George Floyd's legacy under siege as racial justice efforts lose ground, memorials removed
Five years after her nephew's murder, what Angela Harrelson misses most is hearing her phone buzz and knowing he was calling.
'He would call me and say, 'What's up, auntie? Just calling to check on you,' ' Harrelson said. 'And it made me feel so good.'
Harrelson affectionately refers to her nephew by his middle name, Perry, but the world knows him as George Floyd.
In 2020, millions watched in horror as former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pinned Floyd beneath his knee for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. The murder sparked a massive outpouring of grief and anger as protesters took to the streets with handcrafted signs echoing some of his last words, "I can't breathe." Amid violent clashes with police, they pressed on. Artists adorned their cities with his image, a sign of resolve and the impact of his death.
The intersection where Floyd took his last breaths was transformed from a gas station and corner store into a living memorial. Now that the chaos and media frenzy have settled, Harrelson visits the area − known as George Floyd Square − several times a week.
'It's a safe haven for me to sit and reflect on everything that has happened,' she said. 'And that includes the pain and the heartache.'
The future of the square has been a subject of heated debate. Across the nation, other memorials honoring Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement have been removed, vandalized, or fallen into disrepair. As symbols of Floyd's place in history have faded, so too have hopes for federal police reform, commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion and American optimism about the future of racial justice.
Just days before the anniversary of his death, May 25, the Department of Justice announced it is ending investigations and retracting findings of wrongdoing against the Minneapolis Police Department as well as those in Phoenix; Oklahoma City; Memphis, Tennessee; Trenton, New Jersey; Mount Vernon, New York; and Louisiana.
Family members and advocates are determined not to let the losses and the nation's shifting political winds erase Floyd's legacy. Many say preserving the last vestiges of the protest movement is a key part of continuing to push for change and recover from the deep pain caused by his death. Some say it's a battle cry − a time to retrench and recommit to the fight.
'The country is actually regressing,' said Aba Blankson, a spokesperson for the NAACP. 'So as we say, the anniversary is not about grief or recovering from the trauma. It is about purpose and being dedicated and recommitting to ensuring that the country is open to diversity, equity and inclusion, that the country continues to maintain equal protection under the law, that the country teaches truth in history, that the country is not diminishing the rights of women and immigrants.'
Since Floyd's murder, the intersection of 38th and Chicago has become a sacred space.
Two iconic murals were painted at the site, including a blue-and-yellow tribute on the side of the Cup Foods where Floyd was accused of spending a counterfeit $20 bill, prompting the fatal police response. The community installed a raised-fist sculpture at the center of the intersection and headstones engraved with the names of Black people killed by police.
Residents erected barricades to keep traffic − and police − out until their demands for reform were met and to 'figure out how to build this space as one of healing,' according to Ashley Tyner, co-director of "The People's Way," a documentary film about the square.
In 2021, the city removed the barricades and began to formulate a long-term plan for the area. Officials spent countless hours consulting with community members, in part, because one of the city's busiest bus routes runs through the square.
'We knew as a city staff, as a community, that we needed to be incredibly thoughtful about this sacred space to create a vision that would be endured and appreciated for really decades and centuries,' Alexander Kado, the city's senior project manager, said.
They ended up with a proposal for a flexible, open layout that would allow traffic to flow unless officials closed part of the intersection for a special event. The plan would preserve space for Floyd's family to erect a permanent memorial in the spot where he took his last breaths and find someone to take over the former Speedway gas station, a property purchased by the city and dubbed the Peoples' Way.
But the Minneapolis City Council rejected the plan and proposed that the city explore another option instead: establishing a pedestrian mall that would permanently close one leg of the intersection.
Then-Mayor Jacob Frey vetoed that proposal. The council overrode Frey's veto in February.
Council member Robin Wonsley said allowing traffic would 'erase' the history of the square.
'The way in which the city is approaching that is saying, essentially, 'Let's run buses up and down that same street. Let's run buses and cars across the very place where George Floyd was killed.' And that, for me, is a signal of erasure,' Wonsley said during one city council meeting.
But Andrea Jenkins, who represents the area and supports the city's plan, said residents around the square want vehicle traffic. She pointed to a survey by the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota that found about 70% of residents in the surrounding neighborhoods preferred full transportation access in the square.
