The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division Is Now Investigating Anti-White Racism. This Is Not a Parody.
The Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice was established in 1957. It was created because the federal government had spent eighty years declining to enforce the constitutional rights of Black Americans, so Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and built a dedicated division to do what the rest of the government had refused to do. Over the following six decades, the Division prosecuted voter suppression, housing discrimination, police brutality, hate crimes, employment discrimination, and the systematic exclusion of Americans from public life based on their race, color, national origin, sex, and disability.
It investigated a Tennessee school district where a mock “slave auction” was held to sell Black students to their white counterparts, where a “monkey of the month” campaign was used to ridicule Black students, and where an investigation found that these incidents created a racially hostile environment. The Division secured reforms. It challenged Arizona’s attempt to require proof of citizenship for voter registration. It settled a $10.5 million case against Bass Pro Shops for systematically declining to hire Black and Hispanic employees at dozens of stores across the country.
That was the Civil Rights Division. Trump’s hand-picked head of the division has outlined priorities that are dramatically at odds with the way past administrations have enforced civil rights law.
The new priority is anti-white racism.
What “Anti-White Racism” Looks Like As Policy
Trump attributed societal problems to diversity, equity and inclusion and wokeness. Equating diversity with incompetence, he reversed pro-diversity policies in the federal government, and downsized divisions working on civil rights. He reoriented remaining civil rights divisions to target state and local officials, companies, and colleges for “illegal DEI.”
His 2024 presidential campaign stated it would reinterpret existing Civil Rights-era protections for minorities to counter “anti-white racism.”
The language is worth lingering on. Anti-white racism. The Civil Rights Division — the institution created to prosecute the systematic denial of constitutional rights to Black Americans — is now being used to investigate corporations and universities for having the temerity to try to hire more Black people.
The EEOC was established by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to address entrenched discrimination in employment. The Trump-appointed chair of the EEOC, Andrea Lucas, is now seeking to overturn rules created decades ago to tackle discrimination in employment. The Trump administration says those rules have led to more discrimination — against white people.
“Regardless of what has happened before, the way to stop discriminating based on race is to stop discriminating based on race. The end. Full stop,” Lucas said. “I think that that’s a more beautiful vision of our country, and I think it’s consistent with the text of the statute.”
The way to stop discriminating based on race is to stop discriminating. This is presented as a beautiful vision. It would be a beautiful vision if America had in fact stopped discriminating based on race at some point in the last four hundred years and the playing field were in fact level. But the EEOC was not created because the playing field was level. It was created because the playing field had been deliberately, systematically, and legally tilted against Black Americans for three and a half centuries — through slavery, through Black Codes, through convict leasing, through Jim Crow, through redlining, through discriminatory lending, through the systematic exclusion of Black workers from union membership, through the GI Bill’s effective exclusion of Black veterans, through housing covenants, through school segregation, through every mechanism that a society can use to concentrate wealth and opportunity in one racial group at the expense of another.
“The way to stop discriminating based on race is to stop discriminating based on race.” Yes. The question is whether we start that clock in 2025, after four hundred years of discrimination have already compounded into a wealth gap, an education gap, a health gap, an incarceration gap, and every other measurable gap between Black and white Americans — or whether we start it in 1619 when the discrimination began. Andrea Lucas chose 2025. The EEOC that wrote the rules she’s now dismantling chose to account for history. This is the policy disagreement, and it is not a small one.
The Bloodbath
Current and former employees say many of those enforcement actions are unimaginable under the new regime. “They are withdrawing everything we’ve done and taking the opposite side on voting rights, for example,” said a recently departed Civil Division lawyer. “This is not ‘Oh, we want to do more religion cases’ or ‘We don’t want to do creative redlining cases.’ This is abandoning everything that we have done in the past.”
The career lawyers who spent decades prosecuting housing discrimination, voting rights suppression, and racial harassment in public schools have been pushed out. Their cases have been withdrawn. The Division has taken the opposite side — filing against the institutions that were trying to diversify their workforces, instead of against the institutions that were discriminating against workers of color.
According to Brenda Sue Fulton, “[this] administration has hung a sign outside the armed forces saying if you’re not a white male, you are no longer welcome.”
A Navajo Nation president reported that “White House officials informed the Navajo Nation that an artificial intelligence-powered automated review process looking for content with DEI initiatives led to the elimination of anything mentioning Navajo.” The federal government’s official websites were scoured by an AI system instructed to delete content associated with diversity, and the system deleted the histories of Navajo code talkers — men who used their native language to transmit encrypted military messages during World War II, and who did so because the United States could not crack the Navajo code and the Nazis could not either. Their stories were deleted because an AI looking for DEI content found the word “indigenous” and flagged it. The histories of men who died for this country were removed from its official record because they were insufficiently white.
The Vanishing Data
The EEOC is seeking to overturn rules created decades ago to tackle discrimination in employment. One of the rules being targeted would eliminate the collection of workplace demographic data — the information that allowed investigators to identify discriminatory patterns at Bass Pro Shops, at school districts, at banks, at hospitals, at every institution where the numbers told a story that individual complaints could not.
“You can have a hunch, but there’s nothing like the cold, hard numbers,” says a former EEOC official who oversaw major discrimination settlements.
Without the data, there are no numbers. Without the numbers, there are no patterns. Without patterns, there is no enforcement. Without enforcement, there is no Civil Rights Division — there is only a building with that name on it, staffed by people investigating whether a Colorado AI algorithm was insufficiently hostile to diversity.
This is the architecture of regression. You do not have to formally repeal the Civil Rights Act. You defund the enforcement mechanism. You redirect it against the people it was built to protect. You eliminate the data that makes enforcement possible. You staff it with people who believe that the primary civil rights crisis in America is that white men are not being given enough preference.
And then you call it equal protection.
The Statement
A Justice Department spokesperson told Axios: “DOJ’s Civil Rights Division’s focus is to ensure that ALL Americans enjoy the protections of our federal civil rights, not only a select few.”
All Americans. The Division that withdrew the voting rights cases. That took the opposite side on housing discrimination. That eliminated the enforcement actions against racially hostile schools. That fired the career lawyers who prosecuted sixty years of civil rights enforcement. That is now investigating corporations for having diversity programs.
All Americans.
The Select few whose civil rights are now being investigated as a violation of the civil rights of others are the Americans who built and now run the institutions that the Civil Rights Division was created to reform. The All Americans whose protection the Division is now focused on are, predominantly, the Americans who did not need a Civil Rights Division to protect them in 1957, or in 1965, or in 2025, because they were the ones holding the power that the Division was designed to check.
Robbie called it the Civil Whites Division. He is not wrong about what it is. He is just describing it more honestly than the DOJ spokesperson did.