This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become. “As President Trump has said, all staff, offices, and initiatives connected to Biden’s un-American policy will be immediately terminated.” —Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung
Should former President Donald Trump be reelected this November, his administration plans to weaponize Civil Rights–era legislation against the historically underserved communities that they were intended to help, according to an Axios report. Essentially, it will be used to help white people instead. The Trump campaign’s fable of anti-white racism goes something like this: Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs woefully discriminate against hardworking white Americans and dole handouts to the undeserving (often, a racially coded way of referring to nonwhite communities).
A spokesperson for the former president’s campaign, Steven Cheung, told Axios that if Trump wins a second term, “all staff, offices, and initiatives connected to Biden’s un-American policy will be immediately terminated.” Cheung did not clarify what “un-American” policy he was talking about. But Biden has pledged in the past to advance racial equity among Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Asian communities. In an executive order in 2021, Biden vowed to “pursue a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all,” adding in a press release that “entrenched disparities in our laws and public policies, and in our public and private institutions, have often denied that equal opportunity to individuals and communities.”
AdvertisementWhatever Trump’s plan is to roll that back, his allies are already waging a legal battle against government equity programs.
Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementThe pandemic laid bare preexisting health and economic inequities, namely in disproportionate mortality rates by race. In the same year as the equity-related executive order, the federal government produced an approximately $29 billion relief fund for restaurants struggling during the pandemic. The program had a 21-day priority approval period for women, military veterans, and historically disadvantaged individuals (on the basis of race and gender). But when white business owners sued, federal judges struck down the race and gender priority, arguing that it violated the excluded business owners’ equal protection rights. The right-wing nonprofit America First Legal, created by former Trump adviser (and notorious racist) Stephen Miller, backed those lawsuits and brought a similar case against a program in Texas that they won, too. Miller’s group has also filed various civil rights complaints against “woke” companies using the Civil Rights Act of 1964. America First Legal alleges that practices to increase minority representation at the management level of a company, for example, are discriminatory to white people.
AdvertisementWhat’s strategically missing, however, from the race-baiting rhetoric and litigation is discussion of the genesis of such DEI policies. History textbooks—well, some of them, depending on what state you’re in—attest to decades of government inaction, and at times, bigotry, that have been made into policy. Redlining, school segregation, and so many more discriminatory practices were sanctioned by American law. As a result, communities of color, by and large, faced significant hurdles to socioeconomic mobility that white Americans did not. Instead, many white Americans were literally subsidized in their pursuit of generational wealth, education, and positions of legal and political influence where other Americans were prohibited. This is not to say there were or are no poor white people, but it is a basic, indisputable fact of American history that such policies disproportionately harmed the nonwhite groups. It should hardly need to be stated that the reverse-racism discourse is a distraction. When taken literally and earnestly, it is galling in its myopia.
Advertisement AdvertisementNevertheless, supporters of the anti-DEI movement mischaracterize attempts to grant historically denied opportunities as theft or robbery. Proponents of racial or gender equity programs then become branded as criminals running afoul of the Constitution and Civil Rights goals. As the pendulum inches—not swings—toward progress, like clockwork, counterforces emerge to push back in the opposite direction.
Trump is at the vanguard of the backlash to progress—often alleging that his own victimhood is the result of discrimination. He has repeatedly called New York Attorney General Letitia James “racist,” for example. James brought a successful civil suit for fraud against the Trump Organization, which resulted in Trump being fined more than $355 million. A white man labeling a Black woman a racist may have been a sensational strategy to distract from the crimes he was being charged with. It also succeeded in encouraging a semantic debate yet again over whether reverse racism is a real thing.
AdvertisementBut the main point is this: The campaign’s touting of anti-white racism obfuscates the reality that race-based inequality still exists. Trump’s circle and the far-right conservatives allied with it are sending the message that historically underserved groups have amassed and wield an unfair amount of power—over hiring decisions, over college admissions, and over education curricula at every level. In reality, from a wealth and political-capital perspective, many still remain beholden to the legacies of Jim Crow.
Why are we even arguing about this? Trump and his allies have proven over and over that they do not reside in a fact-based world, nor do they seek to govern with regard to reality. But their politics consistently stoke the flames of division—and this is no exception.
So yes, the Axios report is not entirely surprising. Still, it’s an explicit acknowledgement of what many racial justice advocates feared—that if Trump is reelected, his administration plans to eliminate hard-won gains that count as Civil Rights progress on many, many fronts.
