Welcome to today's Qualified at the Intersection. This one is a bit longer, so I invite you to follow along by listening or reading. It’s part of an op-ed follow-up to the piece I wrote for Salon in November 2024 titled, “Trump’s plan to dismantle DEI on day one is a “colorblind” path to Jim Crow 2.0”
You might think Donald Trump posting a deepfake video of President Obama being arrested in the White House and pushed to his knees at Trump's feet is silly.1 But it’s not. It’s a real threat.
There’s a verse in the Bible—Romans 8:28:
"And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose."
I believe the same is true for those whose aim is evil. All things, even terrible ones, work in internal logic toward the manifestation of that evil “for those called according to its purpose.”
Some people still think the solution to our current crisis is some coaching, fixing a flaw in the system, or avoiding terms like DEI. But they’re not tracking what’s really happening. The system isn’t flawed; it’s acting as it was designed to. And we, my friends, are already in Jim Crow 2.0.
Maybe it's hard to see clearly because we’re in the early stages. But the first Jim Crow era didn’t begin with mass violence; it started with arrests, real ones, of Black politicians. And I don’t believe Trump is kidding.
It also saw the reassertion of Confederate ideology. Sound familiar?
According to The Guardian, since Donald Trump returned to office this year, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has begun restoring Confederate names to U.S. military bases. This directly contradicts a 2021 law passed by Congress—over Trump’s own veto—that created a commission to remove those names.2
Hegseth is skirting the law by being clever: he’s naming bases after alternative historical figures who coincidentally have the same last names as the Confederate leaders previously honored.
The Confederates (allegedly) lost the Civil War. They were insurrectionists and enemies of the state.
Even Republicans in Congress are pushing back. One said, “Returning the bases to the names of the people who took up arms against their country on behalf of slavery” is wrong. Hegseth briefly dropped the pretense and acknowledged the “legacy” these names represent.3 That legacy is one of racial terror and state-sanctioned white supremacy.
Meanwhile, according to NBC News, Trump has demanded professional sports teams return to Native American mascots, even threatening stadium deals to get his way.4
In another blow, the USDA recently eliminated the term “socially disadvantaged” from its programs. This ends race- and gender-based criteria for supporting historically underserved farmers, including Black farmers who have faced discrimination for over a century. This news comes from Capital B, a nonprofit Black-led news organization.5
All of this is coordinated. It’s not fringe. These are deliberate actions designed to enshrine white grievance and erase multicultural progress. All things are indeed working together for those aligned with this purpose.
Back in that Salon article, I warned that Trump’s “Day One” plan to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion wasn’t bluster. It was a signal an eyes-wide-open warning. And now? It’s no longer theoretical.
Many scholars now agree that this administration’s rollback of civil rights is the most consequential since the end of Reconstruction.6 The parallels are chilling.
The book Having Our Say7 recounts the lives of the Delany Sisters, two Black women who lived through Reconstruction and Jim Crow. One sister reflected, “The reason they passed those Jim Crow laws is that powerful white people, after the Civil War, were upset that Colored folks were beginning to get their piece of the pie. Colored people were starting to accumulate some wealth, to vote, to make demands.”
Sound familiar?
Those powerful people now resemble Missouri’s Attorney General, who is suing Starbucks for hiring “too many” women and people of color.8 They resemble a President who warns of “white genocide” in South Africa, using it to justify dismantling DEI here at home.
The Supreme Court appears ready to carry the mantle of Plessy Court.9 Their march toward modern Jim Crow began in 2023 with Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.10 The Court ruled that race-conscious admissions violated the Equal Protection Clause.
In my book Qualified: How Competency Checking and Race Collide at Work, I discuss the chilling similarities in tone and logic. Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “They have wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested… but the color of their skin.”
It echoes Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)11, where Justice Henry Billings Brown said, “If the colored race chooses to put [inferiority] construction upon it… it is not by reason of anything found in the act.”
