The DOJ Just Made It Almost Impossible to Prove Racism Exists

By rolling back “disparate impact" claims, the Trump administration is reducing courts to mere rubber stamps for the white supremacy written into the laws.

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Some Black folks may prefer old-school, Deep South style white racism to Northern, Masshole style racism. Some Black folks may prefer Elon Musk's South African apartheid style racism to Elon Musk's American tech bro style racism. The principal difference is that white Southerners (both the American and South African types) are thought to be more honest about the whole thing. They’re racist, they admit it, and they’re proud of it. Black people always know where they stand with them.

White Northerners, by contrast, always demand that you provide them with evidence of their own racism, ignore the evidence you produce, and then claim (without evidence) that they “don’t have a racist bone in my body.” It’s maddening. And, while most people see through it, white Northern insistence that racism exists only in the minds of Black folks occasionally leads to broken negroes like Thomas Chatterton Williams and John McWhorter.

I’m from Queens. I’ve been asked to prove racism exists or prove the person I’m talking to is racist more than I’ve been asked to put my hands up and step out of my vehicle. The white presumption is that racism is a charge, an accusation, and the burden is on me, the victim of their bullshit, to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that my life happens the way I describe it. Whites believe they are innocent of racism until enough evidence can be brought to bear by Black folks to make them reflect on their own ways.

That white, unearned self-regard is reflected in the law. All laws are presumed to be “not racist” until they are proven otherwise. That is a wild presumption, when you think about it. This country was stolen from non-white inhabitants, founded on racism that was hard-coded into its Constitution, built on the theft of Black labor, and to this day is run by and for the benefit of white men. Yet somehow every law these (almost exclusively) white people have written, passed, and upheld is assumed to be washed clean of any hint of racism? That’s not an intelligent theory of legal philosophy; it’s straight gaslighting, perpetuated by a country that refuses to reckon with its own ignorance.