How wealth and race shape who decides property tax referendums
A new study released Wednesday by the Cook County Treasurer's Office found that wealthier, white voters are deciding the outcome of property tax referendums.
The big picture: " Voter Turnout, Race, Income and the Fate of Property Tax Referendums" was the first study by Treasurer Maria Pappas' office that compared income, race and homeownership status in relation to referendum voter turnout.
Average turnout last year for tax-related referendums was about 46%.
But for voters with median household income less than the county median of $81,800, turnout was only 34%. Turnout jumped to nearly 63% for voters with median household incomes over $150,000.
Between the lines: Referendum voting is lower than overall turnout as voters often skip the measures because of lack of information or not being impacted by the outcome.
State of play: Last year, Cook County voters were asked to weigh in on 35 property tax-related referendums, 30 of which were tax increases. Voters approved 26 measures.
Several asked voters to borrow above state limits to improve parks, schools and a new library, and nearly all of those measures passed.
Smaller municipalities are limited by state law in how much they can increase property taxes, but voters in south suburban Robbins and Palos and west suburban Riverside passed measures that would allow a hike.
Voters in suburban Thornton Township voted against raising property taxes to fund mental health care, but Chicago voters approved two new mental health care programs through a 0.025% increase.
Zoom in: One of the most well-known referendums on the primary ballot was Mayor Brandon Johnson's "Bring Chicago Home" initiative, which would have raised transfer taxes on properties that sold for over $1 million to help address homelessness. It failed.
Wealthier property owners would have been most adversely affected by the measure, and more higher-income voters weighed in during the primary than lower-income voters.
Another case in point: In south suburban Robbins, fewer than 73% of residents are homeowners and the median household income is less than $38,000, compared to over 97% home ownership in North Shore Kenilworth, which has a median household income over $250,000.
Robbins had one of the lowest turnouts in last year's primary (14%) while Kenilworth had one of the highest (33.5%).
By the numbers: Average voter turnout in majority white taxing districts was 55% in last year's elections, compared to 33% in Black-majority and 29% in Hispanic or Latino.
Average referendum turnout was about 46%, up from 34% over the previous four years. This jump was despite Cook County last year having its lowest turnout for a presidential election in more than 30 years.
What's next: There's a consolidated election on April 1 with eight property-related referendums on the ballot, including an increase in taxes for mental health services in Palatine and taking on hundreds of millions of dollars in debt in several western suburbs.
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Progressive Chicago mayor advocates for new 1% grocery tax to help billion-dollar deficit
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Yahoo
4 hours ago
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Trump Is Right About Affirmative Action
President Donald Trump's assault on what he broadly calls DEI has been slapdash and sadistic. That doesn't mean the system under attack should be maintained. Racial preferencing in university admissions as well as in employment and government contracting—more commonly understood as affirmative action—might once have been necessary, but long ago became glaringly unfair in practice. Affirmative action in college admissions continues—despite being banned by the Supreme Court in 2023—through the use of personal essays, interviews, and other proxy mechanisms. It continues in businesses' hirings and promotions. It's possible to believe two truths simultaneously: Judging individuals by race instead of merit has to end, in no small part because it hurts the very people it is supposed to uplift; and Trump's approach to ending it is harmful. He is not simply eliminating progressive excesses, but threatening to destroy the legacy of America's civil-rights legislation along with them. Over the years, antidiscrimination policy has come to bear little resemblance to what the authors of the 1964 Civil Rights Act imagined. As the Stanford economist Thomas Sowell observed in his 2004 book Affirmative Action Around the World, the very meaning of the word discrimination now encompasses 'things that no one would have considered to be discrimination' half a century ago, such as, most recently, the exclusion of trans athletes from women's sports. When Lyndon B. Johnson signed the law, he was certainly not picturing wealthy Black business owners getting preferential government contracts, or the children of Black upper-middle-class professionals receiving an enormous handicap on their applications. And yet that is what happened. After the 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the proportion of Black and Latino students at several selective schools actually increased. As my colleague Rose Horowitch reported: '43 of the 65 top-ranked universities have essay prompts that ask applicants about their identity or adversity; eight made the addition after the Court's decision.' This might not be illegal—Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion that the ruling didn't prohibit 'universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected his or her life.' But some schools may be going further. Last month, Students for Fair Admissions and others filed a class-action lawsuit accusing UCLA's medical school of 'engaging in intentional discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity.' The