Trump’s Onslaught Against Racial Justice

Blitzkrieg

President Trump’s recent executive orders are an assault upon the framework of racial justice built since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That law barred discrimination based upon race, color, religion, sex and national origin. Its protections extended to voter registration, public accommodation, schools, parks, and workplaces. Trump’s revocation of former President Biden’s environmental justice initiative (“Justice 40”) and President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 equal employment directive, are veritable licenses to discriminate. The speed and breadth of the onslaught may be described as a blitzkrieg, a “lightening war,” like that of the Nazi invasions in 1939 to ’41, except waged with executive orders, OMB spreadsheets, federal notices, impoundments, and spending freezes.

Impacts

Trump’s overturning of Executive Order 1408 was expected. It eliminated Biden’s “Justice 40 Initiative”, announced in January 2021, which aimed to direct 40 percent of certain Federal investments to disadvantaged communities impacted by pollution. Over 500 federal programs across 16 agencies were involved in dispensing Justice 40 funds – hundreds of billions of dollars – to improve water and air quality, remediate contaminated soils, prevent flooding and fires, develop clean energy systems, create sustainable transportation networks, and offer workforce training for new jobs in the green economy. Though the numbers seem large, they are not considering the scale of the crisis and the size of the disparity in pollution exposure in poor versus wealthy communities.

Unfortunately, the slow speed of the rollout – partly the consequence of delays in passage of Biden’s “Build Back Better” legislation (later, the scaled-down Inflation Reduction Act) — meant that the program only really got up to speed by the time of the 2024 election. Since then, federal agencies have been in a race against time to get money out the door and into the hands of communities, municipalities, states and non-profits before it’s withdrawn. Trump’s inauguration and executive order blitzkrieg stopped that advance in its tracks. To make matters worse, the recent funding freeze (now rescinded) and OMB directives (essentially, a blacklist) meant that even grants already awarded under Justice 40 may never be dispersed. An OMB memo to federal agencies requires them to report any grantees in their portfolios whose work involves immigrants, foreign aid, climate change, abortion, “gender ideology”, “equity” or “environmental justice.” The presumption is that funding for any of these purposes will be cut. (In some cases, this may constitute an unconstitutional impoundment of congressionally allocated funds.)

Some blame for the fiasco must go to the previous administration. Even if they’d tried, Biden’s team couldn’t have created a program more likely to be halted by a Republican administration. The 40 per cent number looks like – indeed is – a quota, long a bugbear of conservative politicians who decry “reverse discrimination” or “discrimination against white people.” Moreover, by deploying the term “environmental justice” in its program descriptions, Biden’s team subjected future beneficiaries to the depredations of the racists who control the party of MAGA. (They should have named the program MEGA – “Make the Environment Great Again”!) Biden painted a big bullseye on the back of the environmental justice movement, and then gave Trump the arrows.

The term “environmental justice” first gained prominence in a 1987 report from the United Church of Christ, Racial Justice Commission, and then in Robert Bullard’s book, Dumping in Dixie (1990). The idea that Black and other historically marginalized communities suffered disproportionately from pollution was at the time, uncontroversial, so little so, that President George H.W. Bush, (of Willie Horton fame), established in 1992, an Office of Environmental Justice at EPA. Two years later, President Clinton signed an executive order to broaden the initiative and develop a strategy for implementation.

The first sign that environmental justice would be segregated from the broader environmental movement was the establishment of EJ centers at several universities. The first was the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, inaugurated in 1992 at Xavier University, led by Beverly Wight. After that came more university centers and the inevitable bureaucratization and academicization: specialized jargon, advisory councils, grant programs, working groups, career guidance, conferences, guidebooks, interagency task forces, risk assessments, toolkits, blogs, training courses, strategic plans, action plans, and foundation funding. Environmental organizations big and small began to trumpet the value of environmental justice, while fencing it off from broader environmental concerns. Under the George W. Bush administration, new appointees at EPA reacted to the development by redefining environmental injustice as something that impacted all Americans, not just those in minority and low-income communities. The movement was simultaneously being expanded and gutted.

A series of inspector general’s reports in the early 2000s indicated that staff, managers and successive directors at EPA failed to take environmental justice into consideration in policy and decision making. In 2008, newly elected President Obama convened a working group to address the problem, and issued a series of memoranda and executive orders, but passed no significant laws addressing environmental justice. On the eve of President Trump’s accession to power in 2017, a former official at the Department of Justice’s Natural Resources Division, was sanguine about the future of the movement: “The [Trump] administration may plan to cut budgets and …reduce authorities, but [environmental justice] is well ensconced in the career people in the federal government…It’s not a law thing as much as it is a social thing.” Trump’s scattershot approach to governance during his first administration, plus his shambolic responses to the pandemic, limited his opportunity to undermine environmental justice.

