Trump's Appalling Racial Legacy

[Celerity]

The Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act has cemented President Trump’s legacy in erasing civil rights and equal opportunity.

https://prospect.org/2026/05/13/trumps-appalling-racial-legacy/


State Rep. Justin J. Pearson (D-Memphis), center, marches with protesters before a special session of the state legislature to redraw congressional maps, in Nashville, Tennessee, May 5, 2026. Credit: George Walker IV/AP Photo

Donald Trump can now claim a trifecta of restoring white privilege in a siege smoldering with all the grievance of George Wallace’s segregation now, tomorrow, and forever. While Trump has not brought us all the way back to “Whites Only” water fountains and packing Black folks in the back of buses, the ghost of Bull Connor floats above Trump’s vicious federal police crackdowns on Latino immigrants and the military occupations of racially diverse cities under lies that crime was out of control. With both iron fist of police brutality and blunt leveraging of federal agencies and the Supreme Court, Trump has assured that for the foreseeable future, white folks will maintain a disproportionate share of front-row seats to orchestrate the future of this country.

The trifecta began with the 2023 Supreme Court ban on race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions. The Court, packed into a conservative supermajority by Trump in his first term, said colleges must now be colorblind. That means willfully blind to the fact, as stated by dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor, that the United States remains largely “an endemically segregated society.” The effect of the ruling was immediate. A Hechinger Report analysis in February found that the nation’s 71 highly selective private universities and 14 public flagships had an overall 18 percent drop in Black first-year students in 2023, from about 10,000 down to 8,200. That jibes with a January study by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute, which found that high-achieving students from underrepresented groups of color “cascaded” downward “into less selective colleges with lower graduation rates and earnings outcomes.”

Any patronizing notions that African Americans squeezed out of elite private colleges can still get a fine education at top state schools are not borne out by data. In analyses for Brookings and the Hechinger Report, University of Maryland education professor Julie Park said more than half of state flagships gained fewer than ten Black students after the Supreme Court decision. To add salt to this wound, Park said many so-called “gains” of Black and Latino enrollment in public flagships were “illusory.” That is because many of the flagships claiming the most gains are the same ones that suffered massive drops in such enrollment years ago when their states banned affirmative action. Worse, Park noted that enrollment at for-profit colleges, notorious for low graduation rates and leaving students hanging high and dry in debt, were up by 15,000 Black students in 2024. That is nothing less than educational sharecropping.

Next in the trifecta is Trump’s bleaching the government of any concern about racial disparities. He has transformed divisions of government created to enforce civil rights into agencies to destroy Black advancement. It is no secret that in the richest nation in the world, Black people still suffer from grievous gaps in health care, housing discrimination, and proximity to pollution, just to name a few. A central accompaniment to the Trump administration’s termination of disparity data collection across agencies is his slew of executive orders, beginning on the first day back in office, that ban diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government. He unleashed the Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to be on the witch hunt for companies and contractors that practice DEI and allegedly discriminate against white people. That, on top of the ban on collegiate affirmative action, triggered a national cowering on diversity that rendered to rubble any remaining reckoning about racial disparities in the wake of the 2020 Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd.

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[Solly Mack]

1. ...

[electric_blue68]

2. It is SO Apalling, Infuriating, that this Racist & the SC6 taking a wreaking ball to decades of hard won progress

All those (mostly?) Sothern States tripping over themselves to get rid of one of, or the only black Reps

[a kennedy]

3. I know.....and all the Civil Rights Activists who died trying to get the voter rights act passed

ARE ROLLING OVER IN THEIR GRAVES. FAWK this gawd damn administration AND ALL THE FAWKING REPUBS IN CONGRESS THAT BOW TO THE ORANGE PIECE OF SHIT.

[electric_blue68]

4. Yes, all who gave their lives.

Then all who were injured and had to recover how ever well or not so well, activists, who had maybe houses bombed, or had to move over extreme threats.

The litany is horrific !