President Donald Trump has signed nearly 100 executive orders since his January 20 inauguration, including a record 26 on the first day. Some of them threaten to rend the kaleidoscopic fabric of an integrated America.
Whatever “making America great again” truly means, his early moves signal that segregation is essential to it.
In the first week of his new administration, Trump signed orders that would dismantle decades-old legal protections designed to desegregate the federal workforce and ensure equal opportunity. Such actions — done with the support of Republicans and conservative activists opposed to equality, as well as mainstream institutions at the center of American life — threaten to march us back toward a segregationist society.
Tech billionaire and prominent Trump adviser Elon Musk frequently and erroneously blames diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives for a host of improbable problems, from Los Angeles’ response to apocalyptic wildfires to Boeing’s flight safety issues. Conservatives, in a show of force, have boycotted companies supportive of diversity. In response, as well as in a preemptive capitulation to the Trump administration, some of America’s most powerful corporations (including Walmart, Meta, McDonald’s, the Ford Motor Company, and Target) have announced that they are scaling back — or, in some cases, scrapping their diversity programs.
Numerous mainstream media outlets that have quietly purged their race coverage teams are also offering tacit support of the anti-DEI crusade by framing’s reporting on these conservative attacks as “rolling back diversity goals” or “rethinking” DEI. This phrasing may be technically true, but it deliberately obscures the ultimate aim: gutting diversity policies and subjugating the marginalized.
The segregationist dog whistles have become considerably more audible to the mainstream masses over the past few years. Loudly questioning Black and other marginalized people’s qualifications and place in public life is code for “other” and a rejection of their place in society. This is perhaps best exemplified by the conservative characterization of former Vice President Kamala Harris as “a DEI hire” when she became the Democratic presidential nominee last year.
Homogeneity — the dull sameness that keeps corporate CEOs White and male — is the antithesis to diversity. Decades of diversity policies have done little to change the demographics of American business leadership. Despite some positive changes following formal desegregation orders, our schools, houses of worship, and neighborhoods have all remained separate and unequal due to the fact that most diversity policies were superficial and did little to dislodge entrenched White power. Diversity policies have always had their critics, and many of the most bracing criticisms were from scholars who hoped to diagnose systemic problems in order to more effectively create integrated spaces. The anti-DEI critics on the right, however, aren’t interested in normalizing inclusivity — they are questioning the value of integration itself.
Historically, Jim Crow segregation was not a system of total separation; it was a system of managed social interactions that reinforced ideas of White superiority. White segregationists considered themselves natural managers, more qualified, and better leaders destined to rule over non-Whites. For segregationists, the ritual partitioning of water fountains and bathrooms simply reflected and reinforced their alleged superiority in public space. Forcing Black bus riders to move if any White passenger wanted their seat reminded everyone that Black people’s comfort was less important. Courts forcing witnesses to take oaths on Black or White Bibles consecrated the system as holy. Under segregation, mundane interactions reminded everyone, White and Black alike, of the racial hierarchy’s natural order. Reinforcement of the illusion of White superiority ensured that people’s movement through shared public space happened on White people’s terms, ensuring no threat to White prerogatives.
Practical matters, like the South’s reliance on Black labor, also made total separation impossible. Workplace segregation drove down wages and disciplined White labor, creating a permanent pool of underpaid Black workers who could break strikes. But segregation also made so-called “good jobs” synonymous with White jobs. Many Black jobs in White workplaces fit the description of service work, such as Pullman porters on trains or domestic helpers in White homes. Black farm workers often faced the most dangerous or thankless manual labor. What’s more, segregationists were quite happy to take Black people’s money as long as commerce occurred through the back door or once they’d served all of the White customers. Within a segregated society, Black people are essential as the underclass that elevated and prioritized White privilege.
Segregation’s most visible defenders often expressed their bigotry openly, burning the Freedom Riders’ buses or putting out cigarettes on nonviolent protesters at Woolworth’s. However, the most-effective segregationists were in courtrooms and boardrooms making policy that reinforced separation through seemingly race-neutral systems that were justified by appeals to some higher principle such as “merit” or “community control of schools.” In his inauguration address, President Trump harkened to this very strategy in his promise to “forge a society that is color-blind and merit-based.“
In 1955, in response to Brown v. Board of Education, administrators at the flagship University of Texas at Austin conspired to circumvent civil rights protections, adopting admissions tests that would “exclude as many Negro undergraduates as possible” while maintaining a legally defensible rationale for preserving segregation. Using admissions tests to exclude Black students was possible because America’s separate and unequal education system was designed to hobble Black students’ ability to compete. Test score differences — a predictable and intended result of Jim Crow schooling — allowed administrators to hide explicitly racist goals behind facially neutral procedural norms, circumventing newly installed anti-discrimination laws. Interpreting standardized test scores as neutral measures of merit laundered and legitimized institutionalized racism, making it an accepted part of organizational procedures.
Similarly framed concerns about seemingly race-neutral community schools led to the opening of segregation academies that replicated Jim Crow education for the children of White parents with financial means. These thinly veiled machinations to undermine racial equality were successfully repackaged into more palatable concerns about community and parental choice. When today’s anti-DEI movement couches their appeals in concerns about “merit,” that never seems to apply when over 40% of White students admitted to Harvard receive an unearned advantage in admissions. Nor do those concerns seem to apply when data shows that White women have most benefited from DEI, that Asian Americans and Black women are among some of the nation’s most college educated groups, and that White men dominate 56% of the nation’s C-suite executive positions.
The fact that the new segregationists feel compelled to cover their tracks with euphemism is an acknowledgement of the weakness of their intellectual position, the lingering stigma against overt discrimination, and the Civil Rights Movement’s moral clarity.
Victor Ray
Behind the anti-diversity movement’s performative worries about qualification is a not-so-subtle subtext implying that any person of color in a position of authority is unqualified. The Civil Rights Movement successfully stigmatized many overt expressions of racism and this was a sign of progress. Freedom from harassment is a prerequisite for equal participation in workplaces and schools, and asking that your colleagues not disparage your race or gender should not be an unreasonable imposition. Yet, some have always chafed at even these mild restrictions. Claims that DEI means “Didn’t Earn It” is one way people signal their support for old-school racism while avoiding the sanction of using open slurs. Couching bigotry in concern about “qualifications” (which only seems to apply to non-White people) is just the socially acceptable way to launder racist disdain.
A side effect to stigmatizing overt expressions of racism is the way being accused of racist behavior is now viewed as an attack on someone’s personal character. When someone’s civility is the focus rather than the impact of their actions, even accurately describing someone as a segregationist seems to be a social faux pas. Once integration’s opponents transformed open concerns about integration into covert worries over “merit,” pointing to their more nefarious (but technically hard-to-prove) motivations never fails to get painstakingly litigated for rudeness rather than validity of proof. This shifted the terms of debate in favor of segregationists, scrubbing the stink off support for policies that would set back civil rights progress.
It would be naive to think that accurately describing the anti-DEI movement as segregationist will immediately stop their progress or convert the Trump faithful. The fact that the new segregationists feel compelled to cover their tracks with euphemism is an acknowledgement of the weakness of their intellectual position, the lingering stigma against overt discrimination, and the Civil Rights Movement’s moral clarity. Accepting the segregationists terms of debate by acceding their alleged concern for universal values does their work for them, giving support to an insidious movement that would make America more unequal. Countering them must begin with calling segregationists by their rightful, ugly name.
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