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civil rights act
Trump and Co Are Doing Their Best to Make America White Again (As If It Ever Was!)
Along with overlapping groups, including immigrants, transgender and other LGBTQ+ folks, women, and union workers, Black Americans are clear targets for this administration.
May 21, 2025
On May 5, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute held its annual fundraising gala. The event showcases the extraordinary imaginations of people who design exorbitant clothes and the gutsiness of those who dare (and can afford) to wear them.
I’m dimly aware of this annual extravaganza because of my interest in knitting, spinning, and weaving—the crafts involved in turning fluff into yarn and yarn into cloth. Mind you, I have no flair for fashion myself. I could never carry off wearing the simplest of ballgowns, and I’m way too short to rock a tuxedo. My own personal style runs to 1970s White Dyke. (Think blue jeans and flannel shirts.) But I remain fascinated by what braver people will get themselves up in.
One of my favorite movies is Paris Is Burning, a 1990 documentary about the underground Harlem ballroom scene, where drag queens and transgender folks, mostly Black and Latina, recreated a fierce version of the world of haute couture. It was a testament to people’s ability to take the detritus of what systems of racism and economic deprivation had given them and spin it into defiant art.
So I was excited to learn that the theme of this year’s gala was to be “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” an homage to the tradition of Black dandyism, about which Vogue magazine writes:
There is something undeniably magnetic about the sharp creases of a tailored suit, the gleam of polished leather shoes, the swish of a silk pocket square. But for Black dandyism, this isn’t just about looking good—it’s a declaration. A defiant reclaiming of space in a world that has long sought to define and confine Black identity. So, what exactly is Black dandyism? At its core, it’s a fashion revolution, a movement steeped in history, resistance, and pride.
The Met’s gala theme was chosen back in October 2024, when it still seemed possible that, rather than electing a fascist toddler, this country might choose a Black woman as president. In that case, the gala could have served as an extended victory toast. (As it happens, Kamala Harris did in fact attend.)
Instead, this country is today laboring under an increasingly authoritarian regime in Washington, one proudly and explicitly dedicated to reversing decades of victories by various movements for Black liberation.
Resuscitating Employment Discrimination
I wrote “laboring under” quite intentionally, because one of one of Trump 2.0’s key attacks on African Americans comes in the realm of work. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 in its ominous preelection document Mandate for Change made this clear in a chapter on the Labor Department. The first “needed reform” there, it insisted, would be to uproot DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) efforts wherever they might be found in the government and military. Its authors wrote that the new administration must:
Reverse the DEI Revolution in Labor Policy. Under the Obama and Biden administrations, labor policy was yet another target of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) revolution. Under this managerialist left-wing race and gender ideology, every aspect of labor policy became a vehicle with which to advance race, sex, and other classifications and discriminate against conservative and religious viewpoints on these subjects and others, including pro-life views. The next administration should eliminate every one of these wrongful and burdensome ideological projects.
In case the reader has any doubt about the evils attributed to DEI, that chapter’s next “needed reform” made it clear that the greatest of those horrors involved any effort whatsoever to prevent racial discrimination against people of color. To that end, Project 2025 wanted the federal government to stop collecting racial demographics in employment. It called on the next administration to eliminate altogether the gathering of such data by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) on the grounds that collecting “employment statistics based on race/ethnicity… can then be used to support a charge of discrimination under a disparate impact theory. This could lead to racial quotas to remedy alleged race discrimination.”
In other words, as I wrote months before Donald Trump returned to power, “If you can’t demonstrate racial discrimination in employment (because you are enjoined from collecting data about race and employment), then there is no racial discrimination to remedy.”
The 1964 Civil Rights Act first established the EEOC’s mandate to collect such employment data by race in its Title VII, the section on employment rights. Title VII remains a major target of the second Trump administration. That’s especially true when it comes to federal employment, where all federal agencies are required “to maintain an affirmative program of equal employment”—an idea abhorred by the Trump administration.