On January 27, 2020, newly inaugurated President Biden issued an executive order “laying the foundation for the most ambitious environmental justice agenda ever undertaken by an administration.” Unlike Obama, Biden enshrined his initiatives in laws, though their implementation, as noted above, was slow and halting. But even Congressional legislation is not safe from the depredations of an autocrat – particularly one that controls the Senate and the House (albeit with small majorities) and the Supreme Court. It’s unclear at this point, how much of the remaining Justice 40 funds allocated by Congress, will be distributed to communities impacted by pollution and climate change. If you are poor and politically disfavored, the wheels of justice turn slowly, if at all.

Trumps second major executive action in civil rights, reversing President Johnson’s equal employment directive, is potentially more destructive than the first. It’s also, on the face of it, more perplexing. Johnson’s order banned federal contractors from “discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin,” precisely what Trump claims to do in his contravening action. So why cancel a long dead president’s nearly identical initiative? Two reasons: First, Johnson’s order contained the now proscribed words “affirmative action.” Employers were mandated to take “affirmative action to ensure that job applicants and employees are treated…without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” The phrase “affirmative action” here, meant nothing more than ensuring that hiring and promotion was conducted without bias. It didn’t require “reverse discrimination,” or the provision of advantages to non-white job applicants or employees. It didn’t prescribe D.E.I. (diversity, equity and inclusion) training, or the hiring of administrators to police workplace speech for possible insensitivity or microaggressions – what the right likes to call “wokeism”. Nevertheless, by revoking Johnson’s order, Trump put another nail in the coffin of affirmative action as the term is now commonly understood. (It’s already banned in higher education.) No disadvantaged communities or individuals are to be given a leg up during Trump’s regime. No effort will be made to make up for past inequities, however much they occlude future prospects.

The second reason for countermanding Johnson’s order is vengeance, which for Trump – in true Mafia style — is a meal best served cold. In 1973, he and his real estate developer father Fred Trump, were sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for violating the Fair Housing Act. They discriminated against Black renters at an apartment complex they owned in Queens, New York. After a long and acrimonious legal fight – Trump was represented by the notorious Roy Cohn, anti-communist Senator Joe McCarthy’s attack dog – the case was settled by a consent decree, which the defendants quickly violated. Trump was sued again but managed to delay the case long enough that the government lost interest in enforcing it. In fact, Donald and Fred’s history of housing discrimination is far wider and deeper that that single case, as a New York Times investigation from 2016 revealed.

Since President Trump couldn’t cancel the Fair Housing Act, passed by Congress in the wake of the assassination of Marin Luther King in 1968, he would revoke one of its predicates, and gain the last word in a more than 50-year-old dispute. More ominously, by banning efforts to reduce racial, gender and other bias, he legitimates and even institutionalizes discrimination. The upshot of his executive order is to prevent government agencies from enforcing U.S. civil rights law, whether in the workplace, housing, education, commerce, health, or environmental protection. Trump would have the U.S. revert to a pre-civil rights era legal and political framework. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Fair Housing Act of 1968 are still the law of the land. So is the Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock (et al) ruling, extending Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to cover sexual orientation and gender identity. But without enforcement by the executive branch, laws are empty vessels. How did it come to this?

Identity politics, DEI, and stigmatization

It’s tempting to believe that Trump’s so-far successful dismissal of the legal armature of anti-discrimination is solely the expression of his own epigenetic racism, or the re-irruption of longstanding American animus. Racist demagogues, from Andrew Jackson to Pat Buchanan, have always had a place in American politics. But that’s to evade the question posed earlier: How did it come to this? And why now? How did a racist grifter like Trump manage to be elected president of the U.S. – not once but twice? Why is the public – which twice voted for a Black president — willing to see more than half a century of civil rights initiatives suspended with the flourish of a presidential pen? The answer is that Trump had unwitting accomplices, or at least, divided opponents.

Since the 19^th century, there have been displaced communities, groups and individuals who organized themselves according to one or more features of their identity – such as language, ethnicity, or religion – and used them to foster solidarity and accrue power. Some forged powerful separatist movements, for example the Basques and Catalonians in Spain, Zionists in Palestine, and Sikhs in India. In the U.S. – because of its legacy of genocide, slavery, and segregation — the most salient feature has been race, or ethnicity. More recently, sex and gender identity have been important bases for group identity, solidarity and struggle.

At the same time however, there has existed the more universalist impetus to organize people according to the category of class. Proponents of socialism argue that national and ethnic affiliation and gender identification are less insignificant in the struggle for power than the position of people in the class structure. Capitalists and politicians discriminate against one identity or another, the argument goes, but their ultimate purpose is sowing division among working people, the better to consolidate ruling class power. (In the U.S., some 70% of people may be classed as workers. They own little more than the value of their own labor power.) That doesn’t mean that racism or sexism aren’t real — they grip the masses and have been the cause of untold displacement, suffering and death. Rather, that the struggle for rights must be fought on a wider plane, so that people with common class interests don’t dissipate the power of their numbers by sectarian disputes. The last line of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848) is still relevant: “Worker of the world, unite!”

