The Loyola Project

 

The Loyola Project. See the film. Start the conversation; 30 sec trailer here.

Loyola Basketball 3 min video here.

From March Madness, A Look Back on the 1963 Championship (7min).

Website here.

Sociological Super Bowl 2025

 Ending [the fight against] Racism; The NFL's Participatory Obedience 2025

NPR's Code Switch reported on the NFL's decision to end their END RACISM campaign in 2025, the same year that President Trump is attending the game and also ending all DEI initiatives in the government.  This concerns scholars who study democracy;

Some democracy advocates worry that too many of our civic institutions are softening their postures toward Trump to avoid getting on his bad side, pointing to what the historian Timothy Snyder calls "anticipatory obedience:"

"Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do."

Advocate explains,

The NFL introduced its “Inspire Change” platform in 2018, with end-zone slogans such as “End Racism,” “It Takes All of Us,” “Stop Hate,” “Choose Love,” and “Vote” becoming part of the league’s broader diversity and inclusion messaging in 2020, the Athletic reports. These changes were implemented in response to nationwide BLM protests following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. The issue of racial injustice had been a talking point in the NFL since 2016, when former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick  (For more on Colin Kaepernick see my 2017 post about it) began kneeling during the national anthem in protest of police brutality and racism, sparking widespread debates.

And the END RACISM end zone message has been in the end zone since 2021 as an anti-racism response to the murder of George Floyd.

But, Trump has a long history of racism (see my post about his attacks on DEI) that makes his comments about NFL players all the more suspect.  Newsweek documented all of Trump's NFL comments during his first term here, including saying that "NFL players who kneel should be fired" (2017), "Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!" (2017) and saying that these players "shouldn't be allowed in our country" (2018).

All of this calls into question the decisions of Trump to be the first President ever to attend a Super Bowl and the NFL's decision to end the END RACISM campaign.  Scholars who study authoritarianism call decisions like this anticipatory obedience.  Taking actions in an attempt to appease a leader is one way that democracies can fall into autocracy.  Princeton Sociologist Kim Scheppele explains this in her forthcoming book called Destroying Democracy by Law (more in my post about that here).
 

Kendrick Lamar's 2025 Halftime Performance, A Conflict Paradigm Lens

Kendrick Lamar's performance showed that he was aware of the gravity of the moment in both Trump attending and the President's past history with the NFL and racism as well as the history of participatory obedience.  Without a doubt, Lamar's performance was a commentary on racial justice in America through a lens of Marx's Conflict Paradigm.  Lamar brought numerous inequalities and injustices to light throughout his performance.

Double Consciousness

As the show begins, Lamar launches into Squabble Up, a song BET explains, 

...that speaks to the tension and resistance found in everyday Black life, Lamar immediately set the tone for the night.  

That tone was

...confronting uncomfortable truths about race, power, and identity in America. His lyrics often serve as a mirror, forcing listeners to see the country for what it is—not the sanitized, revisionist version often presented in history books, but the raw, unfiltered reality of Black life in America.... At a time when diversity programs are being dismantled and affirmative action is being gutted, Lamar stood as proof that Black excellence does not require permission.
At a time when voter suppression is being enacted in states with large Black populations, Lamar’s performance was a call to action, reminding us that our voices—whether in music, sports, or the ballot box—cannot and will not be silenced....Lamar’s halftime show was a direct response to the times we live in. It was a performance rooted in history, shaped by struggle, and fueled by the unrelenting spirit of Black America.
For years, America has tried to erase us—from slavery to segregation, from redlining to mass incarceration, from voter suppression to attempts to erase Black history from the classroom.  But history has shown, time and time again, that we are unerasable.  You can cancel every program. You can roll back every policy. You can attempt to silence every voice. But you cannot erase us.  Black people are America. Not just a part of it—not just contributors—but the very essence of what makes this country what it is.

And that last important point - that Black people are America despite the attempts to erase them from the culture exemplifies what W.E.B. Dubois called "Double Consciousness," or being forced to see yourself through two lenses - as a person who is both American and Black.

