How many times does an administration have to show it has been shaped by the legacy of Jim Crow and a chronically online incel’s wildest racist fantasies for it to come under greater scrutiny?
Last week, the Justice Department announced that it would be lifting a school desegregation order in Louisiana, calling its existence a “historical wrong.”
DOJ officials also suggested that similar orders dating back to the Civil Rights Movement be reconsidered as well.
These court-enforced agreements remain in place for dozens of school districts across the South, but by the looks of it, their days are numbered despite segregation remaining an issue in schools across the country, especially in Louisiana.
According to Leo Terrell, a lawyer for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, Louisiana “got its act together decades ago,” and that the dismissal of the desegregation order corrects a historical wrong.
Let him tell it, “it’s past time to acknowledge how far we have come.”
That’s quite a quote from Terrell, a far-right leader whose reputation for being a cheerleader for antisemitism is well documented. And as Jahan Jones at MSNBC.com notes, Terrell is a friend of right-wing media personality Charlie Kirk, who has called for rolling back the Civil Rights Act and pushed for George Floyd’s convicted murderer, Derek Chauvin, to be pardoned.
What do you imagine two racists talk about when discussing what to do over at the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice?
Meanwhile, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon claims the end of the 1966 legal agreement with Plaquemines Parish schools in the state shows the Trump administration is “getting America refocused on our bright future.”
So bright, it seems like you can only spot white folks in their version of the future.
Perhaps such beliefs and affiliations are why there are reportedly over 100 DOJ employees who have either left their jobs or are planning to as they came to go after systematic bigotry rather than become its legal enforcer.
Later this month will mark the 71st anniversary of the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.
As Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, explained to Annie Ma at the Associated Press last year: “School integration exists as little more than an idea in America right now, a little more than a memory. It’s actually an idea that a pretty good majority of Americans think is a good idea. But that’s all.”
The second Trump administration is actively working to not only change that opinion but reverse what progress has been made since the Civil Rights Movement.
Indeed, the Trump administration has previously made clear that it plans to usher in a reinterpretation of Civil Rights-era laws to focus on “anti-white racism,” rather than discrimination against racial minorities.
It is not breaking news to describe Donald Trump and his ilk as raging racists, but there doesn’t seem to be enough appreciation for how this administration, full of segregationists, is quite skillfully targeting every government program or policy that has passed since the 1960s that has benefited Black people in any way.
Before the lifting of this desegregation order, the Trump administration said the federal government would no longer unequivocally prohibit contractors from having segregated facilities.
And before that, President Trump revoked President Lyndon Johnson’s decades-old order on diversity and affirmative action practices in the federal government.
Most coverage has been fixated on the DEI debacle, but not enough focus has been placed on how this is all part of a broader strategy by a segregationist administration.
It is not a coincidence that the federal jobs, which are traditionally responsible for how Black people attain social mobility, have been gutted by this administration the way it has.
Jennifer Holmes, deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told USA Today in March, “I absolutely think that the attacks on federal workers will have an acute and disproportionate impact on Black federal workers and that’s because the federal government is highly diverse.”
And who better than Elon Musk to wield the chainsaw at those jobs, considering his history with Black workers and Nazi-salutes?
I understand that many of us have been led to believe that Black people’s tickets to better pastures this century involve an LLC or crypto, but trust, it has consistently remained to be government jobs like those or gigs at the Post Office, another target of the Trump administration (something I have warned about for years).
Or the military, now led by another racist in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who this week ordered a 20% reduction of four-star officers.
Hegseth had already fired numerous military leaders, many of them women and Black, and based on reporting from the New York Times about his latest firings, it suggests he is continuing on his presumed path to purge the military leadership of nonwhite men.
There’s also Hegseth banning books from Black authors like Toni Morrison in the Naval Academy library while allowing Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf to remain.
Elsewhere, last month the Washington Post highlighted that 38 of 43 experts cut last month from the boards that review the science and research that happens in laboratories at the National Institutes of Health are female, Black or Latino, per an analysis by the chairs of a dozen of the boards.
Even the National Park Service has been reported on for its “anti-DEI” measures, including the removal of Harriet Tubman’s photograph in an apparent attempt to whitewash the history of the Underground Railroad.
Like New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, I am frustrated by “prominent pundits continue to deny that the administration adheres to a segregationist ideology.”
It is willful ignorance of a fact pattern.
They can carry on with their debate on whether or not it is appropriate to categorize the Trump administration as fascist, but there is another, more easily agreeable classification for this cohort clamoring for their attention.
Give it to them already so more can fixate on how to fight back.
Michael Arceneaux is a New York Times bestselling author whose most recent book, “I Finally Bought Some Jordans,” was published last March.
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