Category Archives: Racial Equality

Rewriting History

I went through grade school, high school, college and law school without ever hearing about the Tulsa riots or the Trail of Tears, among other negative episodes. My experience was not unique. It is only in the last couple of decades that a number of previously suppressed episodes showing the underside of our nation’s history have finally emerged into the public consciousness.

It isn’t a coincidence that Americans are only recently hearing about historical events involving women and people of color. The full history of women and Black and Brown Americans is finally emerging thanks to the civil rights movement and the women’s movement–movements that fostered the equal rights and recognition that MAGA despises as “woke.”

As the culture has changed, the backlash has become more ferocious. The Trump administration is trying to root out DEI–characterizing efforts to combat historic exclusion as “anti-White,” and mounting assaults on historic displays at museums and national parks. Meanwhile, Red states like Florida are re-writing curricula to ensure that their students will graduate with the same ignorance of history that I experienced.

The Washington Post recently reported on one aspect of the administration’s efforts.  An internal government database disclosed “the vast scope of the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to revise or remove information on African American history, climate change and other topics at hundreds of national park sites.” Park employees are under orders to eliminate displays that might “disparage” America, and a growing number of those displays are being “evaluated” to ensure that they are properly positive.

At the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in Mississippi, the Trump administration is “reviewing” the exhibit on the teen’s brutal 1955 killing by White men— though the park’s staff warned that its removal would leave the site “completely devoid of interpretation.”

At the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia, the staff has asked federal officials “to decide whether a document that describes an abolitionist’s murder by a mob might “denigrate the murderers.'”

These displays and materials are among several hundred that managers have flagged at hundreds of national park locations since last summer in response to administration orders to scrub sites of “partisan ideology,” descriptions that “disparage” Americans, or materials that stray from a focus on the nation’s “beauty, abundance, or grandeur.” The submissions were compiled in an internal government database and reviewed by The Washington Post, which confirmed its authenticity with current federal employees.

The submissions are a troubling indication of the  scope of Trump’s effort to recast the history of the country–and to revise how–if at all– our national parks address such subjects as America’s history of racism and sexism, LGBTQ+ rights, climate change, and pollution.

The database became public when a group that described itself as “civil servants on the front lines” posted it to two public websites, explaining that it did so to show Americans how the administration is “trying to use your public lands to erase history and undermine science.”

You will not be surprised to learn that the Department failed to respond to reporters’ questions about the status of the reviews, the process for evaluation, or about the specific examples in the database.

One obvious effect of the administration’s new rules has been confusion.

Staff members identified a brochure at Cape Hatteras National Seashore, in North Carolina, for “possible disparaging of a prominent American” because it mentions that aviator and onetime Smithsonian Institution secretary Samuel Langley failed to achieve flight. A park staffer at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Arizona asks for clarification about whether displays on California condors’ return from the brink of extinction disparage hunters “or tell a success ??”

Others wanted to know whether books or displays about slavery and the black experience, or about Lincoln’s assassination–events that may or may not “disparage” historical figures, but that do cover “dark periods in American history”– are acceptable. What about displays that acknowledge Jefferson’s children with Sally Hemings?

As the report notes, many–if not most– National Park Service employees gravitated toward their work because they were passionate about telling true stories about history and science. A former superintendent of Shenandoah National Park was quoted as saying “It’s a real affront to the values that rangers have.”

Among the MAGA revisionists who have applauded Trump’s effort to redact inconvenient history is Indiana’s embarrassing White Christian nationalist Senator Jim Banks, who has written to officials at Interior and the Park Service over his concerns about “woke” projects that “cast America’s founding and history in a negative light.”

Actually, it’s people like Trump and Banks–people who want to rewrite history– who cast America in a negative light.

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The Contrarian Has A List…

Nice Americans–okay, real Americans–increasingly issue anguished commentaries insisting that Trump’s America “isn’t who we are.” Much as I would like to believe that, it is clearly untrue (or at least an exaggeration). “We” rather obviously come in wildly different varieties–the racist MAGA cult, and the rest of us. Survey research suggests that some 37% of us are either MAGA or MAGA-adjacent, a far larger cohort than I ever imagined.

So who are the MAGA cultists who want to jettison the limits of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and trash the aspirations of the Declaration?

As regular readers know, I attribute MAGA’s support for Trump and the fascism of his administration to racism–to the resentments of White folks (mostly but not exclusively men) triggered by changes in the social order. White “Christian” nationalists and the “intellectuals” at places like the Heritage Foundation are reacting to a perceived assault on their status by those they insist are “lower”–Black and Brown folks, women, non-Christians. (Their fulminations always remind me of that song from Cabaret, where the emerging Nazis sing “The future belongs to us.”)