For now, the fate of the square remains in limbo. A final decision won't be made for months and construction likely won't be complete until at least 2027.
Jenkins told USA TODAY she wants the space to be one where businesses, public transit and a national memorial to victims of police brutality can coexist.
'I would like it to be a space that honors the art and the artifacts that have been left at George Floyd Square, but also as a space for new work to be presented.'
People from around the world come to the square, leaving behind flowers, balloons, signs and artwork. Residents like Leesa Kelly have stepped up to serve as caretakers and archivists of these 'offerings.'
Kelly, executive director of Memorialize the Movement, said she was particularly moved by murals painted on the plywood businesses used to board up their windows during the 2020 protests. As demonstrations died down, she began to worry, 'Will businesses keep them? Will they throw them out?'
So Kelly began collecting the murals and eventually amassed over 1,000 pieces. She said they depict many facets of Floyd's life, including one that features his daughter and another a message from his partner.
'It's just been really beautiful to see how we've been able to take something so tragic and still be able to build something powerful and impactful for our community," she said.
The murals have been exhibited in universities and gallery spaces around the Twin Cities. Art from the square has also begun to make its way across the country. Rashad Shabazz, a historical cultural geographer at Arizona State University, helped bring hundreds of signs, posters and artwork from the protests to Phoenix in 2024.
Shabazz, a former Minneapolis resident, said thousands of people, including members of the Floyd family, visited the Arizona State University Art Museum exhibit, which he called "one of the most important legacies' to come from the movement. He said it is crucial for institutions like museums to put the items on display − whether they be carefully painted portraits or messages hastily scrawled on pizza boxes.
'The offerings are stories, and preservation of them is a preservation of the story,' he said. 'And in doing that, we add those stories to our collective understanding of the world we live in, that moment in time. And they serve as lessons. If we listen to them, we might learn something.'
While some work to preserve memories of the movement, others have found symbolic and substantive ways to try and erase it.
One by one, memorials to Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement have come down in recent years, including in Washington; Des Moines; Indianapolis; Salt Lake City; Santa Barbara, California; and Asheville, North Carolina.
A push jump-started by Floyd's death to remove or rename Confederate memorials has slowed to a trickle. In early 2024, only two had been removed, compared to nearly 170 in 2020, according to a recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. More than 2,000 Confederate symbols remain, and some have recently been restored, including the Confederate names of two Virginia schools that were changed during the racial reckoning of 2020.
After the Supreme Court in 2023 struck down race-based affirmative action admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the precedent has had far-reaching implications for the racial justice movement.
Citing the decision, President Donald Trump wiped out diversity initiatives across the federal government and urged schools and businesses to follow suit despite pledges made after Floyd's murder.
In Minnesota, leaders are bracing for the possibility that Trump will pardon Chauvin, who is serving concurrent state and federal prison sentences for murder, violating Floyd's constitutional rights and other crimes. Trump has said he isn't considering a federal pardon for Chauvin, though aides have raised the idea.
Changing the narrative: How Trump 2.0 is reframing George Floyd and the 2020 protests
The DOJ announced in January that it had reached a court-enforceable agreement known as a consent decree with the city of Minneapolis to make systemic changes to its police department after a federal investigation sparked by Floyd's murder found a pattern of civil rights violations.
Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the department's Civil Rights Division, announced on May 21 that the government would abandon those efforts and retract the department's findings in Minneapolis and a host of other cities, including Louisville, Kentucky, where the 2020 police killing of Breonna Taylor drew outrage.
Amid all the changes, Americans are feeling increasingly pessimistic about gains in racial justice, if any, since 2020 and the possibility that Black Americans will ever have equal rights, according to Kiana Cox, a senior researcher at Pew Research Center.
'The majority of Americans think that the attention that the country paid to race as a result of George Floyd's murder was a watershed moment,' she said. 'But when we asked the more specific question, 'Do you think that attention actually resulted in changes to Black people's lives?' we get a different story.'
In 2023, 40% of respondents said such changes had happened. But in 2025, just 27% said the same.
Still, Harrelson said the current political climate can't erase her nephew's lasting legacy. 'It has not changed how people feel about what happened five years ago. They still carry that pain. They still carry that weight,' she said.
Harrelson said she sees Floyd's impact each time she visits the square, where dozens of their family members and thousands of others will soon gather for a three-day festival in his honor.
