When President-elect Donald Trump issued an executive order attacking policies that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, the National Urban League sued to stop him.
Fortunately, the order was issued late in his first term and was immediately reversed when President Joe Biden took office.
Stamping out racial justice initiatives won't be a late-term afterthought for Trump 2.0, and it won't be limited to federal agencies, contractors and grant recipients.
The incoming administration's hostility to racial justice is unprecedented in the post-civil rights Era. If his administration is allowed to proceed unchecked, it will use the full power of the executive branch to reassert white privilege on every facet of society, public and private.
He will rescind Biden's executive order on Advancing Racial Equity, issued on his first day in office.
Trump has nominated only one Black American for his incoming cabinet: Scott Turner, a former NFL player whose only qualification to oversee affordable housing, protection for poor tenants and aid for the homeless, as head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is that he is virulently opposed to all of it.
His nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has advanced the blatantly racist fallacy that the Pentagon's commitment to racial justice has compromised military readiness. Trump's proposed "warrior board" is poised to purge the armed forces of top officers of color and those who have embraced diversity.
His incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller — condemned by the Congressional Black Caucus as a white nationalist — is pushing the administration to distort the interpretation of civil rights laws to reinforce white privilege. Miller is one of the leading proponents of the malicious myth of "anti-white racism." In reality, at the current rate of progress it will take between one and three centuries for Black Americans to reach economic and social parity with white Americans.
Trump has vowed not only to cut federal funding for any school pushing "critical race theory" — a term right-wing extremists have appropriated to describe any substantive discussion of racism or discrimination — but to impose fines onschools that embrace racial justice, and even to use the Department of Justice to pursue federal “civil rights cases” against them.
Furthermore, he plans to resurrect the failed 1776 Commission, reviled by historians as a plot to "elevate ignorance about the past to a civic virtue."
Trump's hostility to racial justice already is having a ripple effect on private corporations, many of whom preemptively have kowtowed to the incoming administration by dialing back their diversity, equity and inclusion policies. One notable exception is Costco, whose board recently rejected an anti-DEI shareholder proposal.
Trump and his allies have mistakenly interpreted his victory as an endorsement of their every vicious and bigoted impulse. The vast majority of Americans support corporate diversity policies. It's no surprise that the diversity of Biden's administration made it more effective; it's undeniable that diverse institutions are more innovative, adaptable, resilient and resolve problems more quickly.
We can only hope the incoming administration learns this lesson early on.
Marc H. Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League and was mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002. He writes a twice-monthly column for the Sun-Times.
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