The article discusses how the Trump presidency has been a platform for white supremacy, focusing on the Supreme Court's ban on race-conscious affirmative action, the decline in Black enrollment in elite colleges, and the government's erasure of concern about racial disparities.
White Supremacy Is the Point of the Trump Presidency 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.can now claim a trifecta of restoring white privilege in a siege smoldering with all the grievance of George Wallace’sfloats above Trump’s vicious federal police crackdowns on Latino immigrants and the military occupations of racially diverse cities under, 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,in February found that the nation’s 71 highly selective private universities and 14 public flagships had an overall 18% drop in Black first-year students in 2023, from about 10,000 down to 8,200.
That jibes with a Januaryby 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, University of Maryland education professor Julie Park said more than half of state flagships gained fewer than 10 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 “. ” 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 enforceinto agencies to destroy Black advancement. It is no secret that in the richest nation in the world, Black people still suffer from grievous gaps infor 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 ofto the global law firm A&O Shearman, the percent of the top 100 companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange that used the term “diversity” in their human capital management disclosuresfrom 96% in 2024 to 36% last year. Similarly, the percentage of companies in the S&P 500 that used the term “diversity” crashed from 93% to 37%.
Institutional investing giants such asWhether by coincidence or direct effect, the disappearance of diversity is paralleled by the evaporation of jobs for Black people. Start with the federal government. It has long been an employment refuge from discrimination. In fiscal year 2021,with 6.6% of the civilian labor force).
But Trump’s massive contraction of the federal government resulted in Black womenthat Black women lost more than 30% of their employment in the federal government last year, nearly three times more than women overall. In the overall workforce, that institute found that Black women, 14% of the nation’s workforce, accounted for nearly 55% of female job losses.suffering the greatest job losses.
Valerie Wilson, the director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, said in aWhile not as dramatic, Black men are also experiencing lower employment. In February of 2025, Trump’s first full month back in office, Black unemployment was 6%, compared with 3.8% for white.
Last month, Black unemployment was 7.3%, while white unemployment—despite all the economic chaos induced by Trump’s wars and tariffs—has remained relatively stable at 3.7%.the Black unemployment rate was under 5% since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking in the last 20 years, and represented thesince everyone knows that “Republican” in most states translates to lily-white. Southern states are tripping over themselves to redraw maps with a straight face thatThe romantic notion by many Democrats that they can easily return the favor in blue states took a hit this week when theSupreme Court threw out a map that would have added four Democratic seats to Congress.
Moreover, the Supreme Court hasthe Supreme Court’s decision could result in 19 more safe Republican members of Congress and 191 seats in Southern state legislatures flipping to Republicans. The Brennan Center for Justicethat representation for communities of color at the very local level “may be at even greater risk,” as they are more likely to “escape media attention. ” This is precisely the point of the Trump presidency.
It is not about the issue Trump supporters claim was their top concern. In theThat is betrayed by all the current major polls showing Trump tanking with the general populace on the economy, keeping inflation in check, and his war on Iran, which aggravated both of the former with soaring gasoline prices and shortages of industrial and agricultural In RealClearPolling’s May 8 averaging of the latest major surveys, Trump 2.0 was down to an approval rating ofYet Trump’s overall job approval rating among his voters and Republicans remains in the sycophant stratosphere.
He still holds anjob approval rating among his voters and 94% of those who identify as Make America Great Again voters in an Economist-You Gov poll. He still has an 86% job approval rating from Republicans in aOne reason has to be that Trump, when it comes to race, has already gotten the job done, fulfilling the actual wishes of his voters, even with more than two and a half years to go in his term.
In a May 5conducted in the wake of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, respondents were asked about the importance of proportional Black congressional representation. While 83% of African Americans said representation was very important or somewhat important, only 25% of Republicans thought the same.
Closing the case even further is the fact that the issues most boosting his high overall approval ratings are not the economy or inflation, butand crime, which have long been proxies for controlling people of color. Trump continues to get rave reviews from his base for his goon squads from Republicans gave Trump an 88% approval rating for his handling of immigration and 89% for his handling of the border in thecheered on this show of lethal force in an Ipsos-National Public Radio poll.
