U.S. conservatives think they have achieved a long-sought-after goal: the disenfranchisement of black voters. It's pretty damn sad that, 150 years after slavery was abolished in this country, and 50+ years after the Voting Rights Act passed, conservatives are still trying to keep blacks down. The hatred of blacks continues unabated, unless they happen to be outstanding athletes, then conservatives love them. But any important job blacks hold, however, the right considers only because of DEI. And now all southern, conservative states are rushing to carve up any Congressional districts that were created to give blacks at least SOME representation. As soon as the recent SCOTUS decision eviscerating the remaining threads of the VRA was announced, the urge to redistrict became irresistible. But no, that's not racism, right? We will see what happens come this November and the midterms.
Here's another new voice taking on this issue: Rod Winterrowd
The Quiet Erasure
by Rod Winterrowd
While America has watched in horror as ICE agents smash car windows, and pull mothers to the streets and try to meet Stephen Miller’s 3000 arrests per day quota by showing up in courthouses to illegally arrest law abiding asylum seekers as they go through the legal procedure, something equally chilling has been unfolding with far less fanfare. Polls suggest that nearly 80% of Americans have been disturbed by what they’ve seen under this administration’s immigration enforcement. But there is another story, quieter, more methodical, and in many ways more permanent that has received a fraction of the attention it deserves.
Over the past sixteen months, the legal architecture that took sixty years, a civil war’s worth of moral courage, and the blood of actual martyrs to construct has been dismantled, piece by piece. Not with tanks or fire hoses — the images we associate with that struggle, but with executive orders, two-sentence emails, and General Services Administration memos that most Americans will never read.
This is not a partisan argument. These are documented facts. And they deserve to be named, numbered, and understood by every American who believes that the promise of this country belongs to all of us.
Here is what has happened to our Black brothers and sisters since January 20, 2025.
1. The Return of Segregated Workplaces-When President Lyndon Johnson signed Executive Order 11246 in 1965 (the year I was born into an Age of Enlightenment) he wasn’t creating a new idea, he was burying an old one. Before that order, federal contractors could screen Black employees behind partitions so white workers wouldn’t have to look at them. They could maintain separate bathrooms, separate dining rooms, separate drinking fountains. The order didn’t just prohibit discrimination in hiring, it explicitly banned segregated facilities from any workplace receiving a federal contract.
On January 20, 2025, that order was revoked. A subsequent General Services Administration memo quietly removed Clause 52.222-21 from the Federal Acquisition Regulation — the specific language that had prohibited contractors from maintaining segregated workplaces, dining areas, waiting rooms, and drinking fountains. It received almost no coverage. As NYU constitutional law professor Melissa Murray observed, the change is symbolic but, she added, “incredibly meaningful in its symbolism.” The provisions were the legal foundation of integrated American workplaces. They are gone.
2. The Door to Your Home, Left Unguarded-The Fair Housing Act of 1968, another Johnson-era landmark was built on a simple premise: no American should be denied a home because of the color of their skin. It is worth pausing on one particular detail of history before describing what has been done to it. In the early 1970s, the Justice Department sued Donald Trump and his father Fred Trump for systematically refusing to rent apartments in their Queens buildings to Black applicants. Rental agents reportedly noted a “C” for “colored” — on the applications of Black prospective tenants. The Trumps denied wrongdoing, then settled, then were taken back to court for failing to comply with the settlement’s terms. They lost. That is the personal history of the man who has now dismantled the legal infrastructure designed to prevent exactly that.
In 2025, HUD Secretary Scott Turner terminated the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which had required any state receiving federal funding to demonstrate it was actively working to implement fair housing. Then HUD abandoned disparate impact enforcement entirely, dismissing major investigations into systemic housing discrimination, terminating hundreds of employees in its Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, and citing the resulting staff reductions as the reason it could no longer investigate complaints. The watchdog was defunded, and then told it had no one left to watch.
