a $10 million settlement after she was fatally shot by a police deputy in her Illinois home nearly a year prior. The deputy involved faces first-degree murder charges. The Guardian
The Killing of Tahiry Broom: On February 9, 2025, Tahiry Broom, a 29-year-old Black transgender woman, was shot and killed in Detroit. The suspect, Robert Ridges III, allegedly targeted Broom after an argument escalated during their meeting.
Civil Unrest and Legal Actions
Communities have responded to these incidents through legal channels:
Springfield, Ohio Lawsuit: In February 2025, Springfield filed a lawsuit against the neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe, accusing them of racially motivated harassment and intimidation against the city’s Haitian community. This legal action seeks to halt further threats and recover damages. AP News+1The Guardian+1
Conclusion
The recent policies and executive orders enacted by the U.S. government in 2025 collectively undermine the civil rights and progress of Black Americans. From rescinding critical policing reforms to dismantling DEI initiatives and altering educational and employment frameworks, these actions disproportionately harm Black communities. Such measures not only reverse decades of hard-fought progress but also perpetuate systemic inequalities, signaling a concerning trajectory for racial justice in the United States. Trump in only 3 months has also increased the level of racial tensions in America. What are we to do ?
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/11/06/us-second-trump-term-threat-rights-us-world
November 6, 2024
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
News Release
Available In
English
العربية
简体中文
繁體中文
Français
Português
Español
November 6, 2024
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
News Release
Available In
English
العربية
简体中文
繁體中文
Français
Português
Español
US: Second Trump Term a Threat to Rights in US, World
Independent Institutions, Civil Society Will Need to Hold New President Accountable
Independent Institutions, Civil Society Will Need to Hold New President Accountable
Republican President-elect Donald Trump after speaking at a campaign rally at Van Andel Arena, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, November 5, 2024. (C) 2024 © 2024 Carlos Osorio/AP Photo
Click to expand Image
(Washington, DC) – Donald Trump’s second term as United States president poses a grave threat to human rights in the United States and the world, Human Rights Watch said today. These concerns reflect Trump’s rights-abusing record during his first term, his embrace of white supremacist supporters and ideology, the extreme antidemocratic and anti-rights policies proposed by think tanks led by former aides, and campaign promises, including to round up and deport millions of immigrants and retaliate against political opponents.
“Donald Trump has made no secret of his intent to violate the human rights of millions of people in the United States,” said Tirana Hassan, executive director at Human Rights Watch. “Independent institutions and civil society groups, including Human Rights Watch, will need to do all we can to hold him and his administration accountable for abuses.”
During Trump’s first term as president, from 2017 to 2021, Human Rights Watch documented his record of rights abuses. These included policies and efforts to expel asylum seekers and separate families at the US-Mexico border, advance racist tropes against Black communities and other people of color, adopt policies that punish low-income families and deprive them of health care, and to fuel a violent insurrection to overthrow the results of a democratic election.
Trump’s pledges during his 2024 campaign raise greater cause for concern in a second term, both domestically and internationally. In 2023, he said he would not be a dictator “except for day one” in office. Trump has repeatedly praised autocrats such as Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un. He has proposed policies that would weaken democratic institutions that protect fundamental human rights and would lessen checks on presidential authority. The threat of abusing the executive office is of even greater concern because of a recent US Supreme Court decision that grants presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official actions taken in office.
Project 2025, a governing plan written by Trump’s former advisers and political allies, details many other abusive, often racially discriminatory policies that the new administration may adopt. Although Trump has denied connections to Project 2025, many of his statements echo its premises.
While the presidential campaign cycle featured rhetoric from both candidates that was hostile toward immigrants, Trump made scapegoating immigrants a central pillar of his campaign. He has called for extreme policies that include mass detention of migrants and mass deportations of millions of people, which would tear apart families with deep roots in the US. Such a program would invariably entail racial profiling, lead to heightened abuses by law enforcement during mass roundups, and instigate more xenophobic actions among the wider public. During the campaign, Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, spread racist lies about Haitian migrants in particular and fomented disinformation that immigration leads to increased crime in the United States.
Abortion rights will be under increased threat during Trump’s second term. His insistence that states should have the power to block access to basic health care allows policies that violate rights, endanger health, lead to preventable deaths, and criminalize private health care decisions.
Trump has vowed to retaliate against his political enemies. Throughout speeches and campaign interviews, he has used increasingly dangerous rhetoric, referring to his critics as “the enemy from within.” Trump threatened to order the US Department of Justice to pursue prosecutions against President Joe Biden and others he claims oppose his agenda, including election officials and voters. Trump has also suggested he would invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the US military and national guard against people in the US who might exercise their right to protest.
