Trump’s Simple Racism

This article appears in the April 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.

On February 21, President Trump removed the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a four-star Air Force general with a distinguished military record named Charles Q. Brown. Gen. Brown was only the second Black officer to chair the Joint Chiefs, the first being Colin Powell more than 30 years ago.

Trump also fired the chief of naval operations, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, and Coast Guard commandant Adm. Linda Fagan, both pioneering women senior officers. The premise was that all three were diversity hires, not competent enough to have been promoted on the merits.

Franchetti had headed the Sixth Fleet and U.S. naval forces in Korea. Fagan was previously the commander of the Coast Guard Pacific Area, with prior terms as Coast Guard deputy commandant and commander for operations.

More from Robert Kuttner

Brown had a 40-year career. Entering the Air Force in 1984 as a fighter pilot, he logged over 3,000 flight hours, including 130 hours in combat. He commanded the Pacific Air Forces, the Air Forces Central Command, and the Air Force Weapons School, as well as the 8th Fighter Wing and the 31st Fighter Wing.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had long targeted Gen. Brown. “First of all, you gotta fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” he said in a podcast in November. In one of his books, Hegseth flatly suggested that Brown was promoted because of his race. “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt,” Hegseth wrote. “Since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it doesn’t really much matter.”

The insidious nature of the attack on DEI is not just that it targets minorities and women, but that it undermines ordinary civil rights enforcement.

Brown was a particular target because he had chosen to speak out after the police murder of George Floyd. Brown posted a video message to the Air Force titled “Here’s What I’m Thinking About.” He described the pressures that came with being one of the few Black men in his unit. He recalled pushing himself “to perform error-free” as a pilot and officer his whole life, but still facing bias.

To succeed Brown, Trump nominated a retired white three-star general named Dan Caine. A fighter pilot, Caine did some stints at the CIA, as a private entrepreneur, and as a part-time member of the Air National Guard from 2009 to 2016. Trump spoke about first meeting Caine in Iraq, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2019 and again in 2024, where Trump quoted him as saying, “I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir.”

Caine has nothing close to Brown’s command record, and it is unheard of to jump a retired three-star general to the top post of chair of the Joint Chiefs. Had this happened in the private sector—a Black man with an impeccable record being fired to open up a spot for an obviously less qualified white man—Brown would have had an open-and-shut case against racial discrimination as prohibited by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

ALL OVER THE GOVERNMENT, the supposed war on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is being used as a transparent cover for racism, pure and simple. Any Black or female public official is at risk of being fired as a presumed diversity hire. They are at even more risk if they happen to work in any program having to do with civil rights. We are back to the nearly 400-year era, to echo the title of a book by Ira Katznelson, when affirmative action was white. Because the new racism is cynically couched in the language of rolling back DEI, there has not been the outcry that simple racism should produce.

The insidious nature of the attack on DEI is not just that it targets minorities and women, but that it undermines ordinary civil rights enforcement. All federal agencies have civil rights offices that enforce basic laws against discrimination. If they are doing their jobs, they can’t avoid talking about race and gender.

Astonishingly, Trump’s initial series of executive orders even revoked President Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 of 1965, which was the origin of the federal government’s affirmative action efforts. As Johnson put it in a celebrated commencement address at Howard University in June 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

Johnson quite reasonably concluded that it wasn’t enough to illegalize outright discrimination in hiring and promotion, as Title VII of the recently enacted 1964 Civil Rights Act did. The labor market had well-worn informal norms and patterns of recruitment. These would not be altered just by posting a sign, “All Welcome.”

The sociologist Mark Granovetter wrote a famous research study in 1973 called “The Strength of Weak Ties,” on how most people actually got jobs. It systematically confirmed what everyone intuitively knew: You got jobs through informal networking. Somebody knew somebody’s cousin, or a neighbor heard that such-and-such an employer was hiring. These informal networks simply excluded Blacks, because they always had.