The annual celebration will include live music, a church service, and community discussions about racism, police reform and grief called "Perry Talks." But Harrelson's favorite part is taking a quiet moment to think about her nephew during the candlelight vigil.
'I hope I'm doing right by his legacy the best I can,' she said.
Contributing: Phillip M. Bailey and Savannah Kuchar
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: George Floyd legacy under siege as reform stalls, memorials disappear
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The root of the problem, according to Miran, is the 'persistently overvalued' dollar. Supplying the world's reserve currency, Miran argues, severely burdens America by rendering the dollar far stronger than it would be if other nations weren't so addicted, and didn't get such a fabulous ride reaping the dollar's benefits by using the greenback for everything from trading oil to collateralizing bilateral contracts, not to mention marshaling their central bank holdings of our universal currency to manipulate its exchange rate, all at our expense. Specifically, that overvaluation makes U.S. exports unduly expensive, 'eroding our competitiveness,' and at the same time, keeps the yen, renminbi, and euro excessively cheap, allowing Japan, China, Germany, and France to boost exports by selling their stuff Stateside at bargain prices. 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(By the way, Trump himself owned the Beaux Arts Manhattan landmark from 1988 to 1995.) Miran then backtracks to acknowledge that the drive down the dollar route that he extolled isn't possible for a basic reason: Trump's dead set on keeping the global medium of exchange strong and retaining its status as the go-to cornerstone of international commerce. He notes that the POTUS-elect 'threatened to punish' nations that dump the king of currencies. Hence, he puts the original Mar-a-Lago version aside despite its compelling economic logic, and concludes that given Trump's 'praise' for 'the reserve status of the dollar' that the U.S. will stay stuck with the main source chronic of America's trade woes, our excessively pricey currency. After taking a massive dollar devaluation off the table, Miran's 'User's Guide' goes on to embrace what he calls 'an alternative form of Mar-a-Lago accord' for setting things right. Miran insisted to this writer, as he'd said before, that while the Manhattan Institute writings were 'designed as policy advocacy,' the 'User's Guide' 'gets wrongly mischaracterized every day as administration policy, when it's really my own views.' Still, this 'alternative' Mar-a-Lago prescription mirrors the one he's been advancing since taking the CEA chair. It's a model of 'burden sharing' that he's been promoting in recent interviews and speeches. Here's the basic idea: The U.S. can leverage its powerhouse position in global trade to reap compensation from its partners in exchange for our accepting an overpriced dollar that's part and parcel of providing a global currency, and that essentially allows foreigners to sell their products at discount within our borders compared to what we can charge for our cars and chips in their markets. We'll also collect payback for the huge expense of supplying the American security umbrella protecting our allies. Instead of the multi-country agreement envisaged in part one of the 'User's Guide,' 'burden sharing' relies on separate negotiations with multiple nations. The tool for collecting this bounty: tariffs individually negotiated across multiple nations. Theoretically, the more a country lowers its direct duties and non-tariff barriers, the lower the levies the U.S. will charge them. The proviso: Big tariffs for even the best-behaved are here to stay. That stance constitutes a sudden, tectonic shift from the post-war march toward free trade to a new protectionism, and Miran's a prime mover in making it happen. Miran described the concept at length during a talk at the Hudson Institute on April 7: Big exporters to the U.S., and especially China, are what he calls 'inflexible'—they've built plants 'specifically for selling to the U.S. consumer,' and those plants can't pick up and move or easily switch to making something else. Their workers are trained to manufacture those U.S.-bound products. China can't find anywhere else to offload the goods in big volumes. As Miran put it, 'China can't stop selling to us. Who's going to buy as much [of their products] as U.S. consumers?' On the other hand, he argues, America's shoppers are just as flexible as Chinese producers are boxed in. 'We have all the leverage because we're so big,' he says. If Chinese exporters raise their prices to recoup our tariffs, Americans simply will stop buying their offerings. Our consumers 'can reallocate demand across borders' or purchase Stateside-made alternatives, he contends. The upshot: To keep sales humming, the Chinese exporters will lower the prices they charge U.S. importers to fully offset the tariffs those importers are paying, keeping the price of Chinese goods crossing our borders the same. America's shoppers won't see higher price tags on the China-made toys and computers at our megastores and electronics chains. The U.S. Treasury collects rich revenues, and China and the other big exporters, not our families, cover the full costs. 'It will not happen on day one, but will happen in the 'fullness of time,'' said Miran, rebooting one of his favorite expressions. The mainstream economics crowd, however, is not sold. In a Fortune interview, Larry Summers, Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton and a top adviser to Barack Obama, slammed Miran's Mar-a-Lago manifesto, in all its forms, as 'a bizarre, narcissistic conceit rather than a serious approach to policy that other nations can subscribe to.' Put simply, almost all experts to whom I spoke doubt that that China, Japan, Mexico, and other nations, and not U.S. consumers via higher prices, nor companies through reduced profits for investing in new plants and jobs, will absorb double-digit tariffs slapped on imported groceries, autos, and steel. 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"It is like gravity being reversed": How Trump's DOJ created "an invitation to discrimination"
