The Trump administration and its allies opened up a new frontier in their racist assault on diversity this week, as Trump’s handpicked workplace discrimination enforcer issued an all-points bulletin calling on white men to file suits over diversity policies. 

Andrea Lucas, head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, released a video Wednesday calling for white men who claim they’ve been hurt by diversity policies to file claims to potentially “recover money under federal civil rights laws.” 

In an article published one day later, Lucas was quoted telling Reuters that her intent as EEOC chair is to “shift to a conservative view of civil rights,” and she vowed to go after companies with diversity policies next year. And as we’ve seen from the current regime leading the Justice Department’s civil rights division, a “conservative view” of civil rights in Trump’s second term often translates to bogus claims of anti-white oppression and to an outright assault on equality.

Lucas’ announcement comes as conservatives – including JD Vance and Donald Trump Jr. — were ramping up their baseless cries that white men are being victimized by dastardly DEI policies. 

To be clear, the conservatives making such claims haven’t provided any proof to support their fantasy that diversity policies discriminate against white men. To the contrary, there’s ample evidence that white men have benefited from such policies, and furthermore, that Trump’s war on DEI stands to hurt them, too.

There’s certainly great irony to cries coming from the MAGA movement about the supposedly forgotten white man. The Trump administration features men like Darren Beattie and Paul Ingrassia, who has essentially maintained that white men must be in charge for the nation to run correctly.

Now, white men are in charge and yet the administration is still crying victim – supposedly on white men’s behalf. Americans are living under arguably the most decidedly white-centric administration in modern history.

It’s not clear this strategy of playing to purportedly oppressed white men will fully satisfy the MAGA horde, however. The Trump administration has faced kvetching from unabashed racists in the MAGA movement for supporting some immigrant worker visas. And Vance has been portrayed as a race-traitor by other bigots like white nationalist Nick Fuentes for marrying his wife Usha, who is Indian-American. 

There are some disturbing historical parallels worth noting here, as well. 

Between the president’s repeated diatribes against immigrants, his administration’s occasionally violent and unabashedly race-based targeting of nonwhite people under the banner of “immigration enforcement” and now, its open fetishization of the supposedly forgotten white man, Team Trump is closely mirroring some of the most infamous hate-mongers in American history. That includes the Ku Klux Klan and President Woodrow Wilson, who made the supposed valor of white men central to their racist war on nonwhite people.

Much like Trump, who has falsely suggested white Americans have suffered under incompetent nonwhite people due to diversity policies, Wilson once wrote that the post-Civil War era known as Reconstruction – which was essentially a pro-diversity corrective movement – placed white men under “the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes.” And he framed the murderous Klan as an organization meant to “protect the southern country from some of the ugliest hazards of a time of revolution.” Wilson is also quoted saying white men had been roused by a “mere instinct of self-preservation” until “at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan” to “protect the southern country.” 

The Klan itself made the valorization of white men a priority, in much the same way Trump and his allies do today. It’s easy, for example, to read the following 1922 excerpt from the Klan’s “Fiery Cross” newspaper as a precursor to some Trump officials’ claims that white men are destined for power in American society, and that diversity is damaging to the country.

It is God’s purpose that the white man should preserve purity of blood and white supremacy in this country. Those who would have it otherwise or show leniency toward the mixing of white and colored races do not deserve the respect of anyone, much less of those who are trying to preserve American institutions, ideals and principles. A mongrel race and a mongrel civilization mean decay and ruin.

This history is essential, I’d argue, in providing context to the Trump administration’s latest efforts to placate and prioritize white American men.

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