Employers and trade unions needed to take affirmative steps to actively recruit members of minority groups who had been explicitly barred or tacitly excluded from these informal networks. Johnson did not have the authority to require that all employers make such efforts, but he could require it of federal contractors, which included virtually all large corporations.

Thus, Executive Order 11246 provided that: “The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”

Very gradually, thanks to affirmative outreach requirements, racial and gender patterns in the labor force became more integrated, though there is ample evidence that Blacks and women are still underrepresented relative to their skill levels in many occupations, especially in supervisory and executive positions. The fact that these patterns vary widely among different corporations is evidence that discrimination persists among some employers.

Affirmative action has long been attacked as reverse discrimination—disguised quotas at the expense of better-qualified whites. In the Bakke case of 1978, Allan Bakke, a white man, sued the University of California medical school at Davis, charging that he had a better academic record than that of several Black students who were accepted under a “special admissions program,” while he was rejected.

The Supreme Court, in a fractured decision, ordered Bakke admitted, but also found that some kinds of affirmative action programs could be justified, if the purpose was “diversity,” a concept wholly invented by Justice Lewis Powell to cobble together a 5-4 majority. But diversity, which has now become both an objective of progressives and a target of conservatives, has nothing to do with the original rationale of affirmative action, which was to offset the lingering disadvantage created by 400 years of slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow. Why give preference to the son of Pakistani or Mexican millionaires, just because they’re “diverse”?

A second, more subtle complaint of conservatives has been to argue, picking up on Lyndon Johnson’s “starting line” metaphor, that there may have been a time when affirmative action was defensible. But more than a half-century after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that time has passed. This was the argument of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, deciding a complaint brought by a white applicant denied admission to the University of Michigan Law School. O’Connor wrote that carefully designed diversity programs were still constitutionally allowed, but added, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary …”

Well before the clock on those 25 years ran out, the high court ended affirmative action entirely, in 2023, holding that it amounted to reverse discrimination against whites, in violation of both the 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But as Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy, a leading scholar of race and the Constitution, points out, efforts at Black uplift have always been resented as discrimination against whites, going back to President Andrew Johnson’s efforts to sabotage Reconstruction.

IF YOU DRILL DOWN INTO how Trump’s assault on DEI affects basic enforcement of civil rights (never mind diversity), one place to look is the crippling of civil rights enforcement by key agencies. For example, the Department of Education has an Office for Civil Rights that normally investigates thousands of complaints. Since Trump took office, that process has ground to a halt. According to an investigation by ProPublica, the only new cases opened by the office’s attorneys have been directed at such Trump priorities as getting rid of gender-neutral bathrooms, banning transgender athletes from women’s sports, and pursuing alleged antisemitism.

Since Trump took office, no new cases have been brought in the historic areas of civil rights enforcement, such as discrimination based on race, gender, or national origin. According to ProPublica, about 12,000 complaints were under investigation when Biden left office, yet there has been no follow-up under Trump.

It’s a similar story at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, someone who believes they are the subject of discrimination in hiring, promotion, work assignments, sexual harassment, or other such grievances begins by filing a complaint with the EEOC. If EEOC investigators or attorneys find that the complaint has merit, that can lead to a settlement or litigation.

To the extent that government employees work on anything having to do with race, they become high-priority targets.

But on January 28, Trump illegally fired two Democratic EEOC commissioners, Charlotte Burrows and Jocelyn Samuels, leaving the commission without a quorum. Trump also fired the EEOC’s general counsel. In the absence of a quorum and without a general counsel, the EEOC may not bring major new cases that involve patterns of discrimination. Trump’s action was illegal; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 specifies that EEOC commissioners serve for fixed five-year terms. There is no provision that allows the president to remove a commissioner, even “for cause.” (In a similar case, illegally fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox—who is Black—was restored to her position by a federal judge, though the Trump administration has appealed.)

In principle, career EEOC staff can continue the commission’s day-to-day work of continuing investigations that are already in progress. In practice, the Republican acting chair has moved to realign the commission’s priorities with the “reverse discrimination” themes and goals of the administration. It has explicitly halted LGBTQ cases for both new and existing complaints.