The employment-rights section of the Civil Rights Act covers all employers, including the federal government. And in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson went even further, issuing Executive Order 11246, which applied similar principles to the employment practices of federal contractors. That order established the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), which uses the EEOC’s data to ensure that federal contractors don’t discriminate against what are considered protected classes of workers.
Not surprisingly, Project 2025 called on the next administration to rescind Executive Order 11246, which is precisely what President Donald Trump did on January 21, 2025, his second day in office, in an order entitled (apparently without irony) “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” (To be clear, by “illegal discrimination,” Trump, of course, meant imagined “discrimination” against white people.) In addition to eliminating that mandate, Trump’s order also rescinded a number of later executive orders meant to ensure racial equity in employment, including:
(i) Executive Order 12898 of February 11, 1994 (Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations);
(ii) Executive Order 13583 of August 18, 2011 (Establishing a Coordinated Government-wide Initiative to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Workforce);
(iii) Executive Order 13672 of July 21, 2014 (Further Amendments to Executive Order 11478, Equal Employment Opportunity in the Federal Government, and Executive Order 11246, Equal Employment Opportunity); and
(iv) The Presidential Memorandum of October 5, 2016 (Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in the National Security Workforce).
According to Project 2025, preventing “discrimination” against whites requires another move as well: eliminating any law or policy that prohibits discriminatory employment outcomes. In other words, intentional racial discrimination, which is often impossible to prove, would remain the only legitimate form of discrimination.
Decimating the Black Middle Class
Why have I made such a detailed excursion into the weeds of federal law and policymaking? Because the real-world effects on African American communities of such arcane maneuvering will likely be staggering.
Federal employment was a crucial factor in building today’s Black middle class, beginning in the decades after emancipation and accelerating significantly under the provisions of that 1964 Civil Rights Act and the various presidential orders that followed. As Danielle Mahones of the Berkeley Labor Center of the University of California points out, “Federal employment has been a pathway to the middle class for African American workers and their families since Reconstruction, including postal work and other occupations.” We can now expect, she adds, “to see Black workers lose their federal jobs.”
The Trump administration’s apparently race-neutral attack on supposed waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal workforce is guaranteed to disproportionately remove Black workers from federal employment.
And with Donald Trump’s victory in November 2024, that indeed is the plan that has been brought to the White House by Russell Vought, one of the key architects of Project 2025 and now head of the Office of Management and Budget. Implementation began with the series of executive orders already described, which largely govern the hiring of new employees. But actions affecting federal hiring don’t take effect quickly, especially in periods of government cutbacks like we’re seeing today.
Fortunately for Vought and his co-conspirators at the Heritage Foundation, Trump had another option in his anti-Black toolbox: the chainsaw wielded by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. While estimates vary, the best estimate is that, thanks to Musk and crew, around 260,000 federal workers have by now “been fired, taken buyouts, or retired early.”
Eliminating federal employees in such a way has indeed had a disproportionate effect on Black workers, since they comprise almost 19% of that workforce, while the country’s total workforce is only 13% Black. (At the Post Office, the figure may be closer to 30%.) If 260,000 federal workers have lost their jobs under Trump and Musk, then almost 50,000 of them may be Black. In other words, cutting federal jobs disproportionately affects Black workers.
“Negro Removal”
Of course, Donald Trump’s approach to Blacks is hardly new in this country. “Negro removal” has a long history here. When I first moved to San Francisco in the late 1970s, there was a big blank area in the middle of the city. Acres of empty blocks sat in the section of town known as the “Western Addition” or, to the people who had once lived there, “the Fillmore.” The Fillmore had been a racially mixed neighborhood. Populated by Japanese- and Filipino-Americans, it had also housed a significant Black enclave. As a local NPR podcast described the scene, “If you were walking down San Francisco’s Fillmore Street in the 1950s, chances are you might run into Billie Holiday stepping out of a restaurant. Or Ella Fitzgerald trying on hats. Or Thelonious Monk smoking a cigarette.” The neighborhood was often called the “Harlem of the West.”