Beyond-say

During the first Trump administration, Beyonce performed at the Superbowl and faced backlash because her performance was too focused on social justice, too critical of American status quo; it was too black.  The Journal of Black Studies published an essay about the criticism of the performance (see below) and about how Black artists are often pressured to sanitize their performances and personas for an America that refuses to come to terms with racism.  In order to maintain their pop culture success, these artists are forced to live with Dubois' double consciousness as inhabiting an identity that is both a victim of racism and a neutral performer in the society that perpetuates the racism. In many ways Lamar's performance was attacking that that criticism.

Uncle Sam; A Structural Functional Symbol

Though the overall theme of the performance was addressing power and inequality through a lens of Conflict Paradigm, Lamar also brought attention to the inequality by critiquing, through structural functional analysis, the dysfunctional ways that society has broken apart - racially and politically.  The performance included Uncle Sam(uel Jackson) explained by Screen Rant here. Uncle Sam represents America - or at least the structures within it that seek to control and profit off minority artists like Lamar. It's the NFL that bows to Trump by eliminating their call to End Racism; it's the media like Fox that seeks to sanitize performances like this halftime show; it's the law that is used to silence artists like Drake's lawsuit attempts to.  Lamar attacks these structures so ingeniously by infiltrating them and being the performer that the structures gave the stage to. 

As Khal Davenport wrote in The Ringer,

“The revolution ’bout to be televised,” (a powerful reference to Gill Scott-Heron's song and message) Kendrick said before getting into GNX’s “squabble up,” adding, “You picked the right time but the wrong guy.” Later, Jackson as “Uncle Sam” scolded him, calling the performance “too loud, too reckless, too ghetto” and inquiring about whether Kendrick “really knew how to play the game” before imploring him to “tighten up!” The exchange echoed the hostility that Kendrick and so many other Black artists have experienced in the music industry and in this country more broadly. Lamar then transitioned into “Humble,” the lead single from his triple-platinum-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning Damn. 

Then, it happened: As Uncle Sam started to tell Lamar that he was “almost there” and not to mess things up, the opening notes of “Not Like Us” started to play, and Kendrick dropped the following bars before giving the crowd the release that was included with the purchase of their Super Bowl ticket: “It’s a cultural divide, I’ma get it on the floor / 40 acres and a mule, this is bigger than the music / They tried to rig the game, but you can’t fake influence.” The lines call back to the third verse of “Not Like Us,” when Kendrick proffers a lesson about Atlanta’s history as a “Black Mecca” and the broader system that exploits Black culture.

Red Lining

Lamar subtly recreates redlining as his dancers in white are surrounded by an invisible wall tinted red by lights and red dancers around it. 

David Dennis Jr.'s article, The Subversive Genius of Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl Halftime Performance explains,

He was defiant, proud, vindictive, playful and celebratory. He was pro-Black and subversive, trolling and joyful, and through all the expectations and fighting and nastiness, he was ultimately victorious. Lamar was aspirational, inviting us along with him.

Lamar is always pushing up against what it means to be Black and American. Which is why the very first thing we saw in his halftime performance was actor Samuel L. Jackson dressed as Uncle Sam narrating the showcase as well as a voice in Lamar’s head, telling him to play it safe and humble himself for America.

When Lamar opened the show with his homies hopping out of his Buick GNX, a metaphor for his neighborhood and homies invading Americana, he’s admonished by Uncle Sam to humble himself. And when Lamar and his dancers formed a human American flag on the field during his smash hit “Humble,” it was clear there was going to be a larger statement about the country when it needs a mirror the most.

Lamar wanted to deliver a message and a series of messages aimed directly at Black folks who are yearning for a place to rest our hearts. It’s what he has done so brilliantly in the midst of his feud with Drake. Part of Lamar’s attack on his Canadian nemesis has been positioning Drake as an extension of an establishment whose goal is to tear down Black folks. Yes, Drake is a colonizer according to Lamar, but it’s not just about that. It’s about getting rid of all colonizers. So when Lamar dropped his most powerful easter egg of the performance — Serena Williams — it was a wink to a particularly Black audience.