The EEOC’s Annual Performance Report for fiscal year 2024 gives some sense of the scope of its work and the reality of continuing racial and gender discrimination. In 2024, the commission won nearly $700 million in monetary damages, benefiting some 21,000 claimants. The commission filed 88,531 new charges in 2024. Quite apart from whether the Trump administration explicitly pauses new charges, other executive branch policies, such as a hiring freeze and forced and voluntary resignations, will leave the EEOC with far fewer resources to deal with its existing backlog, much less to bring new cases.

Another prime target is enforcement of nondiscrimination in housing. Despite the Fair Housing Act of 1968, study after study has demonstrated that discrimination in the sale or rental of housing has persisted. The 1968 act itself requires all federal agencies to “administer their programs” in a manner “affirmatively to further the purposes of” the Fair Housing Act.

In 2015, the Obama administration promulgated the “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” rule through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), to carry out the purposes of the Fair Housing Act. It requires cities and towns that receive federal money “to create a plan for rectifying fair housing barriers.” But in a tweet posted on July 29, 2020, President Trump said, “I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood … Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!”

Biden moved to restore the rule, but neglected to finalize it, afraid of giving Trump an opening to claim that Democrats were “destroying the suburbs”—by letting Black people move there. This made it much easier for Trump to rescind it again; what took four years in the first term took a month in the second.

HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity is expecting a reduction in force of a whopping 76 percent. “That should tell you that they are not interested at all in protecting civil rights as it relates to fair housing,” Antonio Gaines, president of AFGE National Council 222, which represents HUD employees, told the Prospect. “You’re going to see landlords violating those rights. There will be no forum to hear those complaints or hold private-sector landlords accountable for these things. It’ll be a regression to the 1960s or ’70s.”

Trump has also found DEI in Biden programs that were racially neutral, and used alleged DEI excesses as grounds for terminating them. As Hassan Ali Kanu reported in the Prospect, a prime example is the environmental justice initiative known as Justice40. The goal was to deliver 40 percent of new federal investments, such as those in the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, to disadvantaged and low-income communities, regardless of race. On his first day in office, Trump shut down Justice40 as an offensive case of DEI, and separately directed federal agencies to terminate “all DEI, DEIA and ‘environmental justice’ offices,” positions, and programs.

Federal efforts to reform police abuses are yet another victim of Trump’s orders. According to a report from The Washington Post, the Trump administration has frozen all ongoing Justice Department civil rights cases. One specific target is Justice Department consent agreements with local police departments to rein in abusive patterns of police behavior.

These include a pending consent decree for the Minneapolis Police Department, following their multitude of failures during the George Floyd saga, but a federal judge has punted on the decision in order to allow Attorney General Pam Bondi more time to “familiarize herself with the situation.” Bondi could also upend ongoing Justice Department negotiations and potential litigation to reform the Phoenix Police Department, following a DOJ report which found that Phoenix police systematically harassed Black, Hispanic, and Native American people.

The Department of Justice also shut down the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), which was a federal effort to track misconduct by law enforcement across the nation. NLEAD was the result of a 2022 Biden executive order that Trump rescinded in his first few days in office.

Meanwhile, another civil rights agency, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, is effectively out of business. The OFCCP was created to enforce Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246. With Trump’s repeal of the order, there is nothing for OFCCP to do, except maybe to harass government contractors to dump DEI programs.

Quite apart from hobbling agencies engaged in explicit civil rights enforcement, Trump’s war on DEI has become a pretext for firing government workers generally. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team has compelled the dismissal of large numbers of civil servants. To the extent that government employees work on anything having to do with race, they become high-priority targets. And a disproportionate number of these public workers are Black.

Musk got into an open conflict with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy at a March cabinet meeting over his proposed cuts to the FAA. According to The New York Times, Duffy said: “What am I supposed to do? I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers?” Musk’s rejoinder, based on no evidence, was that people hired under DEI programs, presumably unqualified, were working in control towers.