With respect to foreign policy, during his first term Trump demonstrated little respect for treaties, multilateral institutions, or efforts to protect the human rights of people living under repressive governments. His administration consistently worked against women’s rights and environmental progress at the United Nations and tried to redefine and limit the definition of rights to be protected through the US Department of State.
Trump has signaled opposition to funding for humanitarian aid and civilian protection efforts in major conflicts and crises. Likely partnerships with rights-abusing governments during a new Trump administration risk emboldening these governments to further harm people within their purview and perpetuate cycles of abuse and immunity from accountability around the world.
“Rights-respecting institutions and officials need to hold the line during the Trump administration,” Hassan said. “World leaders, federal and state workers, activists, and ordinary citizens have a role to play in protecting human rights and keeping Trump from carrying out the abuses he has promised.”
Region / Country
Democracy
United States
Tags
The Trump Administration and Human Rights
Click to expand Image
(Washington, DC) – Donald Trump’s second term as United States president poses a grave threat to human rights in the United States and the world, Human Rights Watch said today. These concerns reflect Trump’s rights-abusing record during his first term, his embrace of white supremacist supporters and ideology, the extreme antidemocratic and anti-rights policies proposed by think tanks led by former aides, and campaign promises, including to round up and deport millions of immigrants and retaliate against political opponents.
“Donald Trump has made no secret of his intent to violate the human rights of millions of people in the United States,” said Tirana Hassan, executive director at Human Rights Watch. “Independent institutions and civil society groups, including Human Rights Watch, will need to do all we can to hold him and his administration accountable for abuses.”
During Trump’s first term as president, from 2017 to 2021, Human Rights Watch documented his record of rights abuses. These included policies and efforts to expel asylum seekers and separate families at the US-Mexico border, advance racist tropes against Black communities and other people of color, adopt policies that punish low-income families and deprive them of health care, and to fuel a violent insurrection to overthrow the results of a democratic election.
Trump’s pledges during his 2024 campaign raise greater cause for concern in a second term, both domestically and internationally. In 2023, he said he would not be a dictator “except for day one” in office. Trump has repeatedly praised autocrats such as Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un. He has proposed policies that would weaken democratic institutions that protect fundamental human rights and would lessen checks on presidential authority. The threat of abusing the executive office is of even greater concern because of a recent US Supreme Court decision that grants presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official actions taken in office.
Project 2025, a governing plan written by Trump’s former advisers and political allies, details many other abusive, often racially discriminatory policies that the new administration may adopt. Although Trump has denied connections to Project 2025, many of his statements echo its premises.
While the presidential campaign cycle featured rhetoric from both candidates that was hostile toward immigrants, Trump made scapegoating immigrants a central pillar of his campaign. He has called for extreme policies that include mass detention of migrants and mass deportations of millions of people, which would tear apart families with deep roots in the US. Such a program would invariably entail racial profiling, lead to heightened abuses by law enforcement during mass roundups, and instigate more xenophobic actions among the wider public. During the campaign, Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, spread racist lies about Haitian migrants in particular and fomented disinformation that immigration leads to increased crime in the United States.
Abortion rights will be under increased threat during Trump’s second term. His insistence that states should have the power to block access to basic health care allows policies that violate rights, endanger health, lead to preventable deaths, and criminalize private health care decisions.
Trump has vowed to retaliate against his political enemies. Throughout speeches and campaign interviews, he has used increasingly dangerous rhetoric, referring to his critics as “the enemy from within.” Trump threatened to order the US Department of Justice to pursue prosecutions against President Joe Biden and others he claims oppose his agenda, including election officials and voters. Trump has also suggested he would invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the US military and national guard against people in the US who might exercise their right to protest.
With respect to foreign policy, during his first term Trump demonstrated little respect for treaties, multilateral institutions, or efforts to protect the human rights of people living under repressive governments. His administration consistently worked against women’s rights and environmental progress at the United Nations and tried to redefine and limit the definition of rights to be protected through the US Department of State.
Trump has signaled opposition to funding for humanitarian aid and civilian protection efforts in major conflicts and crises. Likely partnerships with rights-abusing governments during a new Trump administration risk emboldening these governments to further harm people within their purview and perpetuate cycles of abuse and immunity from accountability around the world.
“Rights-respecting institutions and officials need to hold the line during the Trump administration,” Hassan said. “World leaders, federal and state workers, activists, and ordinary citizens have a role to play in protecting human rights and keeping Trump from carrying out the abuses he has promised.”
Region / Country
Democracy
United States
Tags
The Trump Administration and Human Rights