But “urban renewal” projects, initiated under the federal Housing Act of 1949, would tear down over 14,000 housing units and an unknown number of businesses there in the name of “slum clearance and community redevelopment.” By the time I arrived, however, much of the Fillmore had been rebuilt, including the Japantown business area, though many empty lots remained. Today, they’ve all been filled in, but the 10% of the city’s population that had been African American when “urban renewal” began has been halved. And while Blacks still represent 5% of the city’s population, they also account for 37% of the unhoused.
The writer and activist James Baldwin visited San Francisco in 1963, while the Fillmore’s razing was in full swing. “Urban renewal,” he pointed out, “is Negro removal.” And according to Mindy T. Fullilove, a professor of urban studies and health, San Francisco’s urban renewal experience was duplicated across the country. As she put it back in 2001:
[U]rban renewal affected thousands of communities in hundreds of cities. Urban renewal was to achieve “clearance” of “blight” and “slum” areas so that they could be rebuilt for new uses other than housing the poor… The short-term consequences were dire, including loss of money, loss of social organization, and psychological trauma.
As Fullilove argued, federal policies like urban renewal, involving “community dispossession—and its accompanying psychological trauma, financial loss, and rippling instability—produced a rupture in the historical trajectory of African American urban communities.” She believes that such federal intervention foreclosed the possibility that Black people would follow the route to full participation in U.S. social, commercial, and political life taken by “earlier waves of immigrants to the city.”
Policies that appear to be “race neutral” can have racialized effects. The phrase “urban renewal” says nothing about uprooting Black communities, yet that is what it achieved in practice. Just as earlier federal policies led to the removal of Black communities from the hearts of hundreds of U.S. cities, the Trump administration’s apparently race-neutral attack on supposed waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal workforce is guaranteed to disproportionately remove Black workers from federal employment. Together with the planned ejection of millions of immigrants, and following the Project 2025 playbook, Trump, Elon Musk, and their minions like Stephen Miller are doing their best to Make America White Again. (As if it ever was!)
Text and Subtext
The second time around, Trump’s administration sees race everywhere. It’s the subtext of almost everything its officials say and it’s right there in the “text” of its actions and pronouncements.
Ironically enough, Mindy Fullilove’s article is—for the moment—still available from the National Institutes of Health library website. Given the “Negro removal” that the Trump administration has been eagerly pursuing on its thousands of websites and libraries, though, who knows how long it will remain there. Certainly, you can expect to see further erasures of African Americans from any arena this administration enters. As Washington Post columnist Theodore T. Johnson writes,
Not only does this White House see race; it is also a preoccupation: One of its first executive orders enacted an anti-diversity agenda that purged women, people of color, and programs from federal websites and libraries. Trump directed the firing of multiple generals and admirals who are Black, female, or responsible for the military following the rule of law.
Recent weeks have seen the purging (and in some cases, embarrassed restoration) of any number of Black historical figures, including Jackie Robinson, Harriet Tubman, and the Tuskegee Airmen, from government websites.
Nor are attacks on employment and representation the new administration’s only attempts to constrain the lives of African Americans. On April 28, Trump issued an executive order devoted to “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens.” In addition to “unleashing” local law enforcement, the order prepares the way for military involvement in local policing. It also seeks to roll back consent decrees governing the behavior of police departments judged discriminatory by previous Justice Departments. In 2025, no one should be confused about the respective races of the “criminals” and “innocent citizens” referred to in Trump’s order.
So yes, along with overlapping groups, including immigrants, transgender and other LGBTQ+ folks, women, and union workers, Black Americans are clear targets for this administration. That’s why even as rarified an event as the Met Gala may be, it still inspires me. As Ty Gaskins wrote in Vogue, Black style is a “defiant reclaiming of space in a world that has long sought to define and confine Black identity.”
Isn’t it now time for all of us to reclaim our space—and nation—from Donald Trump?
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DOGE Goon Given Access to Treasury Payment System Resigns After Racist Eugenics Remarks Revealed
One observer wrote: "Skull. Measuring. Freaks."
Feb 06, 2025
Marko Elez, a 25-year-old staffer with Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, has resigned from his role after The Wall Street Journal inquired over his ties to a social media account that advocated for a "eugenic immigration policy," among other racist views, the outlet reported Thursday.