Trump’s CIA director John Ratcliffe fired 19 CIA employees who served in roles related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The workers then filed a lawsuit contesting their firings, pointing out they had been temporarily assigned to carry out civil rights laws within the intelligence community, including advancing the hiring and promotion of underrepresented minorities. But federal district court Judge Anthony Trenga ruled that while he thinks based on “basic fairness” the employees shouldn’t have been dismissed, nonetheless Ratcliffe had the authority to fire them.

THE DAY AFTER HIS INAUGURATION for a second term, Trump issued a series of executive orders collectively titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” This sounds innocent enough because it invokes merit, and who can be opposed to merit?

The order revoked several civil rights and diversity orders from the Obama and Biden presidencies, and directed all agencies of government to “[e]xcise references to DEI and DEIA principles, under whatever name they may appear, from Federal acquisition, contracting, grants, and financial assistance procedures to streamline those procedures, improve speed and efficiency, lower costs, and comply with civil-rights laws; and terminate all ‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ ‘equitable decision-making,’ ‘equitable deployment of financial and technical assistance,’ ‘advancing equity,’ and like mandates, requirements, programs, or activities, as appropriate.”

A major target is public education. A supplemental order threatens to revoke federal funding of public schools that accurately teach America’s history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. This is dressed up as “Ending Racial Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.”

On February 14, the Education Department sent out a “Dear Colleague” letter to educators, asserting that “[e]ducational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’ and advanced discriminatory policies and practices. Proponents of these discriminatory practices have attempted to further justify them—particularly during the last four years—under the banner of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’… smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline.” The letter warned that teaching this history could cost all schools their federal funding.

Trump’s strategy of destroying habitats where liberals tend to work blends with his perverse distortion of civil rights principles.

In truth, systemic and structural racism is a major aspect of the history of the United States, especially in the slaveholding states. The Trump administration is demanding that schools airbrush that history, in favor of what can only be called indoctrination. To the extent that states and cities with progressive governments stick to their principles and teach the truth, Trump’s agencies get another pretext for trying to deny them funds.

On February 17, the Education Department announced that it was terminating $600 million in grants for teacher training, much of which was targeted to attract and train minority teachers. The department objected that “many of these grants included teacher and staff recruiting strategies implicitly and explicitly based on race,” which was the whole point. The department also complained that some of the training materials “included inappropriate and unnecessary topics such as Critical Race Theory; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI); social justice activism; ‘anti-racism’; and instruction on white privilege and white supremacy.”

In North Carolina, as result of this order, more than a dozen programs will be terminated, totaling $90 million, including programs to recruit and train teachers for substantially Black communities with severe teacher shortages, as well as programs to cultivate master teachers. Among the grants revoked was a $2.4 million grant over five years for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to help recruit and train teachers for the Diverse and Resilient Educators Advised through Mentorship (DREAM) program to work in high-needs Durham schools.

Thus the Trump strategy does triple duty. It weakens public education and teacher training, especially in Black communities; it takes funding away from a liberal university; and it warps the accurate teaching of American history in favor of a falsely heroic white narrative.

TRUMP’S STRATEGY OF PUNISHING blue states and destroying habitats where liberals tend to work blends with his perverse distortion of civil rights principles. This poisonous mix came together in the announcement on March 7 that Columbia University would lose $400 million in previously committed federal grants because of its failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment, and that similar treatment of other universities would follow.

The statement, jointly issued by the Departments of Justice, Education, and Health and Human Services and the General Services Administration, said that the HHS and Education Departments would soon issue stop-work orders to immediately freeze the university’s access to some funds.

Consider what’s at work here. For starters, this is illegal. The federal government has no authority to freeze or take back previously given grants unless fraud is demonstrated.

Secondly, the order creates a standard made up out of whole cloth, defining the university’s previous actions to protect Jewish students as inadequate. Given the free-speech and assembly rights of the First Amendment, it’s not at all clear what the university authorities should have done.

