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Whenever an equal rights movement enjoys some success, it’s a reason for everyone to celebrate.
Some folks, however, mistakenly see rights as a zero-sum game in society. If there’s progress towards equal rights, they think they are somehow losing their rights. Support for legal equality, in their view, isn’t other people being lifted up but them being pulled down.
The feeling is clearly misplaced. Equal treatment under the law is good for everyone.
However, such resentment can nonetheless be a powerful political force, especially when it’s whipped up by shouty heads on big and small screens year after year. It’s a backlash that can have damaging results, threatening to undo hard-won, earlier progress.
What’s happening today at the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice offers an example.
It’s been one of the most effective and enduring institutions to emerge from the Civil Rights Movement in the US. It was born from Black Americans’ struggle to end Jim Crow laws, which enforced racial segregation for decades after slavery.
The Civil Rights Division has long served as a federal check against systemic discrimination at state and local levels. It enforces federal civil rights laws in things like housing, education, policing, employment, and voting. Its goal has been to protect people from discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, disability, national origin, and so on.
The Trump administration has launched a reckless assault on the Civil Rights Division. Over the past few months, it’s been attempting to remake the department to serve its ideological agenda.
That agenda is, essentially, an anti-equality backlash. It’s steeped in racism and encouraged by the on-screen shouty heads.
Under the new director of the Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, the institution is shifting focus away from defending the rights of marginalized groups to targeting what the administration describes as “woke ideology.”
Of course, “woke ideology” is never defined, but at the very least, it’s a code phrase Americans understand well, particularly in racial terms. Anyone who supports equal rights is “woke.” Undoing this “woke ideology” means pushing the US back to the past, perhaps to a time when racial discrimination was legal.
Early steps at the Civil Rights Division this year move the country in that ugly direction.
In a new dispatch, Human Rights Watch expert Trey Walk describes how the administration has removed senior civil servants working in the voting rights section. It has also ordered attorneys to abandon voting rights cases.
This is a government body that should be enforcing federal laws. It should be protecting people against voter suppression, racial discrimination, and police misconduct.
Instead, it’s aiming to dismantle civil and human rights protections.
And it’s happening in no small part because some people sadly fear equality.
