The Agony of American Racism

When Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the Republican Party ("GOP") rant incessantly about the evils of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion ("DEI") programs and work to end them everywhere the federal government has any leverage, they are moving the Overton Window dangerously and dramatically. The question used to be what tools can and should the private and public sectors use to offset the effects of this nation's longstanding institutional racism. That question is terribly difficult, and reasonable people can disagree as a policy matter about the desirability and efficiency of overtly race-conscious programs to further a less racist future.

But the GOP is not just arguing that DEI programs should be abolished but also that these programs are the cause of much of the pain this country is feeling today. Would-be-authoritarians love scapegoats and it appears that people of color (along with undocumented immigrants, their children, and the trans community) are the GOP's main targets. But this attack on DEI is just the latest effort by people in power in America to continue and even extend racist policies. 

To understand how and why we are here, history is instructive. 

There can be no debate that our country:

Kidnapped Black people;

Enslaved Black people;

Black-Coded Black people after the Civil War (almost as bad as slavery);

Segregated Black People;

Red-lined Black people;

Subjected Black people to a racist criminal justice system.

Some of these practices obviously happened a long time ago, but some are happening as you read these words. Racism still runs deep because of our undeniable and irrefutable racist past. The Trump Administration at every turn, however, is blaming those who were enslaved, segregated, and red-lined (and their descendants) instead of the people who conducted the enslaving, segregating, and red-lining. This shift is racist in every sense of that word. 

Some people believe that racial segregation imposed by law ended a long time ago in some distant and grainy-looking past. But that time-line is not accurate. In 1964, when I was eight years old, the entire South was still deeply segregated and not just in schools. Some of the public facilities that were segregated in my lifetime were schools, jails, parks, pools, telephone booths, and hospitals. And, of course, many private facilities such as theaters, restaurants, and hotels were also segregated. 

Essentially, not that long ago, the South and much of the rest of the country was divided into two worlds: one for White People and one for Black People (with persons of other races and ethnicities falling on either side of the arbitrary line), and this division extended everywhere.

In 1964, a motel that with a different name is still located three blocks from my school, went to the Supreme Court and without any shame argued that it possessed constitutional rights under the 13th  Amendment to completely exclude all Black people from its business. Thankfully, the motel lost the case, but one must sadly wonder whether it would lose today if it cloaked its claims in "religious liberty" language.

Even in the world of college sports, where winning is everything, racism ran deep. The first time any Black athlete was allowed to play for any SEC sports team was 1965. In 1968, the University of Alabama football team was still all white. 

I could go on and on, but it should be obvious that the gross inequalities caused by centuries of racist laws and practices take a long time to overcome, and we are not close. Here is a snapshot of our racist present:

There are 8 Black CEO's of Fortune 500 Companies which puts the number just shy of 2%.

In 2024, the entering class of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was 7% in a state where Black people make up approximately 20% of the population.

At Yale College over the course of a recent 12-year period, Black professors made up about 3% of the faculty.

All the way across the country, the University of California at San Diego has less than 5% Black faculty.

In Los Angeles during a recent 10 month period, almost 25% of Black drivers and passengers were searched, compared to 16% of Latinos and 5% of whites.

In the District of Columbia, over a recent four-week period, of 11,000 police stops, Black drivers accounted for 70% of those stopped while they are less than 50% of the population. 

In Columbus, Ohio, while Blacks make up 28% of the city’s population, about 50% of the use-of-force incidents by city police were against black residents.

Black people in America are three times more likely to be killed by police than whites, and 4.5 times more likely to be incarcerated.

Black family incomes on average are about 60% of average white incomes. 

To be sure, current overt racism does not explain (or fully explain) all of the racial disparities we observe. Unconscious bias does some of the work. So too do pipeline problems. For example, Yale, UCSD, and other universities would have more Black faculty if not for the racial wealth gap, educational inequalities in K-12 schools, and other facts of American life that affect the pool of potential hires. But one need not think that people currently running various institutions that exhibit very substantial racial disparities are themselves racists to recognize that racism is a root cause of those disparities.

To the extent that the GOP believes all of this racism is in the past, a closer look at the federal government's red-lining policies shows that the direct effects of undeniable racist government behavior are still very much with us today. As I've written before:

Between 1934 and 1962, the federal government allocated approximately 120 billion dollars to support bank loans for home mortgages but roughly 98% of that money went to white families. In just Northern California, 350,000 new homes were built between 1946 and 1960 backed by federal tax dollars, but fewer than 100 of those government-backed mortgages went to African-America families. This practice of "red-lining" led to segregated neighborhoods which, even post-Brown v. Board of Education, perpetuated a system of unequal segregated public schools, which in turn still today harms opportunities for African-Americans to succeed in the workplace.

The appreciation of housing prices mostly in the white suburbs allowed [White People] to invest and accumulate more wealth, increasing economic separation between White and Black [People]. These conditions of inequality did not occur randomly but were the result of official laws, intentional policies, and racist programs.

The societal effects of centuries of overtly race-conscious rules, regulations, laws, and practices do not disappear in a generation or even in three generations. Any other conclusion is ignorant or racist ot both. 

But the Trump Administration is not trying to lessen the effects of American racism because it either does not believe it exists or because it supports racism or both. Whatever the true agenda, instead of trying to design policies to address the problem, the GOP today denies the problem exists and, to the extent it concedes it does, claims that the fault lies in DEI programs and affirmative action, not our racist past. 

Blaming the victims and those trying to help the victims instead of the system that designed, advanced, and tolerated horrific and objectively evil practices designed to keep people unequal in life and under law increases the agony that American racism has caused Black people (and others) throughout our history, and that is very much a problem that still needs to be addressed instead of denying that it exists at all.