In the U.S., socialism and class politics, which made strong advances in the Depression years of the 1930s, were set back by the cold war and red scare of the 1950s, while identity politics advanced. In the 1960s, leaders of the civil rights, farm workers, feminist, and gay liberation movements, articulated powerful demands and achieved some key goals. A few of these groups and their leaders were ecumenical, seeking (and finding) support from people who did not share their identity. Martin Luther King was exemplary in that regard; the language he deployed came from texts – especially the Hebrew and Christian Bibles and U.S. Constitution – that were honored by nearly all Americans. Far from identity based, his appeals for justice and equality were universalist, even though he sought legal emancipation for one group especially, Black Americans. King’s assassination was one of the rare examples of a single catastrophe that changed history.

The mid 1970s marked a setback in U.S. and global struggles for equality under law, economic opportunity, and environmental justice. That’s when nations from the United States to Chile, and the United Kingdom to Indonesia, shifted dramatically to the right. Concerned that the economic and political power of workers and anti-imperialist insurgents had advanced too far, large corporations and their government partners engineered a capitalist counter-revolution, what’s now called neo-liberalism. Citing recession, inflation, an oil crisis and supposed Soviet expansionism, capitalist democracies and autocracies undertook concerted attacks upon unions, justice leaders, anti-war groups, and civil rights organizations. Major industries were increasingly monopolized and financialized. (“Financialization” is increased trade in stocks, bonds, commodity futures, currency and other forms of fictive capital.)

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the U.S. was once again on a war footing, and dissent was suppressed or marginalized by a compliant media. “Morning in America,” was Reagan’s best-known slogan, though he also vowed to “make America great again.” The emphasis for him, like the current occupant of the White House, was promotion of a national identity that supervened all others. Though race and gender-based identity groups can accrue a modicum of power, they can never be as large and powerful a constituency as those who identify with the nation, what Benedict Anderson called “an imagined community.”

That was the context in which identity politics, which sometimes operated in conjunction with class politics, bloomed but also grew parochial, alienating large sectors of the working class, while energizing the latter’s nationalism-as-identity. The full history of that development has yet to be written, but it’s fair to say that the recent onslaught by the Trump administration may prove its death-knell. Indeed, the pledge to destroy identity-based politics and its tools, including DEI initiatives and training, was one of the bases of Trump’s re-election. Yet that evisceration may in the end prove a liberation, opening new avenues for inter-group, and class-based solidarity. That’s assuming the current assault on civil and human rights don’t completely disable democratic politics and usher in authoritarianism or fascism.

Don’t agonize, organize

The American working class is currently divided into educated and less educated sectors, each with its own histories, habits, allegiances and vulnerabilities. The former is generally more resilient to economic shocks than the latter, though a recession – like the one from 2008-11 — can badly undermine the position of both. The latter, however, worse paid as well as less educated, are particularly susceptible to myths of race and nation, believing that their precarious social and economic positions can be improved by the subjugation of others. It isn’t so much that they are racist – though that may be a reasonable characterization in some cases — as that they have decided that the DEI and racial justice initiatives embraced by their more advantaged class fellows are opposed to their practical interests. There are clearly other factors that account for divisions within the broad, American working class, but it’s fair to say little effort is made by the major political parties to understand and bridge them. For now, Trump and the Republicans are more successful, using appeals to race, gender cliches, xenophobia, and nationalism as glue.

Yet there are many reasons to hope that the American working class may be on the cusp of regeneration. Trump’s three bromides – tariffs, oil drilling, and the expulsion of immigrants – have no chance of succeeding at what they are supposed to do: revive the fortunes (“lower the price of eggs”) for a working class whose position continues to deteriorate while the wealthy – including the billionaire class – are ever more enriched. A smaller immigrant population and higher tariffs will only worsen inflation – the third rail of American politics – and increase working class precarity.

In addition, the increasing pace of environmental and climate disasters may soon reach a tipping point prompting mass organizing and protest. (Though possibly not before rising global temperatures reach their own tipping points, leading inexorably toward ever greater disasters.)

In the course of my work with the Anthropocene Alliance, I’ve observed the emergence of a diverse, environmental proletariat poised to act. Working class whites in the Gulf South are just as concerned about rising sea levels, flooding, and displacement, as working-class Blacks in coastal Texas. Chemical contamination is equally dangerous to more and less educated people in Mississippi, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Alaska. Though the science-loving, semi-professionals among the American working-class embrace climate science while the uneducated sector still questions it, both recognize that the weather is getting warmer, fires are coming closer, floods are more frequent, and insurance less affordable. They will soon demand that something is done, and when they do, appeals to tariff, immigrants, and “gender ideology” won’t cut it.

What a new, working-class movement needs therefore, is skilled leaders, relentless organizing, and effective communication. While the major political institutions – Congress, the courts and regulatory agencies — are currently being hollowed out by Trump and his sycophants, civil society groups still exist, and social media stars can quickly reach masses of potential activists. Both need to act together and quickly. If they do, we may one soon discover that Trump’s onslaught against racial and social justice has already, in the early days of his administration, reached its apogee. From there, the fall may be precipitous.

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