It has become increasingly difficult to ignore the rancid bigotries that motivate MAGA and Trump. In the wake of Trump’s most recent exercise–portraying the Obamas as apes–even the pathetic Republicans in Congress (who have assiduously avoided reacting to his multiple prior offenses) have been trying to distance themselves.

Can we spell “too little, too late”?

A recent post by Jen Rubin in The Contrarian addressed the numerous racist, misogynistic and anti-Semitic actions of an administration that is increasingly and obviously fascist. Rubin blamed the mainstream press for failing to point out Trump’s racism–ignoring the racism of his accusations about Obama’s birth certificate, and his ride down the golden escalator and launching his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants drug dealers, criminals, and rapists.

As Rubin points out, there had been ample evidence of Trump’s abject bigotry for decades, including his insistence that the (exonerated) Central Park 5 should get the death penalty, and his “nonstop racist commentary about immigrants.”

His attack on DEI is rooted in this same racism, although the legacy media and timid politicians dare not call it that for fear of being labeled “woke.” Blaming the 2025 D.C. plane crash on DEI; taking down a tribute to Jackie Robinson; replacing MLK, Jr.’s birthday as a federal holiday with his own at our National Parks; trying to write slavery out of the Smithsonian; and arresting Black journalists…are plainly efforts to demean and erase African Americans from our history.

Rubin quotes the ACLU’s description of the anti-DEI ideologues who have ferociously attacked inclusion efforts in and out of government. “These ideologues have weaponized the term ‘DEI’ to mean ideas and policies that address systemic racism and sexism.” These attacks are part of “a larger effort by right-wing foundations, think tanks, and political operatives to dismantle civil rights gains made in recent decades.”

Trump has turned the top ranks of civilian and military personnel into a virtually all-white boys club. He has restored the names of Southern slaveholders to military bases; while refusing to appoint a single Black woman to the federal bench in his second term. He has repeatedly hired neo-Nazis and elevated White Nationalist sympathizers. He selected primarily Black and Muslim countries to enforce restrictions and provoke adverse treatment on visas.

Furthermore, his constant insults directed at women — evidenced by the E.J. Carroll sexual assault verdict, or his ongoing mistreatment of female reporters — leave no doubt about his misogynistic venom. His compulsive dehumanization of immigrants and resorting to enabling White supremacists have been at the heart of his presidency. It is hard to conjure what more proof of deep-seated racism and misogyny would be sufficient to persuade those who feign inability to know Trump’s real motives.

Rubin is entirely correct when she says that the corporate/legacy media could–and should– examine the racist views of Trump’s voters and explain how his policies, however rationalized, are racist. They could point out that MAGA’s efforts to destroy the Voting Rights Act is intended to return America to Jim Crow politics, that his mass deportation crusade (and limits to immigration from “shithole” countries) is an effort to make America White again.  They could refuse to let feckless Republicans “scamper away” without addressing Trump’s most recent racist comment. And they could stop “pretending there are benign reasons for policies and personnel decisions that (wow!) just so happen to bolster white men at the expense of all those easily classified as others.”

MAGA and Trump are not who most Americans are–but most Germans weren’t initially Nazis, either. The resistance understands that we are currently choosing who we are–and how history will remember us.

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Broad-Brush Bigotry

Yesterday, in a post about Nick Hanauer, I insisted that no group should be stereotyped–including people who are obscenely rich. Broad-brush negative characterizations–stereotypes– are increasingly being applied to constituencies seen as “Other”–usually, folks with different skin colors or religions but also financial categories.

I don’t waste a lot of sympathy on billionaires, who can certainly take care of themselves. I do harbor deep concerns over the increasingly public and unrestrained bigotries based on race and ethnicity, where the stereotyping of whole populations is both morally dangerous and factually inaccurate.

Take the administration’s effort to paint Somalis with a broad brush. It isn’t just Trump’s wildly unfair accusations about the Somalis in Minneapolis; it was preceded by the ludicrous racist charges (amplified by J.D. Vance) that Somalis in Ohio were eating their neighbors’ dogs and cats.

A recent op-ed by a group of academics–co-authors of a book titled “Somalis in Maine: Crossing Cultural Currents.”–addressed these attacks on Somali immigrants. (Link unavailable). As they wrote,

The hostile political climate targeting Somali Americans has escalated beyond racist rhetoric into unprecedented federal crackdowns that have now spread to Maine.

As members of the Somali Narrative Project, we spent a decade in Somali communities, gathering stories for our book, “Somalis in Maine.” We met people whose lives revealed the depth, complexity and everyday courage that characterize Somali communities across the United States.

