Racism Is Back (And With Trump's Help, It Is Winning)

It's not something that decent Americans want to admit, but the United States has always been a racist country. It was even written into out original Constitution, where slavery was recognized and slaves were counted as only three-fifths of a person for census purposes.

President Abraham Lincoln and Congress tried to remedy it with the Fourteenth Amendment - guaranteeing citizenship to everyone born in the United States. But the effect was short-lived, and the South soon devoted with Jim Crow laws denying equal rights to Blacks.

President Johnson and Congress tried again to remedy it with a series of Civil Rights laws in the 1960's, and things did get somewhat better (although institutional racism continued). Public racism was subdued. The nation even, a few years later, elected its first Black president in Barack Obama.

With the election of Obama, some mistakenly believed racism had been defeated. They were wrong. Obama's election just made the subdued racists more bold, and they came back out from under their rocks. Fearing they were about to lose their white privilege made them angry and they became more public with their sick views.

Donald Trump didn't invent this new and bolder racism, but he recognized it because it coincided with his own views - and he used it to be elected. Now he is trying to re-establish white supremacy - and so far, he is succeeding.

Trump, and his MAGA Republican cohorts, are smart enough not to use the old ideas of racism. They are disguising it in new terms. The two prongs they are using are immigration and D.E.I., but make no mistake, it's the same old racism.

Note that the immigration deportations are not aimed at white immigrants (from Europe, Canada, and even South Africa). The deportations are limited to non-whites. And he's even going further - revoking the legal status of non-white immigrants and denying visas to those from predominately non-white countries. They are now even trying to revoke the citizenship of non-white naturalized citizens and denying citizenship to non-whites born in the United States.

The war on D.E.I. (diversity-equity-inclusion) is the same attack on non-whites. Instead of including them in the American experience, it seeks to exclude them from the opportunities open to white Americans.

The fact that Trump has been successful in his wars on immigration and D.E.I. show that racism is alive and well in the United States. Some progress has been made, but the U.S. is still a racist country. And sadly, the racists and white supremacists are back in control of our government.

Can this country redeem itself and get back on the path toward defeating and eliminating racism? I hope so. The elections of 2026 and 2028 will give us the answer.