There should be no surprise about this. Project 2025 explicitly proposes for the abolition of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and turning it into a unit that avenges wrongs against White people. So, this is just Trump beginning to reel out part of his incoming government’s programme of white supremacy because there are several racist policies lined up as part of the attempt to ‘Make America Great Again.’
For those who don’t get it, making America great again is returning America to Jim Crow and pre-Jim Crow era when White America had its foot on the neck of Black people. That is why I pity the Black people in the US and elsewhere celebrating Trump’s victory for whatever reason they conjure because they really are historically ignorant and blind to his real designs presently, even though he and his supporters have really hidden nothing.
These Black people are like the live fish put in a giant pot of water and placed on a giant cooker, but who think they’re in some lovely ocean until Trump lights the fire as he’s doing now.
In Trump’s MAGA universe, what they’re calling DEI are policies that unjustly favour Black people and the idea is not only to rescind these policies, but to get back whatever they think are the financial benefits attached to give back to White people from whom all this was supposedly taken from in the name of equity. Another part of it is to also stop the teaching of true and accurate American history because they think they can hide White historical injustices to Black people from new generations of White Americans.
So, all these and the right’s fight against teaching Critical Race Theory are forms of historical denialism. People who think all the racist stuff Trump and his people campaigned on was just vote-winning bluster will find out now that America has turned back to the dark past in 2024. When the Harris-Walz Campaign talked about ‘We Are Not Going Back,’ this is the ‘Back’ they don’t want to go back to, but which America has voted for. It’s going to be a long night.
Now, listening to Trump in that clip, it is not clear what it’s aimed at. Is it diversity trainings or is it affirmative action, which the US Supreme Court has already limited via the two cases it decided in June last year involving admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC) or is it aimed at the prevention of the most accurate teaching of history by punishing schools for engaging in conversations around systemic racism? It may well be that whatever it is Trump is thinking could be declared unconstitutional under First Amendment protections, but we need to bear in mind that Trump has already stuffed the Supreme Court with rightwing Justices who have already granted him immunity and who most likely would be willing to go along with anything he fancies, no matter how destructive, especially as all these look like part of a well-orchestrated ideological attack on American democracy with Donald Trump as the arrowhead.
Let’s be clear, what Trump is proposing now isn’t new in American history. This is basically America reverting to type. It is the old idea that reverse discrimination against white people is the real discrimination. It’s been around since the immediate end of the American Civil War when President Andrew Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 when he claimed the Civil Rights Act had gone too far in providing differential treatment for Black folks when in fact all that law did was to seek the end of discrimination by providing some measure of equal opportunity for Black people.
Further, in 1883, Justice Joseph Bradley of the Supreme Court helped to invalidate certain post-Emancipation civil rights laws on the ground that they favoured the Blacks too much just because America was trying to end the history of discrimination against them. Justice Bradley said they should be satisfied with just being “mere citizens,” even though they had only been granted right of citizenship just a few years before.
So, the reverse discrimination argument that Trump, Stephen Miller and co are making today is directly from that old playbook. It is today part of a project of deliberate historical amnesia to make people forget that White folks have been sweeping discrimination of Black folks under the carpet.
Now, it isn’t only that they want to reverse the gains of civil rights for Black people, they want to tag the exercise of such rights a crime by saying the real discrimination is against White people who now deserve reparation and compensation, which is the idea that Trump is rolling out in that video. Of course, this is the same country where Black people have been asking for reparations against slavery and injustice for eons without success.
This is a nation that never compensated victims of enslavement, white racism and segregation for their injuries. The irony is that the only reparations ever paid for racism were paid to white enslavers when the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862 was passed to compensate the slave owners for the loss of their human property.
For those who are observant, you would have noted that this present iteration of the racist activism against Black civil rights now led by Donald Trump started with their reaction against the worldwide protests against police brutality and racism championed by Black Lives Matter (BLM) following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. It became the largest racial justice protest in American history. For the racist and supremacist White folks, it wasn’t that it was a Black protest because they’re very much used to that, it was that White kids were joining Black and Brown folks to protest. The fact that White kids are becoming conscientized about racial injustice and are joining Black and Brown folks to want to do something about it was shocking to them.
From that moment, Trump and his supremacist gang decided to attack what they consider to be the root, which is education on racial justice. It was therefore no coincidence that immediately after the George Floyd protest, the American right launched its attack against the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools. Critical Race Theory is an academic framework created in the seventies to teach American history of racism and white supremacy and how these are still embedded in its institutions, including strategies to combat it. It is designed to help build an egalitarian, just and inclusive society.
