Carl P. Leubsdorf: Trump seeks to reverse the policies that erased past racism

In the Trump administration, Black is white, and white is Black. Really.

For six decades, it has been bipartisan national policy to erase the vestiges of racism with policies and practices better reflecting the country’s current diversity.

But President Donald Trump has not only reversed that policy and punished some who pursued it but sought to eliminate historic references to those efforts and remove prominent minority officials from top posts.

His rationale is that civil rights policies designed to overcome past wrongs to Americans of color in fact give them an unfair advantage over the white majority. It flouts the educational and economic inequities many minority Americans still face.

By seeking to implement a revised interpretation of the civil rights laws, his administration is making a mockery of those laws while seemingly trying to restore the more white-dominated past they sought to address. In the process, it has twisted the term ‘woke’ – initially designed to reflect awareness of racial prejudice and social injustice – into a pejorative for reverse racism.

In a sense, this is hardly surprising, given that racism fueled Trump’s rise to political prominence, namely his persistent lie that the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, was born in Kenya, not Hawaii.

In his 2024 campaign, Trump vowed to eliminate government “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” programs seeking to address systemic inequities and create more merit-based environments. In doing so, he has also condemned its supporters and pressured private institutions like universities, corporations, law firms and museums to scrap diversity efforts or face large fines and lose millions in government research contracts.

Last week, the education department accused president Gregory Washington of northern Virginia’s George Mason University of implementing “unlawful DEI policies that intentionally discriminate on the basis of race” by giving preferential treatment to “underrepresented groups.” Threatening unspecified penalties, it urged him to apologize for violating Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination based on race, color or national origin.

Washington, noting he sought to expand opportunity, not suppress it, refused to apologize and correctly concluded the accusations represent “a profound shift in how Title VI is being applied.

“Longstanding efforts to address inequality – such as mentoring programs, inclusive hiring practices, and support for historically underrepresented groups – are in many cases being reinterpreted as presumptively unlawful,” he said, not only in government but beyond.

Public sentiment is divided on administration racial policies. A March NBC News poll showed equal support for maintaining or eliminating DEI programs. But a recent University of Massachusetts Amherst poll showed nearly 60% disapproved of Trump’s handling of civil rights issues.

Meanwhile, various agencies have gone beyond eliminating DEI programs to remove references to civil rights advances from government websites and restore the names of Confederate generals, removed by the Biden administration, to military bases.

Trump wants to rewrite the history of those efforts. In a recent Truth Social post, he accused Smithsonian Institution museums of stressing “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been” while including “Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

“Let me get this straight,” posted Rep. Sarah McBride, D-Del., the first openly transgender member of Congress, on X. “They’re censoring exhibits about slavery because they supposedly don’t emphasize the progress made for Black Americans, while they also censor government websites that celebrate the progress of trailblazing Black Americans because they deem them ‘woke,’ ” she said.

Illustrating the absurdity of some administration efforts, the Justice Department told Texas that four House districts created to provide minority representation under the 1965 Voting Rights Act are themselves unconstitutional violations of that law.

Here are some other actions:

• Trump issued an executive order revoking the 1965 executive order by President Lyndon B. Johnson barring discrimination in federal contracting. It banned all federal contractors and publicly funded universities from practicing “race-based discrimination.”

• The Justice Department halted new civil rights cases or investigations and barred its lawyers from intervening for plaintiffs in such cases. It reassigned civil rights, voting rights and environmental lawyers to immigration issues and revoked support for a second Black-majority House district in Louisiana.

• The Pentagon plans to re-install the statue of a Confederate general, Albert Pike, in Washington’s Judiciary Square where it was toppled during 2020 racial protests. It is also restoring a statue commemorating the Confederacy in Arlington National Cemetery.

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth purged top minorities and women throughout the defense hierarchy. He fired the first black chairman of the Chiefs of Staff, the first female chief of naval operations, the first woman Coast Guard commandant and forced the resignation of the first black woman to head the Defense Health Agency. All were replaced by white officers.

• The administration has targeted prominent Black officials who opposed him. It raised mortgage fraud allegations against Lisa Cook, the only Black member of the Federal Reserve Board, and Leticia James, New York’s Black attorney general who won a massive civil fraud judgment against the Trump organization. Trump then fired Cook.

• The administration has sought to end or restrict legal immigration of predominantly Hispanic, Asian and Black immigrants from Central American, Asian and African countries. But it prioritized the entry of white South Africans as victims of persecution and discrimination, presumably by the country’s Black majority government.

• The Justice Department said it won’t defend a decades-old grant program for heavily Hispanic universities against a court challenge, declaring it unconstitutionally provides an unfair advantage based on ethnicity.

This marks a stunning retreat that rejects the nation’s historic commitment to pursuing equality and the racial realities of modern-day America.