One year on, the Trump administration’s descent deeper into the gutter of racism no longer comes as a surprise. Trump’s second presidency has been devoted to demolishing anti-discrimination policies based on the absurd claim that they are unfair to white people, especially white men, who are now the real victims of racism. This is a departure for Republicans. Not that many years ago, most of them would try to co-opt the civil rights narrative as their own by claiming the U.S. had achieved the “colorblind” society that was supposedly Martin Luther King Jr.’s end goal. Thus, civil rights–era reforms were no longer necessary because the movement had succeeded.

Today, Trump and JD Vance have dropped the hollow tributes to King and replaced them with disgusting racist memes that blatantly appeal to white men to see themselves as victims of anti-discrimination policies. The point of this isn’t just to undermine the historic accomplishments of the civil rights movement. It is also to create a scapegoat for the poor and working-class whites who make up a growing section of the MAGA base to blame for declining living standards. Dismantling what remains of civil rights–era laws and policies is necessary to bury the radical legacy of the civil rights movement, which, at its core, was about more than representation in politics and business or even formal political and legal equality. It was about materially improving the lives of all Black people and ultimately of all the have-nots.

Trump’s second presidency began in January 2025 with a frenzy of executive orders, including ones attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Within months, this had led to purges of lawyers and federal employees charged with protecting civil rights. By December, Vance was bragging to a nearly all-white audience at a Turning Point USA conference, “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” His statement was so uncontroversial for the Trump administration that it barely received news coverage. In an X (formerly Twitter) post shortly before that speech, Andrea Lucas, Trump’s chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, asked, “Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws.” Trump himself weighed in during a January New York Times interview, in which he declared that “white people were very badly treated” by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which supposedly causes whites who “deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job” to lose out. Trump’s white supremacy got cruder still at the start of Black History Month, when he posted a video on Truth Social in which Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces were pasted on the bodies of apes.

If the aim of this undisguised racism is to distract white working-class MAGA supporters from Trump’s abject failure to usher in a new golden age of prosperity for them, it is becoming less and less effective. In November 2024, Trump won half of all voters making $50,000 or less, according to exit polls; his approval rating among this group is now at 38 percent and dropping. Still, the relentless campaign to portray whites as the victims of Black people who got a leg up thanks to government bureaucrats and the Democratic Party has had an effect. An Associated Press–NORC poll in July 2025 found that nearly 40 percent of white adults believe diversity and equity initiatives increase discrimination against white people. A previous poll in 2022 showed that 30 percent of white Americans believe discrimination against them had increased “a lot more” in the past five years.

Many of the beliefs expressed in these polls are detached from reality. By almost any measure, working-class Black Americans continue to lag far behind their white peers. At $55,157, median Black household income in 2024 was over $30,000 less than white household income. The numbers are so skewed because Black workers earn less than white workers in nearly every major industry. Black unemployment is nearly double the rate of white unemployment. Only one in three Black families has a retirement account, compared with more than 60 percent of white families. And the value of those accounts for Blacks is lower because of racism in hiring and differences in wages and salaries over a working lifetime.

As for the favorite boogeyman of the White House, the actual record of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, even in their heyday following the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, has never been as robust and impactful as either their boosters or detractors have claimed. Indeed, before the right began its crusade against DEI, many of the biggest critics of these initiatives were people on the left who pointed out that they produced more pledges to make companies diverse than actual jobs for Blacks.

Far from replacing qualified white workers with unqualified Black ones, as Vance and Trump insist is happening, DEI initiatives typically set aspirational goals that mean little beyond a vague commitment to do better. Consider the words of billionaire Larry Fink, CEO of the investment firm BlackRock, in an open letter issued a week into the 2020 protests: “As a firm committed to racial equality, we must also consider where racial disparity exists in our own organizations and not tolerate our shortcomings. We can only heal these wounds — building a more diverse and inclusive firm and contributing to a more just society — if we talk to each other and cultivate honest, open relationships and friendships.” BlackRock increased its fraction of Black employees from 5 percent in 2020 to 8 percent by 2025, a relatively minor change and hardly evidence of Black workers replacing white ones. The company has since dismantled its DEI initiatives in response to Trump’s executive orders and legal threats against corporations that maintained such programs.

The surge of corporate initiatives spurred by the 2020 protests did cause a brief boom in the hiring of diversity specialists. Companies in the S&P 500 hired new heads of diversity at a rate of about 12 per month following George Floyd’s death — almost three times the rate of the previous 16 months. But within three years of the Floyd protests — even before the return of Trump — there was a sharp turn away from these types of hires. According to the employment website ZipRecuiter, job posts related to corporate diversity positions fell by 63 percent in 2023. Besides adding those specialists, diversity initiatives have had almost no impact on who sits in corporate boardrooms. One 2021 report found that only three Fortune 500 companies were led by a Black CEO, down from seven less than a decade previously; there have only ever been two Black women CEOs. As the report noted, “There are more CEOs named ‘John’ than female CEOs.”

