Since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, in the view of many observers he’s executed an explicitly white supremacist agenda. In just 10 weeks Trump and his regime have outlawed DEI: diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the federal government, and threatened to withhold funding from states, private companies and universities if they don’t also end diversity initiatives. Trump’s revocation of President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 executive order that prohibited government contractors from engaging in discriminatory hiring practices and segregation in the workplace, was a blatant attempt to legalize the bigotry outlawed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Trump and his cabinet members have also expunged historical descriptions of achievements made by blacks, Latinos, women, Asians, LGBTQ+ and Native Americans from the Pentagon, Arlington National Cemetery, and Kennedy Center websites. Smithsonian museums are the target of a similar effort to censor or eliminate exhibits dedicated to recounting the history of people of color. At the same time the Trump regime is working to restore statues dedicated to Confederate Generals, and renaming US military bases after treasonous confederate leaders. Donald Trump has ordered the government to limit or avoid the use of hundreds of words in documents and communications, that include: bias, racism, diversity, discrimination, activism, disability, climate crisis, hate speech and cultural heritage.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Tim Wise, one of America’s most prominent anti-racism educators, a critical race theorist, and author, who serves as senior fellow at the African American Policy Forum. Here he describes the Trump administration’s undisguised effort to eviscerate the historic victories of the civil rights movement and turn the clock back to the Jim Crow era.
TIM WISE: Really, this administration is dead set on repealing, really, the 20th century and the first, you know, two decades or so of the 21st. And a big part of that — a huge part of that, I would say the largest part of that — is their hostility to the social reforms and progressive reforms, specifically related to race, but also related to gender that have taken place over the course of that 100 years.
So the very same people that are attacking those DEI programs — or any discussion or mention of the history of racism historically, let alone in the present — are the same people who are also attacking equity opportunities or reproductive freedom for women. The very same people who were engaged in this sort of “manosphere” thing, appealing to some of the most base elements of the most retrograde forms of so-called “masculinity.” There’s an overlap, of course, with the attack on LGBTQ folks. All of this is of a piece.
I think what folks have forgotten for a very long time, when we talk about left and right in America, we have fallen for this ploy that to be on the left is, “Oh, you believe in Big Government,” and to be on the right is “You believe in small government and individual freedom.” Well, that’s not ever been true, but it’s obviously not true here. Here you have a right-wing government that believes in some of the most obvious intrusive forms of government: snatching people off the street and renditioning them to foreign prisons on suspicion of crimes for which you have no evidence, or at least are unwilling to present any evidence.
This is an administration that wants to impose massive tariffs on trade that is obviously not a typical, free-market answer that conservatives would normally believe in. It’s a Big Government intervention, whether you believe in it or not, it’s Big Government. You know, this is an administration that has blown up the lie that the difference between left and right is about “individual freedom” versus “Big Government.”
It is what it has always been, ever since those terms began to be used during and after the French Revolution. The terms referred on the right to people who wanted to preserve existing hierarchies of power and defend them, and the left wanting to upend and change those conditions of inequality. That’s what this is.
And so this is an administration that is committed to the restoration of traditional hierarchy, which they believe has been diminished far too substantially for their comfort. And so it’s about restoring, obviously, the power of the rich. No doubt about that. But not just the rich. It is about restoring the power of whites and not just whites, but white men. And not just white men, but straight, white men and Christians, right? Every one of the identity-based hierarchies, they want to restore who they believe to be the rightful rulers in all of those categories.
And that, of course, is straight Christian, rich white men, above all with some exceptions made perhaps for certain white women like Linda McMahon, because she’s rich, too. Fundamentally, that’s what this is an example of. And it just goes to demonstrate how you cannot understand American politics. The race piece in particular. You cannot understand anything that the right does without an understanding of the history of anti-Blackness, the history of racism and white supremacy.
And I know there are consultants in the Democratic party, and then there are actual leftists who get mad when I say that, they get very upset. They accuse us of identity politics, and they say we should just talk about class and talk about the working class in particular in sort of a general way. But the attack on the working class in this country has historically been indelibly linked to the attack on black and brown people.
SCOTT HARRIS: We’re speaking with Tim Wise, anti-racism educator, author, critical race theorist and senior fellow at the African American Policy Forum, in responding to Trump’s white supremacist agenda. Is it time for an aggressive, energized 21st century new civil rights movement?
TIM WISE: It absolutely is and one that understands and learns from our past, but understands that there have always been people all through this country’s history who have supported racial equity and racial justice. It is not a fringe issue. It is central. And in fact, if we’re going to preserve democracy, we have to understand racism has always been the Achilles heel of American democracy. So if we’re going to get democracy, we have to do that through civil rights and racial justice.
For more information, read Tim Wise’s writings at Medium.com and/or visit the African American Policy Forum at aapf.org.
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