Elez was stationed at the Treasury Department, where he reportedly had direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the U.S. government. Earlier Thursday a district court judge placed limits on Elez's and a fellow DOGE staffer's ability to share the sensitive Treasury data.
Elez also worked for Musk at SpaceX, Starlink, and X, according to the Journal.
The X account, which was deleted in December, used the handle @nullllptr—a misspelling of a keyword in the C++ programming language, the Journal reported. However, the account previously went by the username @marko_elez, according archived posts the outlet reviewed. The person using the @nullllptr account also described themselves as an employee at SpaceX and Starlink.
"Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool," @nullllptr posted over the summer, and in September: "You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity." The account also called for a rollback of the Civil Rights Act.
In response to the Journal's reporting, journalist Edward Ongweso Jr. wrote on X: "Skull. Measuring. Freaks."
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Running in Circles on Racial Justice
Hard-fought victories in terms of racial justice in the U.S. are always met with a vicious backlash that makes progress a circular motion where we end up, it seems, where we began.
Jan 20, 2025
We keep running in circles when it comes to addressing racial justice in the U.S. This means that with every advance we almost come back to the same place and must fight the battles all over again. It doesn't mean that progress has not been made, but the progress retrogresses due to the immediate backlash that charges any advance to rectify past racial injustices as an affront to white people. At best there is an ebb and flow when it comes to rectifying the racial harms and damages of the past.
Race history and the many initiatives to rectify past wrongs is more of a circle than a linear line. It may be an expanding circle considering advances, but for every victory won there is a vicious throw back. It is almost like the 1993 movie Groundhog Day where morning after morning we awaken to history repeating itself, and where victories of racial justice are swept away by the courts or a change in the body politic. The struggle continues, and in many cases, we must begin again.
Every racial justice victory in the United States came about because of the Civil War and the various modes of resistance employed by victims of racial injustices. Mass protests and resistance has generally forced those in power to seek easy answers to placate the anger of the victims of racial injustice. But every attempt to satisfy and pacify the various protests is met with vociferous protests that erase hard fought victories. Just a few examples over four centuries in U.S. history serve as evidence. At each juncture of political protest those in power have historically responded with various initiatives designed to calm the uprisings and unrest. However, any advance is quickly eradicated under the guise of reverse discrimination.
If the United States is ever going to create a society of real growth and opportunity, it needs to stop chasing its tail.
After the Civil War, one man, one vote was militarily imposed resulting in the elections of Black men to numerous political offices in the South. With those advances came the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865 abolishing slavery. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 granted citizenship to people born in the U.S. This served as a response to the 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision that ruled Blacks were not citizens. The 14th Amendment passed in 1868 addressed and attempted to rectify state laws that abridged the rights of Black people. In 1870 the 15th Amendment was adopted that attempted to grant the right to vote to Black men (It should be noted that it wasn't until 1920 that women had the right to vote). In 1871 another Civil Rights Act was passed, also known as the Klu Klux Klan Act, which was a response to the growing terrorism used by whites against Blacks and advances in civil rights. These acts of terror were designed to take away the vote, enforce racial codes, and re-impose restrictions on Black people that had been granted post-Civil War. The backlash turned back the clock on the numerous advances that sought to correct the racial injustices of the past.
In 1865 Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, and Andrew Johnson became President. Andrew Johnson was a Southerner who worked to turn back the numerous advances made in racial justice. Under his administration amnesty was granted to Confederates. Confiscated lands (plantations) were returned to those who rebelled against the Union. The last remaining Union troops were withdrawn from the South in the Compromise of 1877 resulting in the reestablishment of pre-Civil War policies that completed the circle of restoring white Southern rule, reinstating the Black Codes, and allowing states to make policies that re-created de facto enslavement. The circle turned 360 degrees from voting rights, citizenship, anti-terrorism, social rectification, and attempts at inclusion to making it virtually impossible for Blacks to vote, live and work, or engage in the routines of life without fear and intimidation. Reconstruction, a response to racial injustices and calls to the nation to be inclusive and equitable, was short lived—from 1865-1877—and in that short time it ushered in amendments and civil rights acts. However, it was attacked from the beginning, sabotaged, and died because of white backlash. Most of the steps forward were spurned within 12 short years, and all the advances undone. The circle of racial justice took Blacks from winning to having to fight all over again.