The Trump administration’s depiction of Somalis as “garbage,” coupled with an aggressive and violent crackdown on Somalis and the withdrawal of legal protections is not only deeply offensive, it is a deliberate distortion designed to inflame fear and justify racist exclusion.

The essay described the administration’s aggressive militarization and violent arrests, and “the detention of U.S. citizens and immigrants alike.”

Even as activists call for the federal presence to end, the Trump administration moved to revoke temporary protected status for more than 2,000 Somali migrants, deepening fear and uncertainty for families and communities.

While their scholarship began in Maine, the authors point out that Somali communities are similar across regional differences; they are families that “rebuild their lives with fierce determination.” Their young people (many of whom have been born in the United States) “study hard, attend college and start careers and families; communities contribute economically, culturally and civically to the places they call home.”

They also become citizens. In Maine, nearly 65% of Somalis were citizens by 2021.

One pernicious tactic used by this administration is the deliberate magnification of isolated criminal cases — such as the small group of individuals charged with fraud in Minnesota —into sweeping indictments of an entire population. In reality, the number of people charged represents only a tiny fraction of Minnesota’s Somali community — well under 1% .

As the essay notes, blaming an entire ethnic group for the actions of a small number is not analysis; it is bigotry. “When white Americans commit fraud, we call it fraud. When Somali Americans commit fraud, certain politicians call it culture.”

Somali immigrants came to this country to seek a better life, which until recently is what America offered to immigrants. As our book emphasizes, Somalis brought linguistic skills, Islamic traditions of scholarship and faith, oral poetry, extended kin networks and cultural resilience. These strengths helped families survive war and displacement, and then to build new lives in the United States, carving pathways into many professions, including meatpacking, entrepreneurship and academia.

The truth about Somali Americans stands in stark contrast with the Trump administration’s rhetoric — and the broader anti-immigrant platform advanced by Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller — that targets brown and Black people while welcoming white South Africans as refugees…

When the president of the United States labels a community “garbage,” and his vice president pounds the table in approval, they are announcing that they believe human beings are disposable. They are sending a clear signal that a population can be thrown away, diminished or eradicated without moral consequence.

Dehumanizing language cultivates the conditions under which human rights can be dismissed, families can be separated, people can be detained and be deported to countries where they have no ties and are vulnerable to violence. The state thus justifies actions that would once have been unthinkable and makes life perilous for everyone.

But the Somali Americans across New England, the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere are living evidence of a different truth. They are parents working multiple jobs to give their children access to opportunity. They are college students majoring in political science, engineering and nursing. They are small-business owners revitalizing commercial corridors. They are imams working for peace, interpreters expanding access to health care and civic leaders advocating for neighborhoods too often overlooked by policymakers.

These stories are not peripheral to American life. They are American life.

Amen.

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Echoes Of Infamy

Trump’s promise to MAGA –as I’ve noted before, the only promise he has kept–was to Make America White Again, with all that promise entails. (It isn’t just skin color that marks some citizens as “Other”– just being female or practicing the “wrong” religion will remove you from MAGA’s “Real American” category…)

The administration’s hysterical war on DEI and “woke-ism” has been unrelenting, underscoring the belief of MAGA folks that efforts to reduce discrimination against women and/or minorities are really discrimination against White males–that “inclusion” of women and minorities is really just code for exclusion of White “Christian” men.

Historians tell us that the Nazis were inspired by Jim Crow, that they “borrowed” from the legal structures that disadvantaged Black folks in the American south to craft the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor– the Nuremberg Laws that laid the  groundwork for the persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust and World War II.

Imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery, and the Trump administration is now returning the favor.

As many of us have recognized–and as the New York Times has recently documented–the administration’s social media posts have increasingly adopted the terminology of Nazi racist propaganda. Its posts increasingly echo neo-Nazi literature, use terminology approving of ethnic cleansing and even QAnon conspiracies, and have “promoted lyrics from an anthem bellowed by the far-right militants of the Proud Boys.”

Their authors are not on society’s fringe. They are in the offices of the White House and the departments of Homeland Security and Labor, using official government accounts.

To some people, the administration’s posts sound patriotic. Others might sense at most a faint dog whistle to extremists. Some posts may just look odd. But those well-versed in the abstruse codes of right-wing extremism hear klaxons.

Some of us noticed this in the advertisements recruiting for ICE.  Ads on Instagram, Facebook and X all used an overlay with the words “WE’LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN.”

That’s also the name of a song, written by members of a self-described “pro-White fraternal order,” that has been embraced by the Proud Boys and other white-nationalist groups. Hundreds of explicitly neo-Nazi and white-supremacist accounts have shared the song on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, since 2020. The white supremacist who killed three Black people at a Jacksonville, Fla., dollar store in 2023 included lyrics from the song in his writing.