Outside of employment, the record of corporate initiatives to address racism is no better. According to the McKinsey consulting firm, between May 2020, when George Floyd was murdered, and October 2022, nearly 1,400 American corporations pledged $340 billion to address racism in America. Only a fraction of the money went to addressing the overpolicing of Black people that led to Floyd’s brutal death; just eight companies made donations to Black Lives Matter organizations. Instead, most of the pledges were for investment in housing and other ventures intended to stimulate greater participation from Black consumers. For example, JPMorgan Chase’s racial equity commitment included $8 billion for 40,000 new mortgages and $4 billion to cover 20,000 refinancing agreements over five years. This and similar initiatives were basically profit-making schemes, promoted as aid and assistance. Above all, they were merely promises made by private organizations with no public mechanism for determining if the promises were kept.

In the summer of 2020 and after, it was easier to emphasize antiracism and diversity with bromides about solidarity with Black Lives Matter than to deal with the implications of the other reckoning about race and class caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Shortly before corporate America decided to proclaim its concern about Black lives, plenty of corporations were in the news for reneging on promises to give hazard pay to the disproportionately Black and brown workers who had been designated as “essential.” The sharp turn to DEI initiatives had the added advantage of deflecting attention from the erupting class dynamics exposed in the opening months of the pandemic, when nearly 40 million people lost their jobs by some estimates, and debates raged over emergency supplemental unemployment and moratoriums on evictions. The corporate pivot to DEI emphasized vibes; pay increases, workplace safety, health care, and sick pay faded into the background.

Meanwhile, Trump and the Republican Party were honing a different narrative that would help them regain momentum after a humiliating electoral defeat in 2020: Diversity and equity initiatives were proof that the Democrats and their surrogates in corporate America were willing to put their thumbs on the scales to help Black people, even if it meant discriminating against whites.

The Republican Party’s base among poor and working-class whites has changed significantly in the past decade or so. The economic downturn in rural areas, combined with hospital closures and the growth of low-wage jobs without health insurance, has led to a much wider use of Medicaid in these areas. In 2014, the Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid to millions of people, including low-income white Republicans. This has complicated the right’s age-old strategy of demonizing those who rely on welfare-state programs. Previously, the right wing had mostly heaped blame on “welfare queens” living high off government handouts at the expense of hard-working, tax-paying white families. But now, needing to appeal to lower-income whites who were more likely than before to rely on government programs, the right made Black professionals in both the public and private sector the new enemies. The attacks on diversity initiatives in higher education and corporate America are aimed at middle-class and upwardly mobile Black Americans. The Trump administration is inviting whites, especially white men, to blame their stagnating or declining living standards on the supposedly rising fortunes of Black people.

This narrative was used to justify the Trump administration’s assault on the federal workforce. Last May, in a memo titled “Merit Hiring Plan,” a Trump official echoed right-wing conspiracy theories about the federal government using racial quotas to guide its hiring practices. The memo explained how “the overly complex Federal hiring system overemphasized discriminatory ‘equity’ quotas and too often resulted in the hiring of unfit, unskilled bureaucrats.” Not surprisingly, the Trump layoffs within federal agencies have hit Black civil servants, particularly women, the hardest. Black women lost 318,000 jobs in the public and private sectors between February and April of last year, the only major female demographic to experience significant job losses during that period. According to The New York Times, agencies where minorities and women were the majority of the workforce, such as the Department of Education and U.S. Agency for International Development, suffered some of the largest workforce reductions, if not complete elimination. After the American Civil Liberties Union and a group of employment attorneys alleged that the Trump layoffs “disproportionately singled out federal workers who were not male or white,” in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Trump administration took down the website allowing the public to track the race and gender of government employees.

The claim that civil rights protections and diversity initiatives have led to the displacement of white men from the workforce is another manifestation of the right wing’s great replacement conspiracy theory. This “theory” is mostly associated with Latinos and immigration, but it was also a motivating factor in the massacres of Black people in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 and Buffalo, in 2022. Of course, the idea that Blacks are taking over and supplanting the rightful place of whites is no less absurd than the immigrant variant. Yet it serves a purpose for the MAGA right in giving white working-class and poor people a scapegoat on which to blame their deteriorating living conditions, especially now that Trump and the Republicans have been in power for a year and have achieved nothing for the “ordinary” people they claim to stand for.