That was despite the fact that crime was Despite Trump’s economic chaos, his dismantling of public-health and environmental protections, his embrace of oligarchs and putting soldiers of all colors in harm’s way in an unprovoked war, white Republicans have made it a priority of maniacal proportions to cut off opportunity at every pass for Black and Latino people. Even though the richest universities and most powerful of corporations have capitulated to Trump on getting rid of DEI, the reverse discrimination lawsuits from conservative think tankshas even canceled an effort by the Biden administration to provide septic tanks to residents in the poverty-stricken Black Belt of Alabama.
The president who has used fecal references for African countries somehow finds a septic tank to be “illegal DEI,” consigning communities to literally wallow in feces. Trump has succeeded like no other modern president in seducing his supporters to wallow in the illusion of superiority once expressed by Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1960. The future president: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.
Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you. ” Republicans would rather flee down the same historical rabbit hole that led up to the Civil War and the murderous decades of enforced segregation. They willfully ignore history and the warning of, “There can be no separate white path to power and fulfillment short of social disaster.
” At this teetering moment in our democracy, Republicans have substituted white power for solutions on the economy and everything else. It’s been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should serve the public good, not corporate profits. It was clear to us from the outset what it would take to build such a project.
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Derrick Z. Jackson is a Pulitzer Prize finalist; a National Headliner and Scripps Howard winner; a 14-time winner from the National Association of Black Journalists; and co-author of The Puffin Plan , the 2021 winner in Teen Nonfiction from the Independent Book Publishers Association.can now claim a trifecta of restoring white privilege in a siege smoldering with all the grievance of George Wallace’sfloats above Trump’s vicious federal police crackdowns on Latino immigrants and the military occupations of racially diverse cities under, 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,in February found that the nation’s 71 highly selective private universities and 14 public flagships had an overall 18% drop in Black first-year students in 2023, from about 10,000 down to 8,200.
That jibes with a Januaryby 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, University of Maryland education professor Julie Park said more than half of state flagships gained fewer than 10 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 “. ” 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 enforceinto agencies to destroy Black advancement. It is no secret that in the richest nation in the world, Black people still suffer from grievous gaps infor 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 ofto the global law firm A&O Shearman, the percent of the top 100 companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange that used the term “diversity” in their human capital management disclosuresfrom 96% in 2024 to 36% last year. Similarly, the percentage of companies in the S&P 500 that used the term “diversity” crashed from 93% to 37%.
Institutional investing giants such asWhether by coincidence or direct effect, the disappearance of diversity is paralleled by the evaporation of jobs for Black people. Start with the federal government. It has long been an employment refuge from discrimination. In fiscal year 2021,with 6.6% of the civilian labor force).
But Trump’s massive contraction of the federal government resulted in Black womenthat Black women lost more than 30% of their employment in the federal government last year, nearly three times more than women overall. In the overall workforce, that institute found that Black women, 14% of the nation’s workforce, accounted for nearly 55% of female job losses.suffering the greatest job losses.
Valerie Wilson, the director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, said in aWhile not as dramatic, Black men are also experiencing lower employment. In February of 2025, Trump’s first full month back in office, Black unemployment was 6%, compared with 3.8% for white.
Last month, Black unemployment was 7.3%, while white unemployment—despite all the economic chaos induced by Trump’s wars and tariffs—has remained relatively stable at 3.7%.the Black unemployment rate was under 5% since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking in the last 20 years, and represented thesince everyone knows that “Republican” in most states translates to lily-white. Southern states are tripping over themselves to redraw maps with a straight face thatThe romantic notion by many Democrats that they can easily return the favor in blue states took a hit this week when theSupreme Court threw out a map that would have added four Democratic seats to Congress.
Moreover, the Supreme Court hasthe Supreme Court’s decision could result in 19 more safe Republican members of Congress and 191 seats in Southern state legislatures flipping to Republicans. The Brennan Center for Justicethat representation for communities of color at the very local level “may be at even greater risk,” as they are more likely to “escape media attention. ” This is precisely the point of the Trump presidency.