suit alleges that the admissions department 'requires applicants to submit responses that are intended to allow the Committee to glean the applicant's race, which the medical school later confirms via interviews.' In March, an X account with an anime avatar and the obscene username @bestn-gy claimed to have hacked NYU and published what it said were the standardized-test scores of students in 2024. The data, broken down by race, showed that Black students had an average SAT score nearly 200 points lower than their Asian peers. (In an email to students, NYU administrators wrote that 'the charts posted by the unauthorized actor, purporting to show certain admissions data, were both inaccurate and misleading.') [Rose Horowitch: The race-blind college-admissions era is off to a weird start] Use of racial preferences extends beyond universities, of course. Soon after taking office in January, Trump signed an executive order banning 'illegal discrimination' in federal agencies and rescinding a range of DEI and affirmative-action mandates. Last week, the administration moved to shut down the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program, which had, since the 1980s, awarded billions of dollars in contracts from the Department of Transportation to businesses owned by women and members of racial minorities. The plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the program called it the 'largest, and perhaps oldest affirmative action program in U.S. history.' The administration now argues that the program is unconstitutional, a realization that it says it came to after Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. People assumed that 'racial segregation was over in 1954 with Brown v. Board,' Edward Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, told me. 'The reality was it wasn't anywhere near being over. Throughout the country, there was pushback.' Supporters of affirmative action who refuse to accept the changing legal landscape are pushing back in the same way now, he said. He told me his organization is planning more lawsuits: 'We're not at the beginning of the end; we're at the end of the beginning.' The struggle between those who support racial preferences and those who think they've gone too far is also flaring up in the corporate world. Jason L. Riley, the author of a new book called The Affirmative Action Myth, sees the DEI bureaucracy that became standard in corporate America as 'affirmative action under a different label.' Since Trump's reelection, companies such as Facebook, Google, Target, and Ford have begun reassessing their DEI commitments. Businesses had leaned into DEI partly because they feared civil-rights litigation. But in the process they left themselves vulnerable to legal challenges from a Justice Department with a different philosophy. Right after the election, in a move that was emblematic of the shifting climate, Walmart announced that it would end racial-equity training programs and scale back initiatives that had favored minority-owned suppliers. When I was younger, I was predisposed to view affirmative action as both logical and morally necessary. But arriving at college as a scholarship student saddled with loans, I couldn't help but notice how many Black students more well off than me had benefited from the practice. These included the children of African and West Indian immigrants whose ancestors had not been subjected to slavery in America, which affirmative action was in part intended to redress. For students such as these, affirmative action has been, as Sowell writes, 'a boon to those already more fortunate.' I also saw how pervasive and pernicious the assumption was that even the most talented Black students hadn't earned their way in. Too often, affirmative action fostered quiet resentment or patronizing acceptance among Asian and white students; encouraged a sense of complacency among some Latino and Black students, who correctly intuited that the same exertions would not be expected of us; and exacerbated inequality across the board rather than alleviating it. The same dynamics reproduce and magnify disparities beyond the ivory tower. Sowell's 2004 book cited a study of the beneficiaries of contracts set aside by the government for minority-owned small businesses. More than two-thirds of a random sample had 'net worths of more than a million dollars each,' Sowell writes. 'When some members of Congress publicly opposed such programs, Congressman Charles Rangel from Harlem compared them to Hitler and depicted any attempt to roll back affirmative action as an attack on all blacks.' In 2023, many Black elites similarly warned that the Supreme Court ruling would 'decimate the Black middle class that affirmative action had created,' as Riley put it to me. Yet the overwhelming majority of the purported beneficiaries didn't seem concerned. A Pew Research Center poll published a few weeks before the decision found that only 20 percent of Black respondents felt that they'd been helped in their education or career by 'efforts to increase racial and ethnic diversity.' Some 35 percent said such efforts had done them harm. [Bertrand Cooper: The failure of affirmative action] Sowell helps explain why. 'Affirmative action in the United States has made blacks, who have largely lifted themselves out of poverty, look like people who owe their rise to affirmative action and other government programs,' he writes. 