The ‘Second Nadir,’ Indeed: The Year in Race

Trump, his Cabinet, and his advisers are dismantling civil rights and erasing evidence of Black history and achievement.

By Shalise Manza Young

Within days of being re-inaugurated, Donald Trump and his cronies somehow blamed a Black woman mayor and queer white woman fire chief for the Los Angeles-area wildfires being so difficult to control, and he and some of his inept cronies declared that “woke” policies at the Federal Aviation Association were why an Army Blackhawk helicopter and commercial airplane collided mid-air over the Potomac River in Washington, D.C.

And those, it can be argued, were the high-water marks when it comes to the racism and discrimination flaunted by this regime in its first 11 months.

Photo by Maurice Harris on Unsplash

Through the ending of programs, stripping of funds, dismantling of departments, bigoted bombast and hackneyed hate speech, Trump, his Cabinet members, and advisers are transparently working toward instituting a Christian white nationalist agenda.

The only surprising part for this writer is the speed at which they have been able to destroy the few wins that ancestors going back decades, and even centuries, had bled and died to secure.

Trump has seemingly always harbored racial animus, but this go-round he put together a collection of cronies who not only would never deny him his worst impulses, but they seemingly revel in and encourage them.

In just his first few weeks back in office, Trump repealed President Lyndon B. Johnson’s order that followed the 1964 Civil Rights Act that banned racial discrimination by federal contractors and businesses receiving federal funds. The Environmental Protection Agency shuttered its environmental justice offices, whose aim was to ensure that all communities are protected from environmental and health hazards. He declared diversity, equity and inclusion “dead” after signing an executive order saying much the same, and got quick compliance from corporations and institutions for whom being diverse, equitable, and inclusive was always a nuisance.

It wasn’t expressly said, of course—back then Trump & Co. were still using thinly veiled language—but the problem, such as they saw it, was that trying to serve all Americans meant white people were being harmed somehow.

By early February, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones warned that we were on the precipice of a “second Nadir,” a nod to historian Rayford Logan, who called the fierce backlash to the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, which we now know as Jim Crow, “the Nadir” because nearly all of the gains newly freed Black Americans received were stripped away and violence toward them reigned.

The months since have only strengthened Hannah-Jones’s argument, as the structural dismantling of civil rights and the symbolic erasure of Black history and achievement have proceeded at a furious pace.

Gen. C.Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Carla Hayden, the librarian of Congress, Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board, Charlotte Burrows, chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission – all trailblazers, all Black – were abruptly fired.

In just three months, from February to April of this year, over 300,000 Black women were forced out of the workforce, many via the purging of federal bureaus like Education, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Veterans Affairs; at each, 20% or more of employees were Black.

When he isn’t sending war plans over messaging apps, screaming about fat generals, and wantonly overseeing killing of fishermen in the Caribbean, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has spent millions restoring the names of Confederate traitors to military bases after they had been rightly renamed to recognize true American heroes from a variety of backgrounds.

He also reinstalled a Jim Crow-era, Confederate-lionizing monument in Arlington National Cemetery, removed web pages honoring the military contributions of Jackie Robinson and the Navajo Code Talkers (they were put back up after backlash), and has forced pretty much every woman in a position of leadership out of her role.

On announcing he was taking over Washington D.C., Trump trotted out his favorite anti-Black hits: Violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals. Getting rid of the slums where they live. Savagery, filth and scum. Thugs. Roving mobs of wild youth. Chicago, Baltimore, Oakland.

Just this month, he called Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and fellow Somali immigrants “garbage” and mused at a Pennsylvania rally meant to be about affordability that he’d rather have people from uber-white Norway, Sweden, and Denmark come to the United States, and not people from “filthy, dirty, disgusting” countries (here’s a hint, Drowsy Don: Norway, Sweden and Denmark actually take care of their citizens with healthcare and strict gun laws, so coming here isn’t exactly appealing to them).

This, you certainly recognize, is a very truncated list.

There’s an oft-used quote from President Johnson: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him someone to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

That was what Trump did in his campaign last year, as millions of dollars in ads demonized trans girls and women, “mass deportation now” signs were proudly waved at the Republican National Convention, and “DEI” replaced “woke” as the stand-in for, let’s be honest, the n-word.

Hate is all he has, and hate is all he needed.

Grocery prices and energy costs continue to rise. Rates for substandard health insurance are days from skyrocketing, and now he’s calling affordability a hoax. The only people benefitting from Trump being in office are the richest of the rich, including Trump himself.

But hey, at least a majority-Black community in Alabama will still have disease-causing raw sewage in its playgrounds and masked thugs can detain (and often assault) anyone for any reason at any time with Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s blessing.

That’s going to have to be fuel enough to keep his supporters warm this winter when they can no longer afford their heating bill.

Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.

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