The tenuous connection between the university’s conduct and the attempt to freeze or take back the grants is invented and entirely bogus. There is no instance where the Trump administration has shone a similar spotlight on the actions of universities for failing to protect the rights of Blacks, Hispanics, women, or sexual minorities.

The attempt of the far right and the Trump administration to wrap itself in the cause of battling antisemitism is hypocritical and disgusting. This is the same Donald Trump who said of the Charlottesville marauders, whose slogan was “Jews will not replace us,” that there were “very fine people on both sides,” even after antisemitic marchers deliberately crashed a car into a group of peaceful protesters, killing one.

Trump pardoned the January 6th insurrectionists, who included several members of the antisemitic Proud Boys and other explicit antisemites who follow QAnon. One photo from the January 6th rampage shows a man wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirt emblazoned with a skull and crossbones, and the phrase “work brings freedom,” a translation of the Auschwitz motto “Arbeit macht frei.”

Trump is a defender of Jews against supposed antisemitism when that’s useful to attack liberal universities, and an ally of the most explicit and vicious antisemites when that happens to be convenient for him.

The Christian right embraces the land of Israel out of a theological belief that only when the Jews return to the Holy Land will the Rapture come. Their biblical function fulfilled, Jews, as nonbelievers in Christ, will then go straight to hell. Trump’s alliance with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is every bit as opportunistic and hypocritical. Should it ever become convenient, Trump will turn on the Jews.

MEANWHILE, PRESSED BY THE ADMINISTRATION, major corporations have scrapped DEI programs and affirmative action commitments. They include Accenture, Amazon, Boeing, Citigroup, Deloitte, Disney, Ford, Goldman Sachs, Google, Lowe’s, McDonald’s, Meta, Molson Coors, Paramount, PepsiCo, PwC, Target, and Walmart. Many of these companies are not just getting rid of exaggerated DEI language, but ending entire human resource programs aimed at recruiting and promoting applicants from underrepresented groups.

It’s another example of how the Trump war against DEI becomes a war against basic civil rights. For instance, in February, Paramount’s co-CEOs informed staff that the company will no longer have hiring goals based on race, ethnicity, sex, or gender and that it will stop collecting this data from applicants.

All large corporations have regulatory business with the U.S. government. Ditching DEI is a handy way of ingratiating themselves with Trump. The ease with which DEI was dropped suggests that social responsibility was never a value for these corporations, but a useful fig leaf until it stopped being useful. As Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò writes for Slate, “on many levels, elite institutions and powerful organizations were performing symbolic identity politics to bolster their reputations without enacting meaningful material reforms,” like unionization or other forms of worker empowerment.

Resisting Trump’s racism is one aspect of the general imperative of resisting Trump.

There have been a few corporate holdouts. Delta remains dedicated to its DEI efforts. Chief External Affairs Officer Peter Carter said on an earnings call in January, “DEI is about talent, and that’s been our focus.” Costco continues to uphold its DEI programs. Apple has resisted pressures. Last month, the company’s board of directors asked shareholders to reject a DEI rollback proposal.

Procter & Gamble provided a statement to The Cincinnati Enquirer in February that said equality and inclusion is good for business. “This cannot and will not change,” CEO Jon Moeller declared. “It’s critical to who we are and what we do, to our principles, values and purpose and most importantly to winning.”

Let’s see how long these corporate holdouts manage to hold out.

To put the history of corporate affirmative action in perspective, while many of these efforts were carefully crafted exercises in branding, there is no doubt that corporate affirmative recruitment and promotion efforts, some dating back to the 1960s, did create new opportunities for Black workers and executives, and broke down prejudicial assumptions. Some Fortune 500 companies became good places for Black Americans to work.

The same is true of the military, which was far ahead of civilian America in breaking down racial barriers. And the civil service, about 20 percent Black, became known as a good place for Black professionals to pursue career opportunities. By attacking all three, in the name of combating DEI excesses, Trump is savaging the places where Black people work. It’s racism, pure and simple.