'This perception is not confined to whites. It has been carefully cultivated by black politicians and civil rights leaders, who seek to claim credit for the progress.' This has led, he adds, to a 'virtual moratorium on recognition of achievements by blacks, except in so far as they are collective, political milestones or otherwise serve current ideological or political interests.' Tolerating double standards like the ones exposed by the NYU hack as natural or necessary is not only infantilizing but historically myopic. Affirmative action was never intended to be permanent. As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor mused nearly a quarter century ago, 'we expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.' But for many, the idea that Black people and other designated minority groups would forever need to be assessed differently in order to compete had become sacrosanct. Thinkers such as Riley and Sowell refute that idea. 'There was a Black middle class in this country before affirmative action,' Riley told me. 'If anything, the era of affirmative action has slowed its growth.' Black poverty fell 40 percentage points from 1940 to 1960, he pointed out: a period 'when the government really didn't give a damn what was happening to Black people.' The idea that Black success is owed to white generosity—and that Black people's most salient value in a given institution is primarily representative and meant for the moral betterment of the white and other non-Black people around them—is a tragedy for all those who see themselves as part of a Black community. (The same can be said for members of other groups who have borrowed from the antidiscrimination playbook.) Only a perplexing mixture of folly and helplessness would motivate people to stake their prosperity on the guilt and magnanimity of the very power structure they claim has oppressed and excluded them. If, as Audre Lorde put it so memorably, 'the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house,' why would the master's benevolence suffice to educate and employ those he regards as his servants? Trump is responding to the use of racial preferences in ways both necessary and extremely dangerous. In April, the federal government launched an investigation of Harvard Law School, part of Trump's reckless and frequently petty crackdown on higher education, under the guise of eliminating DEI. The probe came in response to reporting from the journalist Aaron Sibarium finding that the Harvard Law Review made DEI the 'first priority' in its admissions process and routinely accepted or rejected articles based on the author's group identity. One editor referred, in writing, to the race of a prospective author as a 'negative.' This is a preposterous—and yes, racist—way to think about legal scholarship and to treat human beings. Legal arguments and citations are either persuasive or they are not. Trump's acting assistant secretary for civil rights condemned the journal's selection process as a race-based 'spoils system'—one that probably merited federal scrutiny. In May, the Justice Department sent a letter notifying Harvard about a broader investigation into whether the university had defrauded the government by continuing to use affirmative action in its admissions process. Ensuring that Harvard complies with a Supreme Court ruling is reasonable enough. But Trump hasn't stopped there. His aim is not to improve the school. The point is to humble and humiliate it, along with any institution that doesn't reflect or embrace his resentful project. Opposing DEI—along with the vaguely construed goal of 'fighting anti-Semitism'—has become a pretense for the administration to carry out a culture-war campaign that has very little to do with antidiscrimination. Trump has also purged Black employees from federal offices, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Library of Congress. The barely veiled notion that Black presence and visibility in leadership positions is in itself suspect is as repugnant as it is consistent for a president whose political star first rose by questioning Barack Obama's birth certificate. Trump's most worrisome move to date was an order released in April, innocently called 'Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,' that represents an alarming curtailment of civil-rights laws and norms. The order directed all federal agencies to eliminate the use of 'disparate-impact liability,' a principle established in the Civil Rights Act that protects groups from policies that adversely affect them, no matter whether those policies can be proved to be overtly discriminatory or maliciously conceived. (Consider, for example, zoning laws mandating single-family housing or minimum square footage on new construction, which might have the effect of keeping Black families out of a neighborhood.) Trump's order essentially nullifies the government's long-standing interest in ensuring fairer outcomes among groups with regard to rules that are ostensibly neutral but in practice impose disproportionate burdens. Now government agencies are being told to focus solely on overt or intentional discrimination with regard to opportunity, which in contemporary American life is extremely difficult to establish. Such a change was recently unthinkable. And so, once again, 'the law,' as Anatole France quipped, 'in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.' In attacking both DEI and disparate-impact liability, Trump conflates them in the public imagination. But they are not equivalent. In fact, the difference between the two is instructive for what kinds of antidiscrimination practices must be preserved. Racial preferences have become a discriminatory means of achieving parity through proactive favoritism and reliance on double standards. By contrast, disparate-impact liability—though it can certainly be misapplied or abused—is fundamentally a reactive safeguard against unfairness. It aspires to race-blindness, seeking to remove rather than redistribute unjustifiable obstacles. Some conservatives have suggested that both need to go; the writer Christopher Caldwell has argued that the entire Civil Rights Act was a mistake. In his 2020 book, The Age of Entitlement, he wrote that the law had rolled back 'the basic constitutional freedoms Americans cherished most'—in particular, the freedom of association—by mandating integration and nondiscrimination policies that soon pervaded the private sphere. The only proper response, he implied, was to strip away the very architecture of civil rights as we know it. When the book came out, Caldwell's perspective seemed far-fetched. At that time, conventional wisdom had rallied around the idea that civil-rights legislation never went far enough. Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility would soon become the twin epochal texts of the period that followed the death of George Floyd. 'The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,' Kendi wrote, articulating an idea that quickly became ascendant in much of academia and corporate America. 'The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.' Vive la discrimination! If Caldwell's proposals seemed impossible, Kendi's felt inevitable. What a difference half a decade can make. It is Caldwell's world that we find ourselves living in now. What will come after Trump's wrecking ball stills? The complicated reality is that, for the first time in decades, we will have an opportunity to do something better for all Americans. We should begin with a simple observation: Universities, businesses, and other institutions concerned about ensuring diversity and equal opportunity don't have to rely on racial preferences. The Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy sees real value in affirmative action, not least because it helped counteract the legacy of Jim Crow, which he witnessed firsthand during his youth. But he doesn't believe the practice as we've known it is the only possible solution to the nation's ongoing social challenges. 'I'm not like, 'Everything that exists under the name affirmative action needs to continue,'' he told me. 'It's a vehicle. But a vehicle can only carry so much weight.' [Rose Horowitch: The era of DEI for conservatives has begun] Ralph Richard Banks, a professor at Stanford Law and a co-founder of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice, pointed out some of affirmative action's limitations. He told me that it allowed Americans to obsess over narrow questions—who gets an acceptance letter and who doesn't—while ignoring structural inequalities, many of which go beyond race and manifest long before a student applies to college. It was a 'Band-Aid' that let us postpone 'dealing with the big issues,' he told me. Colleges and businesses that are hiring have other options; he suggested they could reach out 'to communities, neighborhoods, places where we don't usually get applicants from.' Race is part of that calculus, but so is class. When I got to college, I was struck by how few people saw this latter category as a means of achieving justice and inclusion. Policies focused on class, however, could both capture a high proportion of Black applicants and, crucially, treat poor white and other applicants equally—thus beginning to dilute the populist resentment that the Trump movement has so powerfully exploited. Such policies would also treat Black applicants themselves with greater fairness, given that most of the benefits of race-conscious admissions and hiring practices have bypassed the Black underclass entirely. One approach, put forward by the economist Raj Chetty, is for universities to consider where applicants come from; kids from neighborhoods with limited mobility that rarely send students to elite colleges could be given an advantage. A class-based system of affirmative action is the only defensible path forward. Neither alternative—the improbable continuation of the status quo or Trump's heedless war on civil rights—is tenable. The cliché that Trump has the wrong answers to the right questions has again proved convincing. His administration's campaign against affirmative action, DEI, and civil-rights law more broadly has been ill-conceived and poorly executed. Weaponizing a reactionary politics of white grievance and hobbling some of the world's greatest universities because of a personal vendetta is appalling. So, too, is trampling on the laws that have made American society more equal. But it is also undeniable that systematically failing to treat people as individuals doesn't help Black or Latino people—or anyone else, for that matter. It has entrenched the rancid notion of innate racial hierarchy, and ultimately rendered the nation weaker and more divided. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
6 hours ago
- Atlantic
Trump Is Right About Affirmative Action
President Donald Trump's assault on what he broadly calls DEI has been slapdash and sadistic. That doesn't mean the system under attack should be maintained. Racial preferencing in university admissions as well as in employment and government contracting—more commonly understood as affirmative action—might once have been necessary, but long ago became glaringly unfair in practice. Affirmative action in college admissions continues—despite being banned by the Supreme Court in 2023—through the use of personal essays, interviews, and other proxy mechanisms. It continues in businesses' hirings and promotions. It's possible to believe two truths simultaneously: Judging individuals by race instead of merit has to end, in no small part because it hurts the very people it is supposed to uplift; and Trump's approach to ending it is harmful. He is not simply eliminating progressive excesses, but threatening to destroy the legacy of America's civil-rights legislation along with them. Over the years, antidiscrimination policy has come to bear little resemblance to what the authors of the 1964 Civil Rights Act imagined. As the Stanford economist Thomas Sowell observed in his 2004 book Affirmative