Category Archives: Racial Equality

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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Cities

Wonder why Trump sends his SS troops–aka ICE–to cities? And why the people who live in those cities can be counted on to mount a resistance?

The nation’s cities are Blue, of course–studies show that every urban area over half a million people votes Democratic. There’s evidently something about density, about living near other people, that makes folks more likely to be “woke”– a term that actually denotes a degree of humanity and tolerance utterly lacking in the MAGA base. (There’s even data showing that people who live in more dense areas of America’s small towns tend to be more liberal than those in the more sparsely populated neighborhoods of those same towns.)

The American Prospect recently addressed the administration’s hatred of America’s cities. Harold Meyerson writes that

For leaders in search of uniform compliance, cities are inherently troublesome. They are, by their very nature, diverse: It’s cities to which both foreign and domestic immigrants flock, because it’s cities where there’s work. Worse yet, most successful cities foster some level of cross-group tolerance, or even, in the best cases, cross-group solidarity, as a necessary modus vivendi for keeping a city up and running. Partly in consequence, cities develop distinct cultures reflective of their diversity and their urbanity.

That’s why the current generation of our planet’s autocrats often lack support from their nations’ cities. Budapest has never voted for Viktor Orbán; Istanbul is a thorn in the side of Recep Erdoğan. A Muslim Labourite has been mayor of London since 2016, even as no major American city can be found that’s voted for Donald Trump in any of the past three presidential elections.

Of course, as Meyerson points out, Orbán hasn’t sent troops into Budapest, and Erdoğan hasn’t tried to subdue Istanbul. Our mad would-be king is threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act and to send the Army into Minneapolis to protect his SS troops while they seize people who, as Meyerson says, “look suspiciously brown.”

If there was any doubt that ICE is a recreation of the Gestapo, its recruitment materials –rife with retreads of Nazi slogans–should disabuse us of that doubt. The administration is clearly aiming to attract white nationalists who share a hatred for the diversity that characterizes the nation’s urban centers.

Meyerson says comparisons with the Gestapo and the Klan are incomplete– that a glance through history provides other apt comparisons: Trump as a 21st-century version of Attila or Genghis Khan,

heading a horde that is defined by an exterminationist loathing of cities and all that they stand for and promote. Their diversity, their toleration, their culture, their solidarity across racial and other lines—all are threats to the horde’s and its ruler’s autocratic monoculture.

That attitude goes a long way toward explaining the administration’s inhumane response to the murder of city dwellers, and its immediate, blatantly dishonest characterizations of these victims.

The pictures coming out of Minneapolis–the videos captured by cell phone cameras and photojournalists– are mind-blowing. The reactions of the legitimate, elected officials of the city and state have not only been entirely appropriate, they’ve echoed the reactions of those of us who never in a million years anticipated that we would live to see such things happen on the streets of an American city at the direction of an American president. Neither the Mayor nor the Governor has held back–both have “told it like it is.”

And “like it is” is shocking and heartbreaking.

For years, the extremist fringe on the political Right has lusted for a race war. Most rational Americans have gone about our businesses ignoring that fringe and its threats, dismissing the White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis as mentally ill and assuming that these deranged folks represented a small minority. Thankfully, they are a minority, but a majority of Americans failed to vote in 2024, and they were able to elect one of their own.

And he has assembled an administration composed of people who are just as profoundly sick and malevolent as he is.

In the absence of a functioning Congress and an honorable Supreme Court, it increasingly looks as if it will be up to those of us in the cities–the urban folks Trump hates– to power the resistance and reclaim the America that respected and obeyed the Constitution and the rule of law.

Minneapolis is leading the way.

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Disparate Impact

Nearly every day of the Trump II presidency provides another indisputable example of the White nationalism that fuels MAGA. The most recent example is the Justice Department’s elimination of its “disparate impact” regulations: As Politico has reported, “The Justice Department on Tuesday moved to end long-standing civil rights policies that prohibit local governments and organizations that receive federal funding from maintaining policies that disproportionately harm people of color,” 

So what, you might ask, is “disparate impact”?

Disparate impact is a term describing practices that are facially neutral—in other words, practices or laws that do not explicitly discriminate—but that fall more harshly on a minority or disfavored group and can’t be justified by business or governmental necessity. 

Let’s say a rural county has a rule that, in order to become a licensed carpenter–one of the better jobs in that county– someone must be a high school graduate and weigh at least 180 pounds. Neutral, right? Except that in that county, Blacks are less likely to have completed high school, and women are far less likely to weigh at least 180 pounds. Proponents of the rule defend it by explaining that carpenters must be able to read plans and must be able to pick up at least 40 pounds of lumber.

Rather obviously, the rules mandating high school graduation and 180 pounds are ill-suited (at best) to ensure applicants will meet those goals. If that was really the (entirely appropriate) reason for imposing restrictions, applicants for licensure would be tested to see if they could read plans and asked to demonstrate their ability to heft the required pounds of lumber. Even if the discriminatory impact of the rules wasn’t due to intentional discrimination, their impact was clearly discriminatory. 

Allegations of intentional discrimination can be hard to prove. In my made-up example (based on an old case), absent probative evidence that the people creating the rules had intended to make it difficult for women and Black folks to become carpenters, a lawsuit alleging discrimination would fail.  The ability to base one’s case on a demonstration of the real-world effects of such rules, and the existence of reasonable alternatives better suited to the purported goals, would be far more likely to succeed. 