Donald Trump is America's first White president. He is advancing a revolutionary project to end multiracial pluralistic democracy. As a practical day-to-day matter, this means protecting the power, influence, and privileges of white people over Black people and other non-whites. The evidence about the role that white racism and white racial resentment played in Donald Trump's return to power is overwhelming: contrary to the disproved narrative, it was racism and not 'working class' anxiety that overdetermined white support for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Donald Trump was able to use that energy to fuel his ascent back to the White House, where he is now 'governing' as an autocrat who has aspirations to be a dictator. In a 2018 op-ed essay in The New York Times, Charles Blow described this appeal as: 'Trump is man-as-message, man-as-messiah. Trump support isn't philosophical but theological. Trumpism is a religion founded on patriarchy and white supremacy.' As such, Donald Trump will (and is) amplify his racist policies and behavior to maintain control and power when/if he faces pushback from the American people. Donald Trump's authority and power are being used not just against non-whites but against white people — including his own MAGA people — as well. To that point, Trump's 'big beautiful bill' that is being forced through Congress by his supplicant MAGA Republicans will take away hundreds of billions (and likely trillions) of dollars from the country's social safety net by cutting programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act and then transferring it to the plutocrats and kleptocrats. As President Johnson so wisely observed and warned, '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.' Ultimately, the power of white elites to use white racism and white racial resentment to influence and otherwise convince and compel white Americans to support policies and engage in behavior(s) that actually causes them harm is older than the nation itself. Damon Hewitt is the President and Executive Director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Before joining the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, Hewitt served as lead counsel on litigation and policy matters and supervised teams of lawyers and non-lawyers at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In this wide-ranging conversation, Dewitt explains how the struggle to defend democracy and civil rights in the Age of Trump will be a marathon and not the sprint of a few years between elections and campaigns. He also explains how if American democracy was a type of medical patient, they would be very sick and in need of long-term, sustained care because the rise of Trumpism and authoritarian populism reflects much deeper acute systemic problems. Dewitt warns that the Trump administration's assaults on democracy, freedom, democratic institutions, civil rights, the rule of law, and the Constitution will not be limited to just 'those people' (i.e. 'illegal aliens,' 'migrants,' Black and brown people, the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups) but will soon target the American people as a whole with drastically negative consequences for most, if not all, areas of their lives. How are you feeling? How are you managing on the day-to-day given the worsening state of American democracy and rising authoritarianism? You lead an organization that is committed to defending civil rights. You are literally at ground zero right now. It is challenging. This crisis is a test of our collective stamina for what is a marathon and not a sprint. I think about my work as being part of a generational struggle. The baton was passed to us, and we'd best not drop it. Defending civil rights can be exhausting — and that is in the best of times. But as I tell my team here at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, 'we must have joy amidst the struggle.' I said that before Trump's return to power, and that principle is much more important now. There is a profound sense of urgency among those who are working in this space in civil society. We are not in a moment where we can just wait three and a half years, and things are automatically going to get better once we have a new president. Part of the approach to stopping these assaults on democracy, the rule of law, and civil rights is a type of harm reduction model. We are trying to slow down that overflowing sewer, the flooding of the zone. You summoned the type of therapeutic language that is necessary to understand that this American democracy and society are very sick and in pain. Using that framework and metaphor, if America in the Age of Trump is the patient and you are the doctor, how would you assess its health? That is an amazing metaphor. Very powerful. As I see it, the patient has probably gone to an urgent care center when they actually need to see a specialist — or more likely multiple specialists. The patient needs to have an entire program of care, but they have been avoiding the doctor because they are afraid to do the work of taking care of themselves properly. They don't want to take the medicine or follow through on the treatments because it won't be easy. The patient does not want to change their diet. Getting better is going to require lots of hard work, and it is going to hurt. But guess what? If the patient stays sick, it is going to hurt even more. Denial is very powerful in America. There are large numbers of people and institutions who actually believe that they can just put their heads down and it will all be fine. It won't be. A big