Action Around the World, the very meaning of the word discrimination now encompasses 'things that no one would have considered to be discrimination' half a century ago, such as, most recently, the exclusion of trans athletes from women's sports. When Lyndon B. Johnson signed the law, he was certainly not picturing wealthy Black business owners getting preferential government contracts, or the children of Black upper-middle-class professionals receiving an enormous handicap on their applications. And yet that is what happened. After the 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the proportion of Black and Latino students at several selective schools actually increased. As my colleague Rose Horowitch reported: '43 of the 65 top-ranked universities have essay prompts that ask applicants about their identity or adversity; eight made the addition after the Court's decision.' This might not be illegal—Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion that the ruling didn't prohibit 'universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected his or her life.' But some schools may be going further. Last month, Students for Fair Admissions and others filed a class-action lawsuit accusing UCLA's medical school of 'engaging in intentional discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity.' The suit alleges that the admissions department 'requires applicants to submit responses that are intended to allow the Committee to glean the applicant's race, which the medical school later confirms via interviews.' In March, an X account with an anime avatar and the obscene username @bestn-gy claimed to have hacked NYU and published what it said were the standardized-test scores of students in 2024. The data, broken down by race, showed that Black students had an average SAT score nearly 200 points lower than their Asian peers. (In an email to students, NYU administrators wrote that 'the charts posted by the unauthorized actor, purporting to show certain admissions data, were both inaccurate and misleading.') Rose Horowitch: The race-blind college-admissions era is off to a weird start Use of racial preferences extends beyond universities, of course. Soon after taking office in January, Trump signed an executive order banning 'illegal discrimination' in federal agencies and rescinding a range of DEI and affirmative-action mandates. Last week, the administration moved to shut down the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program, which had, since the 1980s, awarded billions of dollars in contracts from the Department of Transportation to businesses owned by women and members of racial minorities. The plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the program called it the 'largest, and perhaps oldest affirmative action program in U.S. history.' The administration now argues that the program is unconstitutional, a realization that it says it came to after Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. People assumed that 'racial segregation was over in 1954 with Brown v. Board,' Edward Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, told me. 'The reality was it wasn't anywhere near being over. Throughout the country, there was pushback.' Supporters of affirmative action who refuse to accept the changing legal landscape are pushing back in the same way now, he said. He told me his organization is planning more lawsuits: 'We're not at the beginning of the end; we're at the end of the beginning.' The struggle between those who support racial preferences and those who think they've gone too far is also flaring up in the corporate world. Jason L. Riley, the author of a new book called The Affirmative Action Myth, sees the DEI bureaucracy that became standard in corporate America as 'affirmative action under a different label.' Since Trump's reelection, companies such as Facebook, Google, Target, and Ford have begun reassessing their DEI commitments. Businesses had leaned into DEI partly because they feared civil-rights litigation. But in the process they left themselves vulnerable to legal challenges from a Justice Department with a different philosophy. Right after the election, in a move that was emblematic of the shifting climate, Walmart announced that it would end racial-equity training programs and scale back initiatives that had favored minority-owned suppliers. When I was younger, I was predisposed to view affirmative action as both logical and morally necessary. But arriving at college as a scholarship student saddled with loans, I couldn't help but notice how many Black students more well off than me had benefited from the practice. These included the children of African and West Indian immigrants whose ancestors had not been subjected to slavery in America, which affirmative action was in part intended to redress. For students such as these, affirmative action has been, as Sowell writes, 'a boon to those already more fortunate.' I also saw how pervasive and pernicious the assumption was that even the most talented Black students hadn't earned their way in. Too often, affirmative action fostered quiet resentment or patronizing acceptance among Asian and white students; encouraged a sense of complacency among some Latino and Black students, who correctly intuited that the same exertions would not be expected of us; and exacerbated inequality across the board rather than alleviating it. The same dynamics reproduce and magnify disparities beyond the ivory tower. Sowell's 2004 book cited a study of the beneficiaries of contracts set aside by the government for minority-owned small businesses. More than two-thirds of a random sample had 'net worths of more than a million dollars each,' Sowell writes. 