Williams has been the target of Drake and America at multiple times in her career. She’s been unfairly targeted for daring to be great, or, in Drake’s case, disinterested in a relationship. During the performance of “Not Like Us,” Williams danced on the field — a middle finger to Drake and timely reminder that Lamar defended her, and the culture, on the song. But if you recall, back in the 2012 Olympics, Williams celebrated her Gold medal by c-walking on the court. The move, an homage to her Compton roots and something Black folks had been doing for ages, became another opening for attack as far too many people accused her of being “ghetto” and too cocky for daring to shout out her hometown and rejoice in victory. Lamar gave Williams space to reclaim that dance as he was rapping about the ills of folks who don’t belong in the same universe as Black excellence trying to tell us what to do.  

Lamar performed between the end zones where the slogan “End Racism” used to be. A few days before the Super Bowl, the NFL made the decision to remove the slogan, coinciding with a nationwide rebuke of DEI, where Black folks’ accomplishments are questioned as much as ever before. To perform at a halftime show for an organization like the NFL implies a tacit complicity in that type of empire, even in the face of raised Black fists at the 20-yard line. And for a certain sector of the audience, nothing Lamar says or does will erase that complicity. 

Symbolic Interaction

As Dennis explains above, Lamar's message was "a message and a series of messages aimed directly at Black folks who are yearning for a place to rest our hearts."  Lamar was singing to all of Black America validating them and saying that not only do you belong, but you are America and you cannot be erased.  This shared meaning was woven throughout his choices of the performance:

• Having all black performers - including the American flag being literally made of Black people.
• Dropping Serena Williams into the performance - another successful black American who has faced criticism for being too 'ghetto' 
• Through his set and Serena Williams appearance highlighting Compton, a city often denigrated as black and violent. 

Newsweek deciphers some of the symbolism in the show here:
The dancers, dressed in red, white and blue, created formations that resembled the American flag. Times of India reported that at one point, Lamar himself stood at the center, seemingly dividing them, a visual metaphor for America's ongoing racial and political divisions.

The Daily Mail analyzes the meaning of the performance here:

At the top of his set, Kendrick, 37, appeared to make a dig at President Donald Trump, who was among the high-profile attendees in the crowd. Addressing the audience, Kendrick said: 'The revolution is about to be televised; You picked the right time but the wrong guy.' The multi-Grammy award-winner was of course referring to Gil Scott-Heron's acclaimed 1971 poem, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, which speaks to the Black power movement of the 1960s. However, Kendrick's mention of the 'wrong guy' sent the internet into a frenzy, immediately leading them to believe he was referencing January's US Election.

Kendrick's back-up dancers were dressed in red, white and blue, in reference to the American flag. During the rapper's track Humble, they stood in formation on the stage making the flag much clearer to see. At first, the dancers were unified, but seconds into the track they divided in half with Kendrick standing in-between them. Some eagle-eyed audiences noted this and deduced that the group was split to show how the country is politically and culturally divided. Others noticed that all of Kendrick's dancers were Black, which was an apparent nod to America's history of slavery. 'Black folk representing the American flag because modern America was built on our labor… Kendrick I see you,' said one. Another wrote: 'Kendrick creating the American flag and then splitting it in half to symbolize the country's divineness... the amount of amazingly executed political symbolism in this one performance… I'm going to have to sit down with a notebook and pen.' A third said: 'Kendrick making the American flag out of black men was absolutely beautiful, and the message was clear. 'Black people built America, and the same people that he was embracing are now calling the performance boring.'

Ernest Owens at The Root says that Kendrick Lamar's halftime show was a coded indictment of the current state of affairs in America.

...the performance was an artistic statement about the current state of America as President Donald Trump (presumably) watched live. Having legendary actor Samuel L. Jackson dressed as Uncle Sam narrating the show (and serving as Lamar’s subconsciousness) was intentional. Having an all Black cast of dancers and performers dressed in red, white, and blue was also intentional....  