part of the denial is not realizing or admitting that you can continue to get sicker, that your health can devolve, the disease can and likely will get worse if left untreated. One of the largest and most critical mistakes that the mainstream political class and news media types continue to make, years into the Age of Trump, is to not understand how Trump's ascent is the result of much deeper and far older problems and systemic failures in this society. This is more than a failure of imagination, it is a choice at this point. One of the root causes of this crisis is deep social inequality and financial precarity. There was a time when having a high school diploma and getting a job with a pension was a formula to be part of the solid middle class in this country. Now, a college degree or even an advanced degree is often a formula for little to no upward economic mobility. In the United States, we have a generation of young people who are now much less likely to be better off than their parents economically. We are mired in reverse social mobility. If one believes that progress in this country is linear and upward, such a reality is jarring and enraging. This helps to explain why there is a cohort among the American public who is attracted to both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Both of them are very different in terms of politics and values. However, they both symbolize and channel rage at a system that is not working for a larger and growing number of Americans. And of course, racism is a deep part of the rise of Trumpism and the MAGA movement. The data is clear in that regard. Racism is not just a stain on the American social fabric, it is a deep and indelible part of that fabric. The inability of law and public policy in this country to keep up with the shifting, evolving manifestations of racism is leaving a lot of people disaffected as well. Looking at the white backlash and white frontlash, the rolling back of decades of progress along the color line, I have been asking myself what year is it really? Do Trump and his MAGA forces and their allies want to return the country to the 1950s? The Gilded Age? Even earlier? As the joke goes, Black people can't really mess with time machines. That is also true of many other groups, too — even if they are in denial about how precarious their rights and freedoms and personhood truly have been historically and continue to be in this country. Here is a thought experiment: Tell me a year when hundreds of 1000s of people took the streets in peaceful protest, when elected officials obstructed justice when it came to racism, when the President of the United States had to take to the airwaves to talk about the importance of voting rights not just for Black people, but all people in the country, when people who fought for racial justice had to worry about their physical safety and surveillance. That year was 1963. That is the year the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law was founded. But what I am describing could have been any of the last few years, too. You are correct. It does feel like we are in a time warp in this country right now, and in the last few years. It is very disorienting. Trump's election, twice, is also a reminder that social progress is not linear and that the country's democratic institutions and infrastructure are more fragile than many of the country's leaders — as well as average Americans — wanted to admit. After the Civil War, there was Reconstruction. Reconstruction was one of the most radical and successful experiments in expanding democracy in American history. The civil rights movement and its victories were a second Reconstruction. The United States is going to need a third Reconstruction to begin to heal from the damage that is now being caused and the deeper problems that got us to this democracy crisis. To that point, Black Americans and other nonwhites have only been equal citizens under the law in this country for about 60 years. One can make a compelling argument that the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were the nation's birth certificate. America as a modern nation was born from those laws, and the project of democracy has been expanding access and protecting all Americans and their right to the franchise. That was only 60 or so years ago. America's experiment in democracy is very young. The American democratic experiment and its fruits and legacy are very much imperiled now. I have also been thinking a great deal about the work of the legal scholar Lani Guinier and her concept of "political race" and how Black and brown people are the miners' canaries in American society. She passed away in 2022. A great loss. What does it mean to be the "miner's canary" in the Age of Trump and his return to power? I was a research assistant for Lani Guinier during my first year of law school. To be the miner's canary means that the experiences of Black people are a prism through which to see a whole wide range of inequalities, beyond race, in this society. Inequality and other forms of marginalization and identity overlap and intersect. We have tons of data and all manner of empirical and other forms of evidence that show how race and racism structure American society and people's life outcomes and other opportunities and experiences. But to the miner's canary, if we make conditions better for the canary to survive, if not thrive in that metaphorical mine, we are making it better for just about everyone else too. The harsh reality about the miner's canary is that it often ends up dying. That is the signal for everybody else to get out of that mine right now because the air is poisonous. Black people are the miners' canaries in American society who are dying younger and at higher rates from a range of causes directly and indirectly related to racism and other forms of inequality and oppression. And guess what? Those premature deaths are a warning to everyone