Most Americans would miss the significance, but White Supremacists (and those who study them) understand the message.

I’ve posted previously about other ads and social-media posts that have included pictures and symbols associated with far-right extremist groups, and websites excluding previously pictured women and Blacks. The Labor Department has posted an image with the words “TRUST THE PLAN”– a central catchphrase of QAnon, and the White House’s X account has posted a photo of Trump and the word “remigration.” The Times article points out that “remigration” is a “decades-old European concept centered on the expulsion of nonwhite people and immigrants deemed unassimilated.”

Tens of thousands of Germans protested the concept two years ago after the country’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland party secretly met with neo-Nazis to discuss plans to implement it. (More than a dozen AfD politicians have reposted Mr. Trump’s “remigration” photo on X.)

The Labor Department has also posted a video captioned “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage,” a caption that clearly and ominously echoes a Nazis slogan from World War II, “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer,” or “One People, One Realm, One Leader.”

Experts cited in the Times article appeared confident that the apparent allusions were not accidental. One sociologist pointed to the use of “secret codes and numerological clues” in the ICE recruitment ads, which he believes have been designed to appeal to “a very specific segment” of Americans. These are “young men who live online and are disaffected by what they see as unwanted changes in American life.” The thuggish behavior of that cohort in Minneapolis would seem to confirm his conclusion.

Let’s be honest: this country has always had a significant number of Nazi and “Nazi-adjacent” citizens. In the 1930s, the the German American Bund had tens of thousands of members and held rallies with Ku Klux Klan members. In 1959, George Lincoln Rockwell founded the American Nazi Party; it employed a “White Power!” slogan and insisted that Nazism was “American patriotism.” The National Alliance, founded by the author of The Turner Diaries, spewed  white supremacy and antisemitism.

We’ve had bigots in the White House before, but never one who was such an enthusiastic descendant of those organizations.

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I Have A Litle List…

Given the fire hose of illegality, unconstitutionality and immense stupidity coming out of the Trump administration on a daily if not hourly basis, people might be forgiven for failing to notice the effort to access and amass all kinds of data.

But control of data is important–and the nature of the information the administration is stockpiling is chilling.

As the Bulwark recently reported, the administration isn’t just compiling lists of immigrants in order to unleash ICE on them. It is busy collecting a wide variety of other information– lists of people with developmental disabilities, lists of “dissidents”—and lists of Jews.

The administration’s effort to collect such data may seem counter-intuitive; after all, it has been busy deleting and censoring any information that it finds inconsistent with its efforts to promote White Supremacy. (As a political science friend recently pointed out, the only campaign promise Trump has kept is his promise to MAGA to re-institute racism.) In addition to its ideologically-motivated elimination of statistics on climate change, hunger, trade and sexual orientation, it has methodically deleted photos of nonwhite people who have excelled in various areas, and even photographic evidence that nonwhites have served in the military from government websites. 

But now it’s becoming clearer that some of the most disturbing developments don’t involve data the administration is suppressing, but rather data it’s collecting—in some cases illegally—and the ways those data can be weaponized against perceived enemies.

It isn’t only nonwhite folks who are being targeted, it’s any group that MAGA fears and/or hates. The administration has actually sued the University of Pennsylvania because that institution has refused to hand over a list of its Jewish faculty, staff, and students. (Penn quite correctly has refused, but last year, Barnard complied with a similar demand.)

As the Bulwark article points out–and as every Jew knows–there are good historical reasons to worry when an authoritarian  leader is trying to compile a registry of Jews–especially when that leader has referred to Jews as “disloyal,” and that leader’s coalition has many outspoken Jew haters and Holocaust deniers.

It isn’t simply an effort to compile a list of individuals that MAGA considers “Other.” The administration’s war on diversity–on people and places that aren’t lily-White “Christian” enclaves–extends to entiire Blue states–states that Trump obviously considers enemy territory. The AP has recently reported that executive branch agencies have been ordered to compile a list of monies being sent to Blue states.

President Donald Trump’s budget office this week ordered most government agencies to compile data on the federal money that is sent to 14 mostly Democratic-controlled states and the District of Columbia in what it describes as a tool to “reduce the improper and fraudulent use of those funds.”

The order comes a week after Trump said he intended to cut off federal funding that goes to states that are home to “sanctuary cities” that resist his immigration policies. He said that would start Feb. 1 but hasn’t unveiled further details.

The obvious purpose of these lists–the only reason to acquire this data–is to differentiate between those MAGA considers “real Americans” (Whites, certain “Christians,” residents of Red states) and those who must be considered enemies. Other.

There are a number of recent “remakes” of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I have a little list…”  In all of them, the chorus is the same: “They never will be missed”….

Shades of Joe McCarthy.

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