Which is why our racist and misogynist administration wants to go back to a time when it was necessary to prove intent.

The Department of Justice made the change in order to comply with one of Trump’s numerous executive orders. In an April Order, he explicitly called for an end to disparate-impact liability for discrimination and ordered federal agencies to stop enforcement of anti-discrimination laws based on disparate impact theories. 

The disparate impact rule has been in effect for over fifty years. It was based upon Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and was firmly established in 1971, in the case of Griggs v. Duke Power Co. Duke Power–the employer– required applicants to have a high school diploma and to take aptitude tests for certain jobs, requirements that were demonstrably not job-related and that disproportionately excluded Black applicants. The Supreme Court in that case held that Title VII “proscribes not only overt discrimination but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation.”

As Politico reported,

The Justice Department on Tuesday moved to end long-standing civil rights policies that prohibit local governments and organizations that receive federal funding from maintaining policies that disproportionately harm people of color.

Repealing the government’s 50-year-old “disparate impact” standards will make it harder to challenge potential bias in housing, criminal law, employment, environmental regulations and other policy areas.

Making it harder to challenge discrimination–making it easier to keep those “Others” in subservient positions– is both the basis of Trump’s support and the over-riding purpose of this profoundly unAmerican administration. 

I’d say “for shame!” if the horrible people in this administration were capable of feeling anything akin to shame–or even embarrassment.

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Those Neglected Issues

It isn’t simply that our attention is consumed by the daily obscenities of the Trump administration–the increasingly overt and unapologetic racism, the economic damage, the assaults on the rule of law. Reeling from the daily headlines and trying to stem the progress of MAGA’s anti-Americanism takes up most of our policy bandwidth, meaning that we neglect the large number of important issues that we ought to be addressing.

One of those issues is America’s housing crisis.

I have previously posted about various elements of that housing crisis--including out-of-state buyers of homes (My own city, Indianapolis, is now first in the nation for out-of-state ownership of rental property, but such ownership is a real problem in most cities.) More recently, I’ve posted about the escalating rate of evictions, also acute locally, and about the laudable effort by the genuinely religious folks in GIMA-The Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance– to provide permanent housing and supportive services for individuals experiencing chronic homelessness through the Streets to Homes initiative.

Local efforts are important, but housing problems are national. A recent article in The Atlantic took an in-depth look at the extent to which private equity has changed the housing market.The article begins with a recitation of the problem: the country is short by approximately 4 million housing units, and the shortage is most severe in areas like starter homes, moderately priced apartments in low-rises, and family-friendly dwellings.  Among the increasing numbers of Americans who are renting, half of them are spending more than a third of their income on shelter, and in numerous markets, wages are insufficient to cover the rent of a two-bedroom apartment.

It isn’t just private equity, of course. Multiple factors contribute to the housing crisis, including but not limited to restrictive zoning codes, excessively bureaucratic permitting processes, and the escalating costs of labor and building materials. But the problem has been significantly aggravated by the aggressive entry of private equity into the housing market. As the article reports, “Institutional investors have bought up hundreds of thousands of American homes since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, outbidding families and pushing up rents.”

And it matters.

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Center for Geospatial Solutions published a report showing that corporations now own a remarkable one in 11 residential real-estate parcels in the 500 urban counties with data robust enough to analyze. In some communities, they control more than 20 percent of properties….These investors are pouring the most money into “buy low, rent high” neighborhoods: communities, many of them in the South and the Rust Belt, where large shares of families can’t afford a mortgage.

These private equity firms are buying up huge numbers of starter homes in low-income, minority neighborhoods, intensifying America’s racial wealth and homeownership gaps. The article notes that, in Cleveland, corporations own 17.5 percent of residential real-estate parcels, primarily in low-income areas. In the city’s predominantly Black neighborhoods, just one in five homebuyers in 2021 took out a mortgage, and in 2022, owner-occupants made just 13 percent of purchases. In a nearby majority-white neighborhood, owner-occupants bought more than 80 percent of homes that same year. In affluent White neighborhoods,  out-of-state corporations owned less than 1 percent of residential parcels.

Private equity isn’t to blame for high housing costs in desirable cities and neighborhoods, but it is distorting markets in low income communities, and pushing thousands of Black and Latino families off the property ladder. And to add insult to injury, renters of these investment properties often find that corporate owners are more prone to skimping on maintenance and upkeep and quicker to evict their tenants than local, individual owners.

Policymakers have advanced a variety of proposals to address the problem. Washington State is debating a proposal to cap the number of units that a corporation can own, but that approach would simply invite investors to set up multiple entities to purchase properties. Other policymakers suggest classifying firms that own more than 10 properties in a given jurisdiction as commercial owners, subjecting them to higher property-tax rates and higher taxes on their capital gains, but there are obvious “work-arounds” to that approach as well.

The most straightforward remedy would be a dramatic expansion of the country’s housing stock–especially the supply of affordable housing. During the presidential campaign, Kamala Harris released a detailed plan to improve housing affordability and increase housing supply, but voters chose to ignore boring proposals aimed at ameliorating real problems, instead choosing to install a bloviating ignoramus who gave them permission to publicly express their bigotries.

I wonder if We the People have learned our lesson…

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