Trump had led the Republican Party, the conservative media and the right in tagging the protests unpatriotic, describing protesters as enemies of America who think America is a wicked country. In early September, 2020, he issued a directive to all federal agencies to stop anti-bias trainings that rely on critical race theory. He declared that those teaching it were teaching “very sick ideas” and that they were teaching people to hate the country.
The Republican project to remove Critical Race Theory from curriculums in schools, despite the immense benefits it has brought to the American society in helping to improve understanding and better race relations, racial and social justice, equality and so on, has been quite successful. In the hands of Republicans and rightwing activists and media personalities, Critical Race Theory has become a catch-all, a real bogeyman to lump ideas of race and racism and also under which they can censor any kind of conversation around race and racism, diversity, inequality and so on.
Right now, 26 states have already passed what they call concept laws to remove Critical Race Theory from curriculums, both real and imagined, in a bid to prevent the teaching of accurate history. These laws of course endanger educators involved. It is now a common sight in America to witness Taliban-like book burning ceremonies.
Indeed, what Trump is doing is following the Project 2025 blueprint of nationalizing these concept laws. That is what he’s saying in that video under the guise of protecting students and parental rights. But whose children and whose parents? If we listen to the rightwing Mums for Liberty, who Trump met with during the campaign, they claim the teaching of Ruby Bridges who at the age of 6 helped desegregate public schools in New Orleans in 1960 might make White children feel bad about their country. In other words, White children must not be taught accurate history of what happened, even though Ruby Bridges at the age of 6 was able to face down racist mobs everyday on her way to and from school where she would see a White woman threaten to poison her and another show her a black baby doll in a coffin, while others throw things at her. White children are never old enough to learn about white racism. They can’t handle the truth. Of course, these people know that learning the truth helps young people understand the country better, that it helps them to understand the work to be done to engender better race relations. But, that is not the goal of MAGA. Trump and co want to protect White children from the truth they need to know in order to be informed citizens in the 21st century. They are in the business of creating citizens with the MAGA mentality to help with the autocracy they are putting in place.
People, especially black people need to wake up to what Trump and co are doing. They are creating an America to be under White hyper-masculine domination and their biggest opposition are black people who have historically championed the fight against racism being the primary victims themselves. Trump wants to administratively and institutionally redefine racial discrimination to be anything that helps minorities achieve equality and equity via state intervention. Trump is the White Knight of white supremacy and he isn’t hiding it. It is the basis of his electoral victory and the thinking in the MAGA world is that they will never have another opportunity to redesign America in their own image. They are in the business of undoing everything the Founding Fathers have done by killing democratic idealism. The Founding Father designed an America that was to grow into its democracy and the promise of “E Pluribus Unum” (Out of the many, one), but Trump and co, like many racists before them, want to kill the democracy and promise by using the instrument of government to return the country under white supremacy that the Founders skirted around believing in the better nature of succeeding generations of Americans.
Trump has nominated as his Attorney General the hugely unqualified supremacist Congressman, Matt Gaetz. This is a man who’s faced accusation of illicit drug use, converting campaign funds for personal use, child sex trafficking and statutory rape. He had been under investigation by the Department of Justice before they decided not to charge him, but he was still under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for underage sexual abuse and illegal drug use before his nomination by Trump from whom he had sought preemptive presidential pardon while Trump was still president relating to the Justice Department investigation examining whether he violated federal sex trafficking laws. He is a believer in the white nationalist Great Replacement theory and has vowed to prosecute Black Lives Matter. His nomination as Attorney General by Trump should tell Black people what is in store.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Black people have been in the trenches long enough to know how to respond to the challenges of the moment. They’ve seen this backlash coming since America had the guts to elect a Black man as President twice. They saw this coming with the Tea Party insurgency, the Trump birther campaign against Obama, Trump’s first election to the presidency, the MAGA movement and now Trump’s second election to the Oval Office, despite being a conman, adjudicated rapist, convict, racist, insurrectionist and self-declared fascist. Trump and his crew are not the first supremacists Black people have had to confront and they possibly won’t be the last. One thing is for sure, like all others before them, they can’t win. In the end, America will be the better for it when Black people once again prove their mettle by saving the union in this fight against Trump and his gang. Black people did not declare this war; Trump did like all insurgents against Black dignity before him, he will lose.