LATE IN THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN, a right-wing group associated with the Trump campaign created a lethal TV ad, which showed a flamboyantly costumed transgender person, intercut with an interview in which Kamala Harris seemed to be saying that she supported gender-altering surgery for prison inmates at taxpayer expense. The punch line of the ad: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”

The ads, which had several different variations, were aired more than 30,000 times in every swing state. The Trump campaign used the ads extensively in televised NFL and college football games and NASCAR races. The ads not only identified Harris with one of the most fraught forms of DEI, but made fun of the cultural left’s use of invented language, for those who got the sly reference.

Of all the forms of DEI, the treatment of trans people is one of the most controversial, even among progressives. Democrats and feminists have divided on whether trans people who are born male should be permitted to compete in women’s sports. Nationwide, according to the NCAA, fewer than ten trans people compete in intercollegiate sports out of a total of about 510,000 athletes, but this controversy has consumed disproportionate attention and done disproportionate damage, crowding out the more complex issue of trans rights generally.

The use of the ad and the damage to the Harris campaign raises larger questions. Did the left bring this targeting on itself, by embracing a sometimes exaggerated, easy-to-caricature form of DEI that turned out to be more controversial than affirmative action, which had been broadly accepted by the mainstream since the 1960s? And did the demands of the cultural left spill over and damage the Democratic Party?

This is a much trickier question than it seems. It depends on which left and which Democrats you are talking about.

The Black Lives Matter movement, which gained broad currency in the aftermath of the 2020 police killing of George Floyd, aptly pointed out that despite the three great civil rights acts of the 1960s, far too many Black people, especially young Black men, were regularly subjected to police harassment, humiliation, arrest, and brutalization. Middle-class Black drivers were disproportionately pulled over for the crime of Driving While Black. Random testing confirmed that discrimination in housing was still rampant. Blacks at elite universities were presumed to be beneficiaries of racial preferences while legacy admissions of C students were rampant.

Structural racism, in short, persisted. The sadistic killing of George Floyd was impossible to ignore, and it was only one in a long series of police murders of innocent Black men, hardly any of which were punished. Police enjoyed impunity. For a short time, the Black Lives Matter movement had the support of a majority of white people.

Much of the DEI movement was an effort by well-meaning whites to respond to Black demands and express solidarity and sympathy with the still-unfinished business of civil rights. At the extreme, some of it could be silly, as in language policing that invited caricature. Some terms, like “Latinx,” were widely rejected by their intended beneficiaries, as a perversion of Spanish. The word “woke,” long used in the Black community to mean alert to race and racial threats, soon became the latest word to ridicule hyper-politically correct whites.

In 2019, as support for Black Lives Matter intensified, a Black scholar named Ibram X. Kendi published a perfectly timed book titled How to Be an Antiracist. One of Kendi’s themes was that even well-meaning whites needed to look harder at their own subconscious racism. This became part of a narrative that had currency among Black radicals: You may think that you are an “ally” of anti-racist efforts, but think again. You are either an active anti-racist or you are a racist. A related theme was that whites who were looking for guidance from Blacks on how to help battle racism were burdening Black people who already had more than enough burdens. Whites needed to figure out their own racism and work in their own communities.

Kendi’s story resonated in some quarters and had elements of truth. But it seemed oblivious to the practical need for interracial coalition if we were serious about making progress. There are just not that many whites of goodwill enlisting as allies in the first place, and even fewer if they are being told that they are racists but don’t know it. All of this was grist for the real racists.

There is no central committee of the cultural left to sort out what themes and narratives make sense and which ones backfire. Activists and writers are free to say and do what they choose. It’s a free country (or at least it was).

To some extent, universities also went overboard in their commitment to DEI. At faculty meetings and in classrooms where I teach, a good proportion of my colleagues and students make sure to identify their pronouns. I have never quite gotten the logic of this. Demanding through peer pressure that faculty and students indicate via this code whether they are gay, straight, bi, or trans seems like a way of outing people in a group meeting who may not want to be outed. Why not ask people to disclose their race and religion?