'When some members of Congress publicly opposed such programs, Congressman Charles Rangel from Harlem compared them to Hitler and depicted any attempt to roll back affirmative action as an attack on all blacks.' In 2023, many Black elites similarly warned that the Supreme Court ruling would 'decimate the Black middle class that affirmative action had created,' as Riley put it to me. Yet the overwhelming majority of the purported beneficiaries didn't seem concerned. A Pew Research Center poll published a few weeks before the decision found that only 20 percent of Black respondents felt that they'd been helped in their education or career by 'efforts to increase racial and ethnic diversity.' Some 35 percent said such efforts had done them harm. Bertrand Cooper: The failure of affirmative action Sowell helps explain why. 'Affirmative action in the United States has made blacks, who have largely lifted themselves out of poverty, look like people who owe their rise to affirmative action and other government programs,' he writes. 'This perception is not confined to whites. It has been carefully cultivated by black politicians and civil rights leaders, who seek to claim credit for the progress.' This has led, he adds, to a 'virtual moratorium on recognition of achievements by blacks, except in so far as they are collective, political milestones or otherwise serve current ideological or political interests.' Tolerating double standards like the ones exposed by the NYU hack as natural or necessary is not only infantilizing but historically myopic. Affirmative action was never intended to be permanent. As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor mused nearly a quarter century ago, 'we expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.' But for many, the idea that Black people and other designated minority groups would forever need to be assessed differently in order to compete had become sacrosanct. Thinkers such as Riley and Sowell refute that idea. 'There was a Black middle class in this country before affirmative action,' Riley told me. 'If anything, the era of affirmative action has slowed its growth.' Black poverty fell 40 percentage points from 1940 to 1960, he pointed out: a period 'when the government really didn't give a damn what was happening to Black people.' The idea that Black success is owed to white generosity—and that Black people's most salient value in a given institution is primarily representative and meant for the moral betterment of the white and other non-Black people around them—is a tragedy for all those who see themselves as part of a Black community. (The same can be said for members of other groups who have borrowed from the antidiscrimination playbook.) Only a perplexing mixture of folly and helplessness would motivate people to stake their prosperity on the guilt and magnanimity of the very power structure they claim has oppressed and excluded them. If, as Audre Lorde put it so memorably, 'the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house,' why would the master's benevolence suffice to educate and employ those he regards as his servants? Trump is responding to the use of racial preferences in ways both necessary and extremely dangerous. In April, the federal government launched an investigation of Harvard Law School, part of Trump's reckless and frequently petty crackdown on higher education, under the guise of eliminating DEI. The probe came in response to reporting from the journalist Aaron Sibarium finding that the Harvard Law Review made DEI the 'first priority' in its admissions process and routinely accepted or rejected articles based on the author's group identity. One editor referred, in writing, to the race of a prospective author as a 'negative.' This is a preposterous—and yes, racist —way to think about legal scholarship and to treat human beings. Legal arguments and citations are either persuasive or they are not. Trump's acting assistant secretary for civil rights condemned the journal's selection process as a race-based 'spoils system'—one that probably merited federal scrutiny. In May, the Justice Department sent a letter notifying Harvard about a broader investigation into whether the university had defrauded the government by continuing to use affirmative action in its admissions process. Ensuring that Harvard complies with a Supreme Court ruling is reasonable enough. But Trump hasn't stopped there. His aim is not to improve the school. The point is to humble and humiliate it, along with any institution that doesn't reflect or embrace his resentful project. Opposing DEI—along with the vaguely construed goal of 'fighting anti-Semitism'—has become a pretense for the administration to carry out a culture-war campaign that has very little to do with antidiscrimination. Trump has also purged Black employees from federal offices, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Library of Congress. The barely veiled notion that Black presence and visibility in leadership positions is in itself suspect is as repugnant as it is consistent for a president whose political star first rose by questioning Barack Obama's birth certificate. Trump's most worrisome move to date was an order released in April, innocently called 'Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,' that represents an alarming curtailment of civil-rights laws and norms. The order directed all federal agencies to eliminate the use of 'disparate-impact liability,' a principle established in the Civil Rights Act that protects groups from policies that adversely affect them, no matter whether those policies can be proved to be overtly discriminatory or maliciously conceived. (Consider, for example, zoning laws mandating single-family housing or minimum square footage on new construction, which might have the effect of keeping Black families out of a neighborhood.) Trump's order essentially nullifies the government's long-standing