The Great Resegregation of America

We begin today with Adam Serwer of The Atlantic writing about the “Great Resegregation” of American society. If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape.

The Great Resegregation of America

We begin today with Adam Serwer of The Atlantic writing about the “Great Resegregation” of American society.

If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly.

The battles of the Great Resegregation are now taking place in at least three overlapping arenas. The first is politics, where right-wing legal organizations have succeeded in rolling back many civil-rights-era voting protections; they want to now fully destroy the remaining shreds. The second is education and employment, particularly at elite institutions, such as the media and academia; right-wing legal strategies have been similarly fruitful here in attacking diversity, thanks to the conservative capture of the Supreme Court. The third is popular culture, where conservatives have sought to leverage anger and nostalgia against movies, television, books, and other creative media brought to life by artists of color.

As the Trump State Department official Darren Beattie wrote, “Competent white men must be put in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” This analysis is perceptive in the sense that the exact reverse is true—we are now in the second decade of a years-long temper tantrum sparked by the election of Barack Obama—not to mention the failed attempts to elect a woman to succeed him—and the effect it had on the fragile self-esteem of people like Beattie.

Undoubtedly, The Great Resegregation of America is but one of those “shadows” referenced by former Vice President Kamala Harris at the NAACP Image Awards last night.

Many are asking what should we do now? “We use our power, organize, mobilize, educate…the American story will not be written by who occupies the White House or by the wealthiest among us…it will be written by you, by ‘we the people.’”-fmr VP Kamala Harris receiving the NAACP Chairman’s Award.

The Trump Administration Wants to Know What You’ve Done for It Lately

Nicholas Bednar of JustSecurity looks at the legal and even some of the cultural ramifications of the e-mail sent out by Elon Musk asking federal employees to name five accomplishments for the past week.

The email follows a pattern of Musk borrowing tactics from the private sector in his efforts to shrink the federal workforce. Following his acquisition of Twitter in 2022, Musk instructed Twitter’s engineers to “email [him] a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code.”

This is not the first OPM email to echo Musk’s takeover of Twitter. On Jan. 28, federal employees received an email with the subject line “Fork in the Road.” That email announced a “deferred resignation” program that promised to place employees on administrative leave with full pay and benefits until Sept. 30. Despite significant concerns over the program’s legality, a federal judge allowed the program to go forward, finding that employees would need to exhaust their administrative remedies with either the Federal Labor Relations Authority or the Merit Systems Protection Board before suing in federal court.

In essence, it appears that the Trump administration is demanding that employees justify their positions. But to date, the administration has done a consistently poor job of determining which positions are, in fact, important. Its poor-track record is evidenced by agencies’ efforts to recall fired probationary employees after realizing they perform crucial functions, such as managing the nuclear stockpile and the power grid or those working on responses to bird flu. Meaningful reorganization of the federal workforce requires more than five bullet points; it requires a holistic evaluation of how federal programs operate.

Paul Krugman Believes Trump Mal-Administration Could Be Laying Foundation for Next Financial Crisis

It’s hard, for example, to see whose interests Trump is serving by trying to kill New York’s congestion pricing scheme, which is already showing clear positive results, including a noticeable decline in traffic accidents. If you think he cares deeply about the relatively small number of people who commute into lower Manhattan by car (many of whom seem to like the policy!), I have a Melania coin you might want to buy.

This behavior may in part reflect the right-wing insistence, going back to