If racist scapegoating can get a hearing, it is because something has happened to white working-class people, along with the rest of American workers. The causes have been widely discussed: The decline in U.S. manufacturing and erosion of union strength over decades has led to sharp declines in earning power and material deprivations across the board. To manage this decline, Americans have taken on a record $18 trillion in household debt. Meanwhile, the affordability crisis grows worse and worse.

This is the context needed to understand the economic insecurity that pervades the lives of all working-class and poor people — Black, brown, and white. During the past decade, the media began to focus on one facet of this crisis of working-class life: “deaths of despair.” In the popular view, this referred specifically to working-class whites without college degrees aged 45 to 54 who died from opioid abuse, alcoholism, or suicide. But from 2015 to 2022, the rate of “deaths of despair” among Black Americans tripled, ultimately surpassing the rate among whites. Even beyond the statistics, though, the accusation that this tragic product of social malaise and economic marginalization was somehow caused by civil rights law or diversity initiatives makes a mockery of the profound levels of hardship afflicting all working people, which have led to a decline in overall life expectancy in the U.S., sharper than any other country in the developed world.

The right wing has had help in perpetuating the idea that civil rights laws have gone too far. In the case of the Democrats, it is their silence that speaks volumes. Worried about losing potential white swing voters, the party leadership said little after the U.S. Supreme Court, now packed with right-wingers, abolished affirmative action in college admissions in 2023. They have had even less to say about Republican attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies as a justification for removing civil rights protections for Black workers and students. The Democrats’ appeal to Black voters is mostly focused on the threat to voting rights. But with their silence about other issues, they give credence to the Republican talking points that antiracist protections have come at a cost for white men.

By imagining that civil rights protections take something from white men, not only are the causes of white deprivation obscured, but the role of discrimination in Black economic subordination is also lost. The 20th century civil rights struggle for Black Americans was as much about opening the robust post–World War II economy to Black workers as it was about addressing the indignity of racial insults and stigma of inferiority. Or as Martin Luther King Jr. explained in 1963, “The Negro today is not struggling for some abstract, vague rights, but for concrete and prompt improvement in his way of life. … The struggle for rights is, at bottom, a struggle for opportunities.”

The eventual passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act removed formal legal barriers to the full participation of Black workers in the then-booming U.S. economy. But King and others recognized that more was needed to ensure equal Black participation in all aspects of the economy. They called on the federal government to be proactive in helping Black families out of the poverty imposed on them through decades of racial discrimination. As King observed:

No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law.

King understood that proposing such a program for Black workers would be untenable in a world where millions of white people were also living in poverty. So in the aftermath of the 1963 March on Washington, he called instead for a “special, compensatory measure” for all the financially marginalized. He compared the scale of such a program to the GI Bill promised to veterans when they returned to the U.S. after World War II. King recognized that “millions of white poor” would also benefit from this kind of social legislation. He described poor whites as “the derivative victims” of slavery: “They are chained by the weight of discrimination, though its badge of degradation does not mark them. It corrupts their lives, frustrates their opportunities and withers their education.” Discrimination, King continued, “has confused so many by prejudice that they have supported their own oppressors.”

Some aspects of King’s insights are dated. Today, financial precarity and insecurity exist among a much wider layer of white workers, not just among those mired at the bottom. Also, King’s vision flowed from the existence of an expanding U.S. economy that created the modern white middle class. That economy no longer exists. Instead, millions of workers suffer declining living standards while historic levels of wealth are concentrated at the top of society. Racial attitudes have undoubtedly changed since 1963, though the pandering of Vance and Trump shows that racist scapegoating can still be effective. Perhaps an even bigger change is how Black American life has transformed in the past 60 years. The end of legal discrimination and federal enforcement of civil rights laws in the 1960s opened paths to upward mobility for some Black Americans. No one in King’s day would have imagined the number of Black millionaires and those making over $100,000 today. From the record number of Black Americans serving in Congress to the emergence of a small but significant Black elite, some aspects of Black life are unrecognizable compared with 60 years earlier.

But the shared reality of economic uncertainty and insecurity for millions of Black and white Americans alike — along with millions of others — provides the basis for the kind of political movement that King envisioned. Various individuals and social groups have long used race for their own objectives, whether in pursuit of reactionary or progressive goals. Today’s wealthy, Ivy League–educated white men blaming anti-discrimination policies for the declining living standards of ordinary white people is no different. Challenging this scapegoating and the destructive right-wing program it seeks to advance will require a mutual understanding of the grievances we share and a commitment to come together and fight to turn the tide against Trump.

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