It is not about the issue Trump supporters claim was their top concern. In theThat is betrayed by all the current major polls showing Trump tanking with the general populace on the economy, keeping inflation in check, and his war on Iran, which aggravated both of the former with soaring gasoline prices and shortages of industrial and agricultural In RealClearPolling’s May 8 averaging of the latest major surveys, Trump 2.0 was down to an approval rating ofYet Trump’s overall job approval rating among his voters and Republicans remains in the sycophant stratosphere.
He still holds anjob approval rating among his voters and 94% of those who identify as Make America Great Again voters in an Economist-You Gov poll. He still has an 86% job approval rating from Republicans in aOne reason has to be that Trump, when it comes to race, has already gotten the job done, fulfilling the actual wishes of his voters, even with more than two and a half years to go in his term.
In a May 5conducted in the wake of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, respondents were asked about the importance of proportional Black congressional representation. While 83% of African Americans said representation was very important or somewhat important, only 25% of Republicans thought the same.
Closing the case even further is the fact that the issues most boosting his high overall approval ratings are not the economy or inflation, butand crime, which have long been proxies for controlling people of color. Trump continues to get rave reviews from his base for his goon squads from Republicans gave Trump an 88% approval rating for his handling of immigration and 89% for his handling of the border in thecheered on this show of lethal force in an Ipsos-National Public Radio poll.
That was despite the fact that crime was Despite Trump’s economic chaos, his dismantling of public-health and environmental protections, his embrace of oligarchs and putting soldiers of all colors in harm’s way in an unprovoked war, white Republicans have made it a priority of maniacal proportions to cut off opportunity at every pass for Black and Latino people. Even though the richest universities and most powerful of corporations have capitulated to Trump on getting rid of DEI, the reverse discrimination lawsuits from conservative think tankshas even canceled an effort by the Biden administration to provide septic tanks to residents in the poverty-stricken Black Belt of Alabama.
The president who has used fecal references for African countries somehow finds a septic tank to be “illegal DEI,” consigning communities to literally wallow in feces. Trump has succeeded like no other modern president in seducing his supporters to wallow in the illusion of superiority once expressed by Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1960. The future president: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.
Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you. ” Republicans would rather flee down the same historical rabbit hole that led up to the Civil War and the murderous decades of enforced segregation. They willfully ignore history and the warning of, “There can be no separate white path to power and fulfillment short of social disaster.
” At this teetering moment in our democracy, Republicans have substituted white power for solutions on the economy and everything else.
‘Pretty Explicit White Nationalism’: Trump National Security Strategy Document Leaves Critics Aghast ›Donald Trump Now Owns White Supremacy ›Derrick Z. Jackson is a Pulitzer Prize finalist; a National Headliner and Scripps Howard winner; a 14-time winner from the National Association of Black Journalists; and co-author of The Puffin Plan , the 2021 winner in Teen Nonfiction from the Independent Book Publishers Association.can now claim a trifecta of restoring white privilege in a siege smoldering with all the grievance of George Wallace’sfloats above Trump’s vicious federal police crackdowns on Latino immigrants and the military occupations of racially diverse cities under, 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,in February found that the nation’s 71 highly selective private universities and 14 public flagships had an overall 18% drop in Black first-year students in 2023, from about 10,000 down to 8,200.
That jibes with a Januaryby 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, University of Maryland education professor Julie Park said more than half of state flagships gained fewer than 10 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 “. ” 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 enforceinto agencies to destroy Black advancement. It is no secret that in the richest nation in the world, Black people still suffer from grievous gaps infor 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 ofto the global law firm A&O Shearman, the percent of the top 100 companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange that used the term “diversity” in their human capital management disclosuresfrom 96% in 2024 to 36% last year. Similarly, the percentage of companies in the S&P 500 that used the term “diversity” crashed from 93% to 37%.
Institutional investing giants such asWhether by coincidence or direct effect, the disappearance of diversity is paralleled by the evaporation of jobs for Black people. Start with the federal government. It has long been an employment refuge from discrimination. In fiscal year 2021,with 6.6% of the civilian labor force).