At the peak of the effort to police language, some groups issued lists of forbidden words that bordered on self-parody. One was not supposed to use the term “fieldwork,” because it evokes the work in the cotton fields of slaves—sorry, enslaved people. A Stanford University guide to language even recommended avoiding the word “grandfather,” because it was used in the grandfather clauses of the Jim Crow era designed to prevent Blacks from voting. These insensitive uses of language could be understood as “micro-aggressions.”

It’s one thing to banish the n-word. The latest version of rarified language policing is a form of virtue-signaling and cheap grace. Rather than obedience, it produces eye-rolling, even among good liberals. There are just not enough people in the general public who have sympathy for it. That’s why the “they/them” ad resonated.

If you have a DEI bureaucracy, whether at a university, a corporation, or an agency of the government, its tendency is to keep coming up with more rarified forms of DEI. Mandatory training by diversity consultants, at universities and government agencies, may have produced more resentment than heightened sensitivity, even among would-be allies.

To some extent, Biden’s administration embraced a version of DEI that invited backlash. To flag just one example, Biden’s Executive Order 14035 of June 25, 2021, titled “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce,” put the entire federal government in the business of promoting forms of DEI that went well beyond affirmative action. In the internal politics of the Democratic Party coalition, this and similar orders are the result of letting constituent groups demand and define maximal policy. Biden provided some fat targets for Trump to gleefully repeal.

WHAT, THEN, SHOULD DEFENDERS of civil rights be doing now? Trump’s assault on basic civil rights in the name of ending DEI is not only thinly veiled racism. It is also part of Trump’s larger project of destroying government and punishing states and cities led by Democrats. Resisting Trump’s racism is one aspect of the general imperative of resisting Trump.

Some of this is done in court, some in the court of public opinion. The impact of the war against DEI on basic civil rights needs more attention and condemnation. The efforts to shut down government and target minority and women workers as diversity hires is illegal and will be the subject of litigation that will eventually be resolved by the Supreme Court.

One thing going for the Democrats is Trump’s propensity for overreaching and contradicting himself. It’s too soon to tell whether there will be anything resembling remotely fair elections in 2026 and 2028. If there are, and Democrats can manage more unity than in their early stumbles, there is a decent chance of taking back at least one house of Congress in 2026 and winning the presidency in 2028.

What then? I put the question to one of America’s most respected Black constitutional scholars, professor Randall Kennedy. He teaches at Harvard Law School and is the author of several books, including the authoritative defense of affirmative action, For Discrimination, and is a former law clerk to Thurgood Marshall.

Kennedy had several thoughts. An edited transcript of our full conversation is posted here. Although advocates of racial affirmative action have long resisted socioeconomic affirmative action as a weaker second-best, explicitly racial affirmative action has now been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Kennedy told me that he thought socioeconomic affirmative action was now a defensible high ground.

Liberals, Kennedy argued, need to reclaim the basic idea of color blindness, which conservatives have used to pillory preferences. “To be appropriately color-blind is to recognize the full humanity of others free of misleading distractions unleashed by racial mythologies,” he said.

Taking a long view, the never-ending struggle for racial justice has ebbed and flowed, sometimes with allies in government, often with enemies. The first Reconstruction lasted only from Lincoln in 1865 to the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877. The era of Jim Crow then lasted nearly another century until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the great civil rights acts of the 1960s. That was the Second Reconstruction. But as Kennedy points out, in the debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, even though it did no more than prohibit discrimination, its opponents treated the bill as preference for Blacks.

The Second Reconstruction lasted only until Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” shifted the South from a Dixiecrat anti-Black monolith into a Republican one. There was a brief era of biracial governments in the South, with racially liberal governors such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. But that era came to an end with a right-wing Supreme Court weakening voting rights. When progressives return to government, we need a long-deferred Third Reconstruction, this time with greater attention to coalition politics and a coalition of the decent.

Research assistance for this article was provided by Nic Suarez.