Jonathan P. Baird

Everyday since the onset of the second Trump administration Americans who care about civil rights have suffered a barrage of blows aimed at turning back the clock and reversing all gains that have been made in the struggle against racism since the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v Board of Education. There are almost too many items to list but I will mention some important ones:

– Trump’s challenge to the 14th amendment and birthright citizenship
– Trump overturning LBJ’s Executive Order 11226 which sought to end racial discrimination by the federal government in contracting
– the Executive Order banning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts not only from federal government hiring and practices but also from state and local programs receiving federal dollars
– the Executive Order requiring schools teach “patriotic education” and banning accurate teaching in K-12 schools of the history of racism
– the purge of competent, experienced and capable black and female military leaders who were accused of “being woke”
– the reversal of seven earlier Executive Orders designed to combat environmental racism
– Trump firing two Equal Opportunity commissioners who were confirmed by the Senate to serve set terms, leaving the EEOC without a quorum so the agency can’t take votes on policy or enforcement of civil rights laws
– renaming military bases after traitorous Confederate generals, segregationists and enslavers
– co-President Musk’s racist and xenophobic attack on a federal judge of color, Amir Ali, who has ruled against DOGE

It is easy to treat each shocker as an isolated, individual event. The problem with that approach is that it fails to delineate patterns. There is no effort to place events in a historical context or to connect how individual occurrences tie together.

Donald Trump, his administration and the MAGA movement are trying to roll back America’s commitment to the value of equality. This struggle has been ongoing since our nation’s founding. The two greatest American sins are slavery and the genocide against Native Americans. From the very start of the nation, our commitment to multi-racial democracy was opposed by an alternative set of illiberal values rooted in racism.

The fight has always fundamentally been about white supremacy and whether America would maintain that hateful tradition. Our history has a ping pong-like quality where that struggle has gone back and forth with gains followed by reversals.

The Civil War was fought to end the slave system that dehumanized African Americans, denied them the right to vote and brutalized them through terrorist acts of violence. Even though the Union forces won the Civil War, the Reconstruction period that followed was short-lived. Particularly after federal troops pulled out of the South in 1876, the racist forces again prevailed.

From around 1890-1940, all the positive civil rights gains that happened in the aftermath of the Civil War were wiped away. White southerners called for Redemption – the return of white supremacy and restoration of the old, pre-Civil War order.

The historian W.E. B. DuBois described the era as one where “The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery”. The KKK and white racists in the South enforced a form of racial fascism where black people were racially segregated and frozen into a status of subjugation. Over 4000 lynchings reinforced racist rule. These social relations remained the norm until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s-1960’s.

The Brown v Board of Education decision ushered in a period of advance in the struggle against segregation. Our society started to recognize its legacy of voter suppression and discrimination in every area of life, including housing, employment, education and health care. Barriers like the denial of the right to serve on a jury, have an interracial marriage, swim at a racially segregated beach, eat at a restaurant, travel on a bus or stay in a hotel disappeared.

There was undeniable improvement in the economic well-being of many people of color and that was complemented by increased representation in elected political office.

Unfortunately, that success stands threatened as we hover on the cusp of a new period of backwardness. The many actions I outlined show that the coalition of illiberal forces organized around the Trump administration and MAGA are actively working to restore white supremacy. In our era, they wear suits instead of Klan robes.

Their patriotic history is a fairy tale based on suppressing black history. America hasn’t acknowledged the depth of racist poison undergirding our institutions and our way of life, We have not done well in many areas like fair housing, employment discrimination, mass incarceration, racial hate crimes, police violence, and unequal public education. Adam Serwer calls what is going on now the “Great Resegregation”, the restoration of America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender.

The Trump side has argued that efforts to end discrimination are themselves a form of discrimination. They indulge the fantasy racism is over, maintaining that we should all be color-blind. Colorblindness rhetoric is about the idea of solving our race problem by ignoring it. It is a convenient way to head off public discussion of racism.

I believe that the current onslaught against DEI is a cover to justify the rollback of civil rights. It is code. The intended message is support for white supremacy. Conservatives don’t usually publicly use the N-word now. They talk about DEI causing plane crashes and black immigrants eating dogs and cats. That way they can be racist and have plausible deniability.

Many white people still mistakenly believe racism serves their interest but it is the billionaire class that is hogging the money and screwing over black and white workers. Racism remains the billionaires’ most effective divide and conquer tool. The civil rights movement advanced the economic and political rights of all working people and white people have benefited when racism is beaten back.

We have come too far and learned too much to go back.