In response to the racial justice organizing in the 20th century and the social unrest through demonstrations, sit-ins, and mass marches, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. This act prohibited discrimination in labor and attempted to end segregation in public facilities, public schools, and federally funded programs (keep in mind that 10 years prior, in 1954, the Supreme Court had already ruled segregation in public schools unconstitutional and ordered schools to desegregate). In 1965 the Voting Rights Act was passed to challenge the many schemes employed by states to abridge the ability of Blacks to vote. It also required Southern states to seek permission to substantively change voting practices. However in 2013, the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holdergutted these protections arguing that they were "based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day." Hence voting protections enacted in 1965 were gutted effectively rendering the act a relic of the past. This is an example of the ebb, or the circular motion, of the nature of racial rectification in the U.S.
In the 21st century white resistance to the freedoms of Blacks to move and live within the society coupled with continued fears of whites towards Black people resulted in "Stand Your Ground" laws. These were boilerplate legislation written by the American Legislative Exchange Council and offered to state legislators which produced glaring and frightening consequences for Black people. Black people were shot for ringing the wrong door bell, or for being in the wrong neighborhood. But all of this played into a larger scheme to erode equal rights and turn back the clock on racial rectification.
The reaction to racial justice is relentless and comes whenever strides are made to make the nation more inclusive. The Black Lives Matter movement emerged, trying to hold people and society accountable. The movement was spurred on by the killings of Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery by vigilantes. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, and Philando Castile were examples of police killings. In the streets voices chanted, "Defund the police," and bodies blocked expressways and intersections. Political leaders and bodies across the country entertained discussions on the matter. Corporate America responded along with other entities employing "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" (DEI) measures. DEI became part of the discussion in the economic, political, and educational arena. The corporate world responded to the various outcries of disadvantaged groups that included racial and the LGBTQIA community and sought ways to demonstrate their desire to include and sell to these groups. Among those employing DEI initiatives were Amazon, Meta (FaceBook), McDonald's, Walmart, Ford, Lowe's, John Deere, American Airlines, Boeing, Jack Daniel's (Brown-Forman), Caterpillar, Harley-Davidson, Molson Coors, Nissan, Polaris, Toyota, and Anheuser-Busch.
The criticisms however grew louder as the "Turn Back the Clock" and Make America Great Again activists homed in on "wokeness" and began to attack those corporations for their support of racial justice and gay rights. The 2023 Supreme Court decision on college admissions, which struck down affirmative action programs declaring that race cannot be a factor in college admissions, was used to advance charges of reverse discrimination and of lowering standards. Then with the election of President Donald Trump the attacks on DEI found greater energy and corporations demonstrated lesser courage. Each of the corporations mentioned have since rolled back or eliminated their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. This is another example of a 360-degree turn in the struggle for racial justice and inclusion within the society, culture, and workplace.
Blacks have been historically wronged and remain disadvantaged. We continue to lag behind our white counterparts in terms of education, economics, and wealth. If progress is linear then we could surmise that at some point Blacks would catch up to whites. Instead, in most categories, the gaps and disparities have grown wider. The only way to explain this phenomenon is that we are engaged in a circle of gaining and then losing. The circle may grow larger signifying the progress being made, but the hard-fought victories in terms of racial justice are always met with a vicious backlash that makes progress a circular motion where we end up, it seems, where we began.
If the United States is ever going to create a society of real growth and opportunity, it needs to stop chasing its tail. It needs to change its belief that correcting past wrongs is somehow to penalize someone else. The irony is that those who complain about reverse discrimination are the ones who have been the beneficiaries of a system of discrimination. A strong society must come to terms with its history; tell the stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly; and muster the courage to create and maintain policies, programs, and systems that correct the sins of the past.
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