3. The Chairman, Dismissed General Charles Q. Brown Jr. — CQ Brown was the second Black American in history to serve as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, following Colin Powell. He was a decorated combat pilot with over forty years of service. He was fired by President Trump on February 22, 2025, less than two years into a four-year term, with no cause given. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had previously suggested publicly that Brown had gotten his position because he was Black. No replacement of comparable experience or stature was named. The message to every Black man and woman serving in uniform was unmistakable.
4. The Email That Began With “Carla”- Dr. Carla Hayden was the 14th Librarian of Congress. She was the first woman and the first African American to hold the post. Under her leadership, the Library was modernized, digitized, and opened to audiences who had never before felt it belonged to them. She had testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee just two days before she was fired. The termination came via email, sent at 6:56 in the evening. It began with the word “Carla”, just her first name followed by two sentences informing her that her position was terminated effective immediately. She later said her first instinct was to wonder whether it was even real.
She was with her mother when it arrived.
5. The Ballot, Erased - In April 2026, the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais that effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the last major federal protection against racially discriminatory electoral maps. It was the final guardrail. Within days, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry declared a state of emergency and suspended an active congressional primary election in which thousands of citizens had already cast absentee ballots. His stated goal: to allow the legislature to redraw maps eliminating the state’s majority-Black congressional districts.
The ruling has since triggered redistricting efforts in Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi, all aimed, in the words of civil rights organizations, at wiping out Black political power at every level, from Congress to school boards. This is not a Southern problem. It is an American one. And it is spreading.
6. The Recession Nobody Named - In 2024, Black unemployment stood at approximately 6.1%. By December 2025 it had risen to 7.5%. By the first quarter of 2026, it reached 7.6%. Over the same period, white unemployment barely moved…up 0.2%. Black women ended 2025 with an unemployment rate comparable to what white women experienced during the worst moments of the Great Recession. The primary driver was the mass elimination of federal jobs, the sector that for generations has offered Black Americans a pathway to the middle class, with stable wages, benefits, and pensions. Since January 2025, the federal workforce has lost 277,000 positions. Black workers, who made up nearly 19% of federal employees while representing 13% of the overall workforce, absorbed a disproportionate share of those losses.
Economists have begun using a phrase that should stop every American cold: a Black recession inside an economy that, by most official measures, is still described as ‘healthy’,  if you’re able to pay your bills.
7. The Organization That Dismantled the Klan, Indicted for Funding It - The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded in 1971 with a singular mission: to use civil litigation to destroy white supremacist organizations. It worked. Through decades of lawsuits, the SPLC bankrupted Klan chapters and drove neo-Nazi organizations into financial ruin. To do that work, it used paid informants — people who infiltrated these groups and reported on planned violence, sharing what they learned with the FBI.
On April 21, 2026, the Trump Justice Department indicted the SPLC on federal fraud charges, alleging it had secretly funded the very extremism it claimed to fight. Legal experts across the ideological spectrum have called the case deeply flawed, noting that the SPLC’s mission has been publicly stated for fifty years, making it nearly impossible to argue that any donor was defrauded. The FBI itself worked directly with the SPLC’s informants for decades. The SPLC says its program saved lives, and that it shared a 45-page event alert with federal law enforcement ahead of the Charlottesville rally.
The organization that helped bring down the Ku Klux Klan is now being prosecuted by an administration that has simultaneously removed the prohibition on segregated federal workplaces, gutted fair housing enforcement, fired the nation’s top Black military officer, dismissed the first Black Librarian of Congress, and overseen a Supreme Court decision that has set in motion the erasure of Black representation from the ballot box.
Make of that what you will.
The question every American should be asking is simple: if these actions were being taken against any other group, any other community would we still call it coincidence?
We are celebrating the 250th anniversary of a democracy built on the promise that all men are created equal. That promise has never been perfectly kept. But it has, until now, always been the direction we were traveling.
The clock is being turned back. 2026 is looking more like Jim Crow or worse, reconstruction as we approach the anniversary of our great country.
And most of America isn’t watching.
