Bringing Back Jim Crow

Hey, so you don’t think that the Trump administration is racist? Well Trump & Company just did away with 50 year old civil rights policies!

DOJ rolls back anti-discrimination rules

Trump officials say the requirement to consider racial impacts was itself a form of discrimination.

Politico

By Alex Guillén and Hassan Ali Kanu

12/09/2025

The Justice Department on Tuesday moved to end long-standing civil rights policies that prohibit local governments and organizations that receive federal funding from maintaining policies that disproportionately harm people of color.

Repealing the government’s 50-year-old “disparate impact” standards will make it harder to challenge potential bias in housing, criminal law, employment, environmental regulations and other policy areas.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of “race, color, or national origin.” The Justice Department and the courts have historically interpreted the law as a ban on intentional discrimination as well as policies that, in practice, have a “disparate impact” on one group of people.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in April that directed agencies to eliminate disparate-impact liability wherever possible.

Let’s see… he gutted the EPA, OSHA, they rolled back our protection in prisons, and now he is gutting the civil rights laws!

“The Trump administration cannot claim to value equality by undermining the very laws that keep people protected from discrimination,” said Amalea Smirniotopoulos, NAACP-LDF senior policy counsel. “Removing the Department of Justice’s regulations prohibiting unfair discriminatory policies takes away critical safeguards against the most insidious forms of exclusion” in policing, the court system, public jobs, and access to government services.

Harmeet Dhillon, DOJ’s civil rights chief, highlighted that the rule change will lead to fewer civil rights lawsuits — cases she characterized as frequently overreaching.

“The prior ‘disparate impact’ regulations encouraged people to file lawsuits challenging racially neutral policies, without evidence of intentional discrimination,” Dhillon said in a statement. “Our rejection of this theory will restore true equality under the law by requiring proof of actual discrimination, rather than enforcing race- or sex-based quotas or assumptions.”

Translated from Trump-speak… our billionaire friends can save millions from lawsuits!

So what exactly are we talking about? The Trump administration wants to make it legal for businesses to discriminate not through words or explicit actions, but through policies.

DOJ began requiring the recipients of federal funding to consider disparate impacts — for example, whether a new industrial facility would disproportionately harm a nearby majority Black community — in 1973.

The regulations also undergirded investigations of organizations, such as housing providers and police departments, accused of engaging in a “pattern or practice” of discrimination. Such investigations often lead to settlements or agreements requiring efforts to reverse the discriminatory practices.

Policies like “Stop and Frisk,” which courts have ruled to be discriminatory, have overwhelmingly targeted minorities.

Now, the Trump administration’s rule changes are making it even harder for people to bring disparate impact discrimination claims. This affects access to jobs as well. For example, some employers require a valid passport or driver’s license, yet many trans people cannot obtain IDs that reflect their true gender. If an employer hires only people whose gender presentation matches the gender marker on their ID, that can result in discrimination — even when it’s framed as a “neutral” requirement.

Slowly, the Trump administration has been chipping away at civil rights protections while normalizing racist practices — such as favoring immigration from predominantly white countries and restricting immigration from what Trump referred to as “shithole countries,” “hellholes,” and “filthy” nations.

During the campaign he also promoted harmful stereotypes, at one point blaming Haitians for eating pets. He has repeatedly targeted Somali immigrants as well, claiming they “contribute nothing,” that their home country “stinks,” and suggesting they are “completely taking over” parts of Minnesota.

There is no doubt that Trump has echoed some of the racist attitudes long associated with his father. In many ways, it appears to be a case of like father, like son.