But Trump’s massive contraction of the federal government resulted in Black womenthat Black women lost more than 30% of their employment in the federal government last year, nearly three times more than women overall. In the overall workforce, that institute found that Black women, 14% of the nation’s workforce, accounted for nearly 55% of female job losses.suffering the greatest job losses.
Valerie Wilson, the director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, said in aWhile not as dramatic, Black men are also experiencing lower employment. In February of 2025, Trump’s first full month back in office, Black unemployment was 6%, compared with 3.8% for white.
Last month, Black unemployment was 7.3%, while white unemployment—despite all the economic chaos induced by Trump’s wars and tariffs—has remained relatively stable at 3.7%.the Black unemployment rate was under 5% since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking in the last 20 years, and represented thesince everyone knows that “Republican” in most states translates to lily-white. Southern states are tripping over themselves to redraw maps with a straight face thatThe romantic notion by many Democrats that they can easily return the favor in blue states took a hit this week when theSupreme Court threw out a map that would have added four Democratic seats to Congress.
Moreover, the Supreme Court hasthe Supreme Court’s decision could result in 19 more safe Republican members of Congress and 191 seats in Southern state legislatures flipping to Republicans. The Brennan Center for Justicethat representation for communities of color at the very local level “may be at even greater risk,” as they are more likely to “escape media attention. ” This is precisely the point of the Trump presidency.
It is not about the issue Trump supporters claim was their top concern. In theThat is betrayed by all the current major polls showing Trump tanking with the general populace on the economy, keeping inflation in check, and his war on Iran, which aggravated both of the former with soaring gasoline prices and shortages of industrial and agricultural In RealClearPolling’s May 8 averaging of the latest major surveys, Trump 2.0 was down to an approval rating ofYet Trump’s overall job approval rating among his voters and Republicans remains in the sycophant stratosphere.
He still holds anjob approval rating among his voters and 94% of those who identify as Make America Great Again voters in an Economist-You Gov poll. He still has an 86% job approval rating from Republicans in aOne reason has to be that Trump, when it comes to race, has already gotten the job done, fulfilling the actual wishes of his voters, even with more than two and a half years to go in his term.
In a May 5conducted in the wake of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, respondents were asked about the importance of proportional Black congressional representation. While 83% of African Americans said representation was very important or somewhat important, only 25% of Republicans thought the same.
Closing the case even further is the fact that the issues most boosting his high overall approval ratings are not the economy or inflation, butand crime, which have long been proxies for controlling people of color. Trump continues to get rave reviews from his base for his goon squads from Republicans gave Trump an 88% approval rating for his handling of immigration and 89% for his handling of the border in thecheered on this show of lethal force in an Ipsos-National Public Radio poll.
That was despite the fact that crime was Despite Trump’s economic chaos, his dismantling of public-health and environmental protections, his embrace of oligarchs and putting soldiers of all colors in harm’s way in an unprovoked war, white Republicans have made it a priority of maniacal proportions to cut off opportunity at every pass for Black and Latino people. Even though the richest universities and most powerful of corporations have capitulated to Trump on getting rid of DEI, the reverse discrimination lawsuits from conservative think tankshas even canceled an effort by the Biden administration to provide septic tanks to residents in the poverty-stricken Black Belt of Alabama.
The president who has used fecal references for African countries somehow finds a septic tank to be “illegal DEI,” consigning communities to literally wallow in feces. Trump has succeeded like no other modern president in seducing his supporters to wallow in the illusion of superiority once expressed by Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1960. The future president: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.
Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you. ” Republicans would rather flee down the same historical rabbit hole that led up to the Civil War and the murderous decades of enforced segregation. They willfully ignore history and the warning of, “There can be no separate white path to power and fulfillment short of social disaster.
” At this teetering moment in our democracy, Republicans have substituted white power for solutions on the economy and everything else.
‘Pretty Explicit White Nationalism’: Trump National Security Strategy Document Leaves Critics Aghast ›Donald Trump Now Owns White Supremacy › The 1% own and operate the corporate media. They are doing everything they can to defend the status quo, squash dissent and protect the wealthy and the powerful. The Common Dreams media model is different. We cover the news that matters to the 99%.
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