This is the beating heart of the colorblind myth: systemic inequality is imaginary, and what we see is simply misinterpretation.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissents in Harvard and Trump v. CASA have cut through that illusion. In Harvard,12 she reminded us that racial inequality is not theoretical it is inherited, measurable, and enduring. Ignoring race isn’t neutrality. It’s complicity.
In Trump v. CASA where the Court stripped federal judges of the ability to issue nationwide injunctions, which means harmful executive actions stay in place unless challenged locally, Justice Jackson issued a blistering dissent.13 “Perhaps the degradation of our rule-of-law regime would happen anyway… But this court’s complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise.”
And she was rebuked by Amy Coney Barrett.
Recently, the Court approved the layoffs of 1,400 Department of Education employees, many of whom enforce Title I, Title IX, and IDEA14 protections. This isn’t administrative streamlining. It’s hostility toward public education, a hostility rooted in Reconstruction.
After the Civil War, the Freedmen’s Bureau delivered literacy to formerly enslaved people and poor whites. Historians say it laid the foundation for public education in the South and across the nation.15 But the backlash was swift. A political cartoon from the era read: “The Freedmen’s Bureau! An Agency to Keep the Negro in Idleness at the Expense of the White Man.”16
That mindset is still with us.
Meanwhile, Trump’s executive orders17 have gutted affirmative action for federal contractors, erased gender identity protections, and targeted enforcement of disparate impact rules, the very tools used to prove systemic racism.
They’ve also repackaged support for HBCUs into empty private sector outreach. His HBCU executive order stripped it from the Department of Education, removed federal backing, and replaced it with promises—no money, no mandate, just performance.
As Professor Cedric Merlin Powell puts it, this is “reverse-engineering inequity.” It pretends HBCUs thrive on their own while draining their lifeblood.18
And while claiming to support Black colleges, Trump proposed cutting $65 million from Howard University, the only federally chartered HBCU.
So here we are.
Jim Crow has returned not in name, but in legal rulings, in policy, in ideology, and intent.
We are standing at the edge of another 90 years of exclusion.
Remember, Black Americans have only had a few decades of true legal freedom. From Reconstruction to Jim Crow, to the long fight for civil rights, we are balancing 50 years of freedom against centuries of exclusion. And now they want to return to that.
So what can we do?
The regular solutions won’t work. This is bigger than debates or town halls.
We need collective nationwide action. That includes strikes, work stoppages, and the use of our collective economic power. We must act while we still have it.
We must also fight like hell from now until the midterms. Flood the polls with people determined to halt this retrenchment.
Because this isn’t the beginning of Jim Crow 2.0.
We’re already in it.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-07-22/three-things-that-should-scare-us-about-trumps-fake-video-of-obama
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/20/pete-hegseth-fort-bragg-fort-benning-confederates
Ibid
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trumps-demand-washington-football-cleveland-baseball-name-change-rcna219890
https://capitalbnews.org/usda-ends-dei-policy-black-farmers/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/02/politics/trump-civil-rights-rollback-what-matters
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Having_Our_Say/fz2EEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PT9&printsec=frontcover
https://dailycoffeenews.com/2025/02/18/missouri-ag-sues-starbucks-cites-more-female-and-less-white-workforce/
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/plessy-v-ferguson
https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/07/17/critique-supreme-court-ruling-affirmative-action-opinion
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/plessy-v-ferguson
https://thehill.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/Jackson-dissent.pdf
https://www.futurepublicschool.org/title-notifications/
https://shc.stanford.edu/arcade/publications/occasion/states-welfare/public-education-and-welfare-state-case-freedmens
https://www.loc.gov/item/2008661698/
https://www.cbcfinc.org/policy-research/cbcf-executive-order-tracker-impacts-on-black-america/
https://www.cbcfinc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/White-House-Initiative-to-Promote-Excellence-and-Innovation-at-HBCUs.pdf
https://www.cbcfinc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/White-House-Initiative-to-Promote-Excellence-and-Innovation-at-HBCUs.pdf
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