Racial injustice hasn’t operated through openly racist rules for many years.
There’s not a company that has a manual that says don’t hire Black people. There aren’t laws that require or even allow separate lunch counters or drinking fountains. Stores don’t have signs that say No Blacks Allowed.
Instead, the most impactful racism for decades has survived through supposedly neutral systems. Today, hiring algorithms, school discipline policies, mortgage models, insurance pricing and workplace promotion practices just to name several.
Knowing this reality, in the last two years, federal agencies have rapidly taken steps to weaken both racial-data collection and the disparate-impact rules that were in the past used to identify and confront discrimination without proving explicit racist intent, which we all know is oftentimes impossible.
After the government on its own “determined” that racial data collection was unconstitutional, on July 21, 2026, the EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that investigates complaints of discrimination, began the process of eliminating a 60-year-old requirement that employers report workforce data by race and sex.
The data in the past helped reveal whether Black employees were concentrated in lower-paid positions, excluded from management or missing from particular industries. It was a key indicator of whether people were doing the right thing or engaging in disparate treatment of Black people.
On July 23, 2026, The Department of Education was ordered to similarly remove regulations addressing policies that disproportionately harm racial groups. It now will no longer enforce Title VI disparate-impact regulations.
That makes it way harder to challenge school rules that appear neutral but disproportionately result in Black students being suspended, expelled, arrested, disciplined or denied educational opportunities. For. The. Same. Acts. White. Students. Face. Just different consequences.
A challenger now will generally needs evidence of intentional discrimination rather than merely demonstrating a severe and unjustified racial disparity.
This follows Trump’s April 23, 2025 Executive Order 14281 directing agencies to eliminate or minimize the use of disparate-impact liability.
Disparate impact allows the government to challenge a facially neutral practice that disproportionately harms a racial group, even when there is no email dropping the N-word. It’s been used in employment, housing, education and federally funded programs.
This builds upon an April 2025 Trump executive order that directed the Department of Education to eliminate what the administration ironically called race-based school-discipline policies. Policies designed to promote racial fairness in discipline.
And it builds upon the administration’s May 2025 order that federal agencies stop keeping and using statistics concerning race, sex, ethnicity and national origin in hiring decisions and workforce-planning processes.
This is all a masked attempt to allow racism to flourish and discrimination be 100x harder to prove.
Of course, the backbone of all of these attempts to open up the floodgates of discrimination started on inauguration day! This was the thing Trump thought was most important. Above grocery and gas prices. Above inflation. Above the Russia-Ukraine or Israel-Hamas conflicts.
On January 20, 2025, the administration revoked the government-wide racial-equity framework and ordered agencies to terminate all DEI and environmental-justice offices, programs, grants, requirements and performance measures.
Agencies were directed to identify and end equity-related plans, programs, positions and contracts across the federal government.
The very next day, on January 21, 2025, the president revoked Executive Order 11246, issued by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 that had required federal contractors to take affirmative steps to ensure equal employment opportunity and allowed the Labor Department to review contractors’ discriminatory employment practices.
Let’s get serious. We, left, right, and middle, all know that just because America stops counting racial disparities or keeping stats doesn’t mean racism and racial discrimination just disappear.
The federal government has just made it way harder to prove.
Worse — these changes are a free pass for racists to discriminate without fear of consequences.
Racism was alive and well these past 60 years, but our laws and regulations at least sometimes held people accountable. They provided redress. And in many cases, they made us all keep a closer eye on racist practices. In government. In companies. And in schools.
Now that those laws have been gutted, and regulations revoked, racists have been given carte blanche to time travel to the 60s and discriminate away.
Let’s be real. These changes aren’t about merit.
If that were the case, the administration wouldn’t itself have one of the least qualified cabinets in 50 years. And the least racially diverse in 50 years!
More importantly, if this was all about merit, you’d all be at the front lines when numerous meritorious Black men and women get treated differently than similarly situated white peers. You’d be angry when Black people are passed over for hiring based on “Black”-sounding names. You’d be pissed off when Black people are passed over for promotions in favor of sometimes less qualified peers.
If you truly cared about merit, then you’d be angry at racial injustices against numerous talented Black Americans.
Instead, the “merit” argument is just another cover to try to keep Black America down.
Without keeping track of how Black people are affected by company and government policies and actions anymore, it’s hard to imagine how injustices can ever be addressed going forward.