else. We are interconnected. Black people were that miner's canary warning, very loudly, that Donald Trump's return to the White House would be a disaster for all Americans and an existential threat to the future of the country's democracy and freedom. There were other alarm-sounders as well. For example, the relatively small number of people with a prominent public platform who kept trying to warn the American people about what would happen if Trump was elected to a second term. How come those tens of millions of Americans who put Trump back in the White House did not listen to these grave warnings — warnings that have now come true? I will preface my answer by saying that the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law is a non-partisan organization. Looking at the data, I have concluded that the 2024 election was largely decided by how a few million people who voted for the Democrats in 2020 decided not to vote at all this time. Trump also won a larger percentage of the Latino vote. He also expanded his base marginally among young black men. There are also single-issue voters who ignored all of the other, much more important issues regarding the future of American democracy and our rights and freedoms. Trump would tell Black Americans, What do you have to lose by voting for me and not the Democrats? Well, it turns out a whole lot. Those Black folks who switched over to Trump were a marginal but key part of his victory. However, we cannot and should not ignore how Donald Trump won a majority of white women. He has now done this three times. We need to ask white women as a group how they can continue to support Donald Trump given his personal behavior and values, the "Access Hollywood" tape, his treatment of Hillary Clinton and then Kamala Harris and powerful women more generally? Trump's support for taking away women's most fundamental civil rights to control their own bodies? How does a woman look her daughter in the eye and tell her she voted for such a man? What is the state of the rule of law right now in this country? The rule of law has been exposed as being much more fragile than was commonly believed or hoped. The law is the connective tissue of our society and institutions, and norms. Our democratic system works because the leaders respect the opinions of the courts even if they do not personally agree with them. Donald Trump and his administration and the right-wing have increasingly rejected those norms about how the law works in the American democratic system. It is different, but perhaps the closest analog might be so-called "massive resistance" in the South and some other parts of the United States to the mandate of Brown v. Board of Education, where school districts refused to integrate, sometimes they were shutting down entire schools or districts to avoid compliance. There were even these fake legal theories known as "interposition" to resist the courts' orders about civil rights. Donald Trump as president, has repeatedly shown that he only cares about himself and not preserving, upholding, or protecting the country's democratic institutions, of which the rule of law (and equality under it) and justice are central. I have been speaking with retired federal judges about what could potentially happen if the executive branch loses in court and then refuses to respect the outcome. Or what if an officeholder loses an election and refuses to respect the people's will? Their answers were not comforting. At the end of the day, we still rely on the collective instinct of a few good people in the right places so that things don't fall apart in this country and our democracy. But it could all easily collapse. It has happened many times in other countries. The rule of law is not on strong ground with Trump 2.0. That's why we must all devote a good deal of attention and energy to upholding it and fighting back against efforts to erode it. What is your reaction to how the Trump administration has remade the Office of Civil Rights to focus on protecting the supposedly trampled-upon rights of White right-wing Christians and "oppressed" white people more broadly? This is about much more than just a simple shifting of policy priorities. That happens with new administrations and is relatively routine. What the Trump administration is doing is turning empirical reality and the facts upside down. It is like gravity being reversed. The Civil Rights Division has long been known as the crown jewel of the Department of Justice. The reason that the Department of Justice was created was to enforce federal civil rights laws. What the Trump administration is doing is taking away the avenues for redress and protection for people who have suffered real injustice and violations of their rights. Moreover, the actual laws and procedures that have been developed over decades to protect the civil rights of marginalized people — and by extension all people in this country — are being weaponized to serve Trump and the larger radical political project that seeks to take away equality under the law for all people. For example, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has been waging a campaign of threats and over-the-top rhetoric to falsely imply that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits efforts by K-12 school districts and colleges to further diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. By issuing threatening press releases, diatribes masquerading as policy guidance, current OCR leadership is not trying to enforce the law. They are actually trying to remake the law by elevating their own warped interpretations of Supreme Court precedent in the recent higher education admissions cases to cover nearly every aspect of school environments. At the same time that the Department of Education is engaged in this campaign of intimidation requiring school communities to scramble, and teachers and administrators to be fearful, the Department of