The Great Resegregation
For the Atlantic, Adam Serwer writes about the Great Resegregation, the attempt by the Trump administration to reverse the civil rights movement.
If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly.
Like CRT before it, DEI has become conservatives’ go-to cover for their discriminatory actions:
The term DEI, frequently invoked by the Trump administration, functions as a smoke screen. It allows people to think that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI purge is about removing pointless corporate symbolism or sensitivity trainings. Although it is easy to find examples of DEI efforts that are ill-conceived or ill-applied, some conservatives have leveraged those criticisms to pursue a much broader agenda that is really about tearing anti-discrimination laws out at the roots, so that businesses and governments are free to extend or deny opportunities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation if they so choose.
Karen Attiah recently wrote about resegregation as well: The assault on DEI? It’s aimed at resegregation.
Across the United States, in government agencies and private corporations, leaders are scrambling to eliminate DEI programs. President Donald Trump is not only destroying any trace of diversity work within the government: He has ordered a review of federal contracts to identify any companies, nonprofits and foundations that do business with the government and keep their diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and he has warned that they could be the target of investigations.
Let’s call this what it really is: resegregation.
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