During his set, parts of the Super Bowl crowd were lit up to formulate the sentence “WARNING WRONG WAY” – a symbolic message of where our nation is currently headed.In another sequence, the wide gap in between his background dancers (all dressed in either red, white, or blue jumpsuits) forming a disjointed American flag clearly implied a divided country. 

All of this after the NFL itself decided to drop their “End Racism” banner on their end zones isn’t a coincidence.... The greatest rapper of our generation did it all: He put the nail in the coffin of an industry heavyweight and more importantly reminded the rest of America that the bigots currently occupying the White House are not like us.

DEI and Trump's Wages of Whiteness

During his campaign, Trump has used "DEI" as a red herring for rallying his supporters.  The Guardian published a story about it (4/2024), Racist Dog Whistle: The Right Has Weaponized 'DEI'.  And in the first days of the his second term, Trump went all in against "DEI" hilariously covered by the Daily Show;

The Guardian also published an Explainer article (1/2025) called What is DEI and Why Is Trump Opposed to It?  The Independent and Rolling Stone have both covered the wide ranging blame that Trump has tried to pin on "DEI."

Attacks on with DEI

Sociology can help us understand what is going on with the seemingly sudden attack on "DEI."

Wages of Whiteness

W.E.B. Dubois wrote about the way that race was used during reconstruction to prevent disadvantaged working class White Americans from uniting with disadvantaged Black Americans.  Dubois theorized that disadvantaged White Americans could cling to their higher racial status as an intangible wage that would prevent them from being too focused on their actual wages. This would prevent a working class alliance between Americans of different races which would far out number their wealthy and powerful white Americans benefitting from economic inequality.  Below is an excerpt from Dubois's Black Reconstruction (1935);

Most persons do not realize how far [the view that common oppression would create interracial solidarity] failed to work in the South, and it failed to work because the theory of race was supplemented by a carefully planned and slowly evolved method, which drove such a wedge between the white and black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule. (Black Reconstruction [1935], 700-701)

Note how relevant Dubois's words above are, nearly a century later!  In this era of extreme inequality, the bottom 80% of Americans should be united in creating a more egalitarian society.  But instead Trump has led much of America to blame any difficulties in society on "DEI" including racial minorities, foreign migrants, and LGBTQ individuals. And his courts have permitted him to serve a second term and free the largely white working class convicts from the Jan 6 insurrection with many of them vowing revenge and a disdain for the law. 

Politics of Losing

Trump's recent attacks on "DEI" are not limited to what Dubois wrote about during reconstruction.  In their book, The Politics of Losing, sociologists Rory McVeigh and Kevin Estep explain how there is a familiar pattern repeating itself throughout US history.  During periods of extreme wealth inequality, the white working class scapegoats minorities as the reason for their struggles.  To use Dubois's words, McVeigh and Estep find that working class whites cash in their wages of whiteness during these periods.  The result is an increase in racial scapegoating and nativism and a rise in white supremacy.  McVeigh and Estep find this scapegoating led to three distinct peaks in KKK prominence:  Reconstruction, the 1920s, and the 1960s.  But their finding also shows a fourth epoch of white supremacy emerging with Trump.  During his first term, America saw the public endorsement of Trump by the KKK, the rise of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the One Percenters at events like Charlottesville and the Jan 6th insurrection.  In 2025 lexicon, this white supremacy is cloaked in attacks on "DEI."  According to Trump, DEI caused the DC airplane collision; DEI caused the train crash in Ohio;  DEI caused just about any catastrophe in the US.  And, DEI is causing the lives of white heterosexuals to be more difficult.  