Education has also shuttered 7 of its 12 regional civil rights offices, leaving school communities in Texas, Ohio, California and many other states without anyone to call when a child faces discrimination at school. This simultaneous weakening and weaponization of civil rights infrastructure has left school districts are scrambling to meet the Department's demands while at the same time leaving parents and students who have been bullied at school because of their race, or are not receiving necessary services in relation to a disability, with no one in government to call for assistance. In another attack on multiracial, pluralistic democracy, the Trump administration recently ordered that the Office of Civil Rights reject what is known as 'disparate impact' as evidence of racism and other forms of discrimination. They have also ended investigations and monitoring of police thuggery and brutality and other abuses of the civil rights. While destroying and subverting the civil rights infrastructure, the administration also aims to unravel essential civil rights legal frameworks for addressing modern-day discrimination. Today, structural racism built into the norms and policies of institutions is harder to prove as intentional disparate treatment, but it can be proved through a legal standard called disparate impact. The Supreme Court first recognized disparate impact as a form of discrimination in 1971 and has since repeatedly upheld cases brought under that standard. Disparate impact liability is an essential tool that has been utilized for decades to enforce civil rights protections for individuals who are harmed by policies that appear neutral on their face but which are shown to erect barriers to opportunity for people from certain groups. Through Executive Order, the Trump administration has claimed that disparate impact liability is unlawful. It has called for immediate repeal of all 'racial nondiscrimination' regulations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act that contemplate disparate-impact liability, directed agencies to assess pending investigations, lawsuits, and consent judgments that rely on disparate-impact liability and deprioritize enforcement of claims alleging disparate impact discrimination, and directed the Department of Justice to target state laws, regulations, policies, or practices that relate to disparate-impact. The administration's aim here is to destroy the foundation of civil rights protections in this country — to erode guardrails preventing discrimination in housing, lending, employment, education, healthcare, and other areas of life. It's like declaring 'open season' for racism — an invitation to discrimination. Recently, the Trump administration turned reality and facts upside down again when it abandoned ongoing Justice Department investigations into police misconduct in cities all across America. This sweeping announcement even included two cities–Louisville and Minneapolis–that had already voluntarily agreed to make critical reforms to their police policies and practices to mitigate instances of police violence against its citizens. This police misconduct was not speculative, it was reality. We know this because the Justice Department thoroughly investigated these police departments and then made its findings public. The timing of this announcement makes these actions even more troubling. The Trump administration made this announcement just days before the five-year mark of the lynching of George Floyd by a Minneapolis Police Officer, and on the same day, Trump claimed that South Africa engaged in genocide against white Afrikaner farmers. Make no mistake, the Trump administration is making clear its view about whether Black lives matter. But upside down or not, a fact is still a fact. The findings from those police misconduct investigations cannot be easily swept under the rug. If the Trump administration and the larger revolutionary right-wing, as seen with Project 2025 for example, gets its way, what will America look like? What do you want to prepare people for? In the infamous Dred Scott decision, Supreme Court Justice Taney, speaking for the majority, said that the Negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect. Well, that's how everybody in this country is going to feel. You will have no rights that Trump and the federal government are bound to respect. If you are an American citizen or if you have legal status to be in this country, you could be picked up off the street or taken from your home and put on a plane to some foreign prison. Sure, there are provisions in the Bill of Rights and Constitution prohibiting such a thing, but the Trump administration doesn't care about that. It may start there, and many Americans will incorrectly convince themselves that they are "good people" and haven't committed any crimes, so they are safe. They are not. Once one group is targeted or fundamental rights are taken away, then it is a slippery slope. Again, this is why the treatment of Black people in America is like the canary in the coal mine. The mistreatment of Black people is a harbinger of the mistreatment of all Americans. Voting rights will be taken away next. The Republicans and their allies on the state and local level are already systematically targeting the voting rights of Black and brown people — and white people as well — who support the Democratic Party. Many people in this country are going to learn the painful lesson that once the government says that you have no rights it is bound to respect that not just their political freedoms and civil rights will be constrained by their ability to have a happy life and to be fulfilled if not thrive will be taken away too. The destitution will not just be political and moral, it will be economic too. Under such an autocratic, if not outright authoritarian regime, the rich get richer and the poor get even poorer, and the middle class shrinks and disappears.
