Have We All Just Agreed to Live With Soul-Crushing Racism?

Elon Musk throwing up a Nazi-style salute on Trump’s Inauguration Day. Photo: Mark Peterson, New York Magazine

Not since Woodrow Wilson screened The Birth of a Nation at the White House in 1915 has a president been the source of such openly racist propaganda as Donald Trump. Other presidents may have presided over worse racial inequality or used dog whistles to signal their sympathy with racists, but none have been so explicit in their demagogic appeals to white people’s most chauvinistic impulses.

With the help of Elon Musk, Trump has conducted an all-out assault on the government in order to eradicate the supposedly pernicious influence of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, which has led him to blame the deadly plane crash over the Potomac River in January on the presence of minorities in the aviation industry and to fire General Charles Q. Brown, the second Black person in history to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He has called for the “resettlement” of Afrikaners facing purported anti-white discrimination in South Africa while appointing speechwriter Darren J. Beattie, who tweeted that Black people are “feral” and need to be sterilized, to the State Department. In response to Trump’s threats and directives, the Department of Defense has outlawed Black History Month for servicemembers, and the Maryland National Guard canceled a parade for Frederick Douglass’s birthday. Following the White House’s lead, Missouri is suing Starbucks for hiring too many minorities.

And these are just some of the most palpable proofs of the Trump administration’s bigotry. Political discourse is now saturated in racism in a way that would have been shocking not so long ago, with the vice-president of the United States, whose wife and children are of Indian descent, defending a 25-year-old DOGE staffer named Marko Elez who was revealed to have posted racist comments like “Normalize Indian hate,” “You could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity,” and “I was racist before it was cool.” Musk’s social-media platform, X, is rife with white-supremacist and Nazi content, some of which has been boosted by Musk himself who, in addition to claiming that his native South Africa is committing “genocide” against whites, has also supported Germany’s far-right AfD. This is a political moment in which blatant racism is tolerated, Nazi salutes are flung from public podiums by presidential surrogates, and the purported low IQs of minority populations is a subject of wide discussion — not to mention the rank racism that permeates the administration’s posture toward foreign immigrants and the people in Gaza.

Perhaps most striking of all is how muted the public response has been — no mass protests, half-hearted objections from the opposition party. “I don’t know if there’s a massive shift toward racism as much as an expanded indifference toward it,” the historian Robin D.G. Kelley told me. “People are just kind of like, ‘Well, what can we do?’”

The assumption of the generations that came after the civil-rights movement has been that the quest for racial equality would move — however fitfully, however slowly — in the direction of progress. There have been myriad setbacks, as well as longstanding wrongs that have never been corrected, but these were often accompanied by genuine accomplishments. Indeed one such setback was the election of Donald Trump in 2016, which was partly a backlash to the election of the first Black president — a setback that seemingly was halted by his ouster in 2020, which was partly propelled by the George Floyd uprising and the change it promised. But now Trump is back, and his brand of MAGA racism is more entrenched than ever before, raising the possibility that racial norms that have been painstakingly shaped and amended over decades are just as susceptible to being dismantled as government bureaucracy and the rule of law.

The current atmosphere of vitriol and chaos has made it hard to determine exactly how destructive the next four years could be. As usual with Trump, there is a fine line between menace and plain incompetence, the latter of which could turn out to be a saving grace. “We know they’re not interested in merit,” said Kelley of the sycophants the president has tasked with purging America’s workforce of allegedly unqualified Black and brown hires. “They got the dumbest people in their cabinet.” At the same time, the risks of complacency could not be higher, say organizers and others who’ve spent the past decade leading the fight against racism even as complacency seems to be the tenor of the hour.

“I think it does matter that this time he won the popular vote,” said the broadcaster Margaret Kimberley, who wrote the book Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents. “I hate the term ‘mandate,’ but he realizes that with a weak opposition he can do what he wants.” The scale of Trump’s triumph in November has been overstated (he won the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points). But the inroads he made with young and male voters across racial groups are real enough that Democrats have been frightened into submission. “What leverage do we have?” complained House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in February when asked about voters calling on Democrats to do more to oppose Trump. “It’s their government.”

The Democrats don’t have much support in the streets either. The party was in an equally weak governing position in 2017. But it was motivated by an outraged public and a sense that Trump’s victory was an anomaly. “You had millions of people who mobilized outside the electoral system,” said Kimberley. Between the Women’s March, the Black Lives Matter movement, and scattered protests like those against the president’s Muslim ban, popular dissent drove the party to electoral victories in 2018, 2020, and beyond.

That coalition fell apart in 2024 in the face of the threat of Trump’s return. The supporters of criminal-justice reform were marginalized and scapegoated by the party. “Rather than see Palestine as a human-rights issue that people get behind, they did everything they could to suppress it,” said Kelley. When Republicans smeared Kamala Harris as a feckless “border czar,” Democrats retorted that it was in fact Trump, with his claims about “illegal-alien gang members” escaping the “dungeons of the third world” and invading America’s suburbs, who was too soft on immigrants. The result has been a leadership vacuum felt from Capitol Hill to Main Street, and a post-election consensus that “wokeness” is what cost Democrats the election. The sense of political crisis engendered by past protest movements — and which is still America’s most successful blueprint for fighting ethno-fascism — has been replaced by craven appeals to conservatism.

Activists and organizers on the ground are struggling to regroup in their own ways. “There’s been a divide,” said Samuel Sinyangwe, whose data analysis on police violence underpinned much of the past decade’s activism. “I’m sensing from a lot of people — some of whom had positions in the previous administration and some of whom were informing those people — an apathy, or almost like, ‘We told you so.’” There’s also a feeling that they couldn’t get the message out even if they wanted to. Ten years ago, social platforms like Twitter were information-sharing and strategy hubs for Black activists; today, the newly renamed X is a Muskian echo chamber that many of the same activists have abandoned. “Folks underestimated the level of disinformation and misinformation that has been proliferating over the last eight, nine years online and how much it’s seeped into the collective consciousness of our friends, our family,” said the Florida-based organizer Phillip Agnew. “Instead of a stronger movement toward left politics, you’ve got podcasts and streamers saying, ‘Hey, the problem is that you need to double and triple down on capitalism. Get your crypto up. Get your money up.’”

The policy consequences of such apathy could be severe. Trump and Musk wish to gut entire knowledge reserves — literal terabytes of information that tracks how policies disparately impact minorities, for example, which line the hard drives of the agencies they’re plotting to abolish. (“I don’t want to tip off the administration,” Sinyangwe replied when I asked him what he’s most afraid of losing in the DOGE purges.) And beyond that, who knows? Maybe Trump aims “to reinstate second-class citizenship,” as Kelley put it, or “to disappear Black people from public life altogether,” according to Kimberley.

In the meantime, we are left living in a country in which both official and casual racism are being re-normalized, where young and old will be exposed to more bigotry on social media and on their podcasts, and where it’s more uncertain than ever that schoolchildren will learn the basic lessons of the civil-rights movement — lessons that have undergirded American civil society since the 1960s. The post-civil-rights period in the U.S. has failed to make good on the movement’s promise in a number of ways, but at the very least, its statements of purpose and legal accomplishments have mapped a legible course toward equality, from the Oval Office down to the workplace. Even if Trump does not fully succeed in reestablishing legal second-class citizenship, he is spearheading a culture shift in which American history’s horrors are widely dismissed or forgotten, and where racial inequality is no longer regarded as a leading cause of our country’s problems but the answer.