One year after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, a pattern emerges. Across dozens of executive orders, agency memos, funding decisions and enforcement changes, the administration has weakened federal civil rights law and the foundations of the country’s racially inclusive democracy.
From the start, the US was not built to include everyone equally. The Constitution protected and promoted slavery. Most states limited voting to white men. Congress restricted naturalised citizenship to “free white persons”. These choices were not accidents. They shaped who could belong and who could exercise political power, and they entrenched a racial political majority that lasted for generations.
That began to change in the 1960s. After decades of protest and pressure, Congress enacted laws that prohibited discrimination in employment, education, voting, immigration and housing.
Federal agencies were charged with enforcing those laws, collecting data to identify discrimination and conditioning public funds on compliance. These choices reshaped US demographics and institutions, with the current Congress “the most racially and ethnically diverse in history,” according to the Pew Research Center. The laws did not eliminate racial inequality, but they made exclusion easier to see and harder to defend.
The first year of the second Trump administration marks a sharp reversal.
Cumulative retreat
Rather than repealing civil rights statutes outright, the administration has focused on disabling the mechanisms that make those laws work.
Drawing on over two decades of teaching...
from Scroll.in https://scroll.in/article/1090117/the-dismantling-of-american-democracy-in-the-trump-administrations-first-year?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=public https://sc0.blr1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/article/211545-twlvkyrftp-1768907478.jpg
via
0 Comments