How Trump Upended 60 Years of Civil Rights in Two Months
An assault on federal protections may bring about a new era of unchecked discrimination.
"Since returning to power, Trump has used his singular authority as the head of the federal government to recast the white majority as the primary victims of systemic racial discrimination — though no evidence, not even self-reporting among white people, shows this to be true."
—Nikole Hannah-James, The New York Times Magazine (June 27, 2025)
Nikole Hannah-James does a masterful job of reporting on all the ways Trump has turned civil rights in this country on its head. She also provides a historical example of "how quickly racial progress can disappear" by showing how, in the late 19th century, the Old South rapidly dismantled the considerable Black racial progress that had happened under Reconstruction. This is a gift 🎁 link so there is no paywall. Below are some excerpts.
[...] On his second day in office, President Donald Trump labeled O.F.C.C.P.’s [Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs] efforts to enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act illegal and discriminatory — presumably against white people. He signed his own executive order revoking Johnson’s on behalf of, as he put it, “hardworking Americans who deserve a shot at the American dream.”
Within the week, Trump’s acting secretary of labor ordered the O.F.C.C.P. to “immediately cease and desist all investigative and enforcement activity” and close all open cases. A few weeks later, O.F.C.C.P.’s acting director proposed slashing its staff by 90 percent. In fewer than two months, six decades of civil rights enforcement was essentially dead.
Trump has justified these actions by claiming he is rooting out racial discrimination disguised as “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Indeed, the other federal agency charged with investigating employment discrimination, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, recently created a page on its website dedicated to helping white Americans file complaints based on being victimized by diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
But to see what Trump is doing as simply eliminating so-called “D.E.I.” is to misunderstand the scale and the consequences. What’s at stake is not only corporate diversity trainings, equity offices and the use of pronouns in email signatures. Many diversity, equity and inclusion programs were put in place to help ensure compliance with civil rights laws and to foster integration in a society that for most of its history explicitly discriminated against Black Americans. No court has deemed these programs illegal. Yet in the opening months of his second term, Trump has capitalized on the unpopularity of equality efforts among some Americans, glibly wielding the language of D.E.I. to initiate the broadest and most significant assault on civil rights and racial integration in this country in more than a century.
Since returning to power, Trump has used his singular authority as the head of the federal government to recast the white majority as the primary victims of systemic racial discrimination — though no evidence, not even self-reporting among white people, shows this to be true. In addition to upending long-established enforcement of civil rights law in employment, he has undermined civil rights protections in housing and education and environmental policy; crippled or shuttered entire federal civil rights agencies; and retracted federal findings of civil rights violations against police departments. He has forced by mandate, threat and coercion the elimination of policies and cultural norms focused on integration and equality throughout government, education and the private sector. Trump has claimed — though he has no authority to do so — to have repealed birthright citizenship, which was embedded in the Constitution at the end of slavery to guarantee Black Americans citizenship by birthright and grants automatic citizenship to all people born on American soil.
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