Given the Trump administration’s war on the legacy of the civil rights movement, I was curious about what the White House will say about the holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.
After all, President Trump has given a high-level job to Paul Ingrassia, who in 2024 used a racial slur in saying the King holiday should be “eviscerated” and “tossed into the seventh circle of Hell.” Trump’s team dropped MLK Day and Juneteenth from the holidays offering Americans free entry to our national parks.
Trump’s close ally, Elon Musk, who is pouring money into Republicans’ midterm coffers, promotes overt racism and appeals to “white solidarity.” Trump himself recently denounced Somalis and Somali Americans as “garbage.”
Trump also complained recently that the civil rights movement led to white people being “very badly treated.” That was in line with Trump’s record of stoking racial resentment among white people who feel threatened by the nation’s increasing diversity. Vice President JD Vance follows the same playbook. He recently called diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives a “deliberate program of discrimination primarily against white men.”
It’s more than rhetoric. The Justice Department has banned disparate impact analysis, one of the most important tools for documenting racial discrimination. The department is abandoning its historic mission to investigate police brutality, such as the recent ICE killing of a protester in Minneapolis. The department’s civil rights division is carrying out Project 2025’s call to punish state and local governments, nonprofits, universities and businesses that have or support diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Attacks on the legacy of the civil rights movement have included library purges and demands for censorship in college classrooms, national parks and monuments and museums. The Smithsonian Institution is being pressured to whitewash U.S. history by Trump administration officials, with help from white Christian nationalists.
Meanwhile, Stephen Miller is using his power to turn longstanding bigotries into policy, urging ever-more aggressive action against immigrant communities and their supporters. The consequences are deadly.
ICE and Border Patrol agents, emboldened by White House support for lawless behavior and a green light from the Supreme Court majority, engage in blatant racial profiling, targeting citizens and noncitizens alike.
After an ICE agent killed Minneapolis mom Renee Good, the Department of Homeland Security posted a recruiting pitch featuring an anthem embraced by white nationalists — the latest in official posts and memes that experts have called out as “firehosing the internet with white supremacist propaganda.”
At a time when global conflicts have led to a rise in the displacement of people who have lost everything, Trump has slammed the door on virtually all refugees. He’s making a race-based exception for white South Africans — and possibly white far-right activists from Germany.
Watching people cheer for de facto appeals to white nationalism is deeply disturbing to me as an American, and as a Black man from a mixed-race family who grew up in a predominantly white community in upstate New York.
Back in 2016, I drove to New York City for what I hoped would be a celebration of Hillary Clinton’s election as president. The next day, I drove back to Ithaca, stopping at a rural gas station I had visited many times without a second thought. Seeing people there celebrating Trump’s election made me wonder how many people around me had never really thought I belonged.
But I had other experiences to draw on. For every kid who bullied me when I was young, there were more who defended me. Voters repeatedly elected me to public office in a predominantly white city. Many of my supporters, mentors, and heroes are white.
Musk is telling his white followers that they should fear Black and brown people having power because Black and brown people hate them. That kind of crude racial divisiveness may win cheers from his Nazi and Nazi-adjacent fans, but it’s not going to convince most Americans, because it’s not what we experience in our lives. And it’s not what our history has shown us.
King appealed to Americans of all races, colors and faiths to build a broad coalition in support of human decency and dignity for all people. He grounded the civil rights coalition in broadly shared values and its activism in nonviolent resistance, teaching and demonstrating that nonviolence is not passivity, but a principled approach to resisting immoral abuses of power.
That’s the kind of coalition we need and are building today. We see it at No Kings rallies in defense of democracy. We see it in the multiracial, multicultural, multigenerational outpouring of support for neighbors and families terrorized by the regime’s masked marauders. And we see it in the dwindling public support for Trump and his regime’s cruelty.
This Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, let us commit ourselves to continue building and broadening that coalition.