interest in ensuring fairer outcomes among groups with regard to rules that are ostensibly neutral but in practice impose disproportionate burdens. Now government agencies are being told to focus solely on overt or intentional discrimination with regard to opportunity, which in contemporary American life is extremely difficult to establish. Such a change was recently unthinkable. And so, once again, 'the law,' as Anatole France quipped, 'in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.' In attacking both DEI and disparate-impact liability, Trump conflates them in the public imagination. But they are not equivalent. In fact, the difference between the two is instructive for what kinds of antidiscrimination practices must be preserved. Racial preferences have become a discriminatory means of achieving parity through proactive favoritism and reliance on double standards. By contrast, disparate-impact liability—though it can certainly be misapplied or abused —is fundamentally a reactive safeguard against unfairness. It aspires to race-blindness, seeking to remove rather than redistribute unjustifiable obstacles. Some conservatives have suggested that both need to go; the writer Christopher Caldwell has argued that the entire Civil Rights Act was a mistake. In his 2020 book, The Age of Entitlement, he wrote that the law had rolled back 'the basic constitutional freedoms Americans cherished most'—in particular, the freedom of association—by mandating integration and nondiscrimination policies that soon pervaded the private sphere. The only proper response, he implied, was to strip away the very architecture of civil rights as we know it. When the book came out, Caldwell's perspective seemed far-fetched. At that time, conventional wisdom had rallied around the idea that civil-rights legislation never went far enough. Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility would soon become the twin epochal texts of the period that followed the death of George Floyd. 'The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,' Kendi wrote, articulating an idea that quickly became ascendant in much of academia and corporate America. 'The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.' Vive la discrimination! If Caldwell's proposals seemed impossible, Kendi's felt inevitable. What a difference half a decade can make. It is Caldwell's world that we find ourselves living in now. What will come after Trump's wrecking ball stills? The complicated reality is that, for the first time in decades, we will have an opportunity to do something better for all Americans. We should begin with a simple observation: Universities, businesses, and other institutions concerned about ensuring diversity and equal opportunity don't have to rely on racial preferences. The Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy sees real value in affirmative action, not least because it helped counteract the legacy of Jim Crow, which he witnessed firsthand during his youth. But he doesn't believe the practice as we've known it is the only possible solution to the nation's ongoing social challenges. 'I'm not like, 'Everything that exists under the name affirmative action needs to continue,'' he told me. 'It's a vehicle. But a vehicle can only carry so much weight.' Rose Horowitch: The era of DEI for conservatives has begun Ralph Richard Banks, a professor at Stanford Law and a co-founder of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice, pointed out some of affirmative action's limitations. He told me that it allowed Americans to obsess over narrow questions—who gets an acceptance letter and who doesn't—while ignoring structural inequalities, many of which go beyond race and manifest long before a student applies to college. It was a 'Band-Aid' that let us postpone 'dealing with the big issues,' he told me. Colleges and businesses that are hiring have other options; he suggested they could reach out 'to communities, neighborhoods, places where we don't usually get applicants from.' Race is part of that calculus, but so is class. When I got to college, I was struck by how few people saw this latter category as a means of achieving justice and inclusion. Policies focused on class, however, could both capture a high proportion of Black applicants and, crucially, treat poor white and other applicants equally—thus beginning to dilute the populist resentment that the Trump movement has so powerfully exploited. Such policies would also treat Black applicants themselves with greater fairness, given that most of the benefits of race-conscious admissions and hiring practices have bypassed the Black underclass entirely. One approach, put forward by the economist Raj Chetty, is for universities to consider where applicants come from; kids from neighborhoods with limited mobility that rarely send students to elite colleges could be given an advantage. A class-based system of affirmative action is the only defensible path forward. Neither alternative—the improbable continuation of the status quo or Trump's heedless war on civil rights—is tenable. The cliché that Trump has the wrong answers to the right questions has again proved convincing. His administration's campaign against affirmative action, DEI, and civil-rights law more broadly has been ill-conceived and poorly executed. Weaponizing a reactionary politics of white grievance and hobbling some of the world's greatest universities because of a personal vendetta is appalling. So, too, is trampling on the laws that have made American society more equal. But it is also undeniable that systematically failing to treat people as individuals doesn't help Black or Latino people—or anyone else, for that matter. It has entrenched the rancid notion of innate racial hierarchy, and ultimately rendered the nation weaker and more divided.