Judith Levin from the Guardian explains it like this;

DEI is a capacious euphemism. In the right’s parlance, it stands not for the policy or program but for the Americans the policy serves: people of color, queer people, women and people with disabilities. It stands for the people it did not serve, those unqualified “DEI hires” whisked to high places through government-endowed privilege: VP Kamala Harris, the supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and – we can infer from Trump’s current philippic – the gay former transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg. In Trumpian terms, DEI stands for those who deserve retribution for perpetrating the crises he invents in order to justify retribution against those he claims to have perpetrated them: border invasion, energy shortages, military unreadiness, and, now, aviation disasters.

Trump has no ideology. Ideology contains ideas, and Trump does not traffic in ideas. He mobilizes feelings. The feelings he is mobilizing after 67 bodies fell into the Potomac River go beyond resentment and anxiety among those putatively more qualified white, able-bodied men who believe they have lost jobs to the blind and deviant. Normalizing vilification, making bigotry chic and fun, Trump has disinhibited even his critics to dip their toes in the slime.

Few media pick up on the misdirection but the NY Times explains that while many Democrats and activists are rallying to defend diversity programs, others say they distract from deeper efforts to address inequality.  Instead of addressing the hollowing out of the middle and working classes over the last 50 years, racism has been the focus of democratic efforts resulting in continued decline of the middle classes for everyone - white and black while leaving many whites resentful of the racial gains in spite of their financial difficulties.

The History of the Politics of Race 

"DEI" is just the most recent code language for politicians who wish to use feelings of racial resentment to motivate supporters. There is a long history of racial politics in the US. 

Dr. Carol Anderson is a history professor from Emory University who has research and published about the reaction of whites to black civil rights gains.  She calls the backlash by whites reacting to black gains "white rage" as detailed in her history book at the left.  Below is a summary of her claim:

"Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House, and then the election of America's first black President, led to the expression of white rage that has been as relentless as it has been brutal.
Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage." 

Ian Haney Lopez is a race and constitutional law professor from University of California Berkley.  His book shows how racism has been used subtly since Richard Nixon and the "Southern Strategy".  This subtle racism is sometimes called dog whistles - phrases that only register with some people who are tuned in to hear them.  For example, a politician can say, "welfare costs too much taxpayer dollars" and a neutral person would hear simply that paying money to the poor is expensive.  But to those who believe that the poor are mostly black, this phrase says that Americans who are black are taking advantage of tax payer dollars.

President Obama

Few things could spark the politics of racial resentment like the first black President could.  There are numerous examples that show the use of racism throughout the Obama administration, including this article from NBC news here and this shirt from Romney's campaign against President Obama:

Michael Tesler shows how, in the years that followed the 2008 election—a presidential election more polarized by racial attitudes than any other in modern times—racial considerations have come increasingly to influence many aspects of political decision making. These range from people’s evaluations of prominent politicians and the parties to issues seemingly unrelated to race like assessments of public policy or objective economic conditions. Some people even displayed more positive feelings toward Obama’s dog, Bo, when they were told he belonged to the white Ted Kennedy. More broadly, Tesler argues that the rapidly intensifying influence of race in American politics is driving the polarizing partisan divide and the vitriolic atmosphere that has come to characterize American politics.


Here are photos of opposition during President Obama's Administration:

A 2025 Cambridge study Beyond the Trump Presidency: The Racial Underpinnings of White Americans’ Anti-Democratic Beliefs finds,

racial attitudes towards out-groups—including racial resentment, anti-immigrant sentiment, and white racial grievance—strongly correlate with anti-democratic beliefs, whereas in-group racial attitudes do not. Analysis of multiple waves of the American National Election Studies (ANES) reveals that racial resentment and white grievance now explain twice as much variation in anti-democratic beliefs as they did in 2012. Experimental evidence also demonstrates that white Americans react negatively to voting expansions when the racial implications of these reforms are made explicit. These findings underscore the growing alignment between anti-democratic beliefs and racial attitudes in contemporary U.S. politics.

The most persistent and damaging anti-democratic conspiracy theory to emerge out of 2012 was that President Obama was a Muslim who was not born in the United States as such, was anti-American detailed by Factcheck.org. 

Trump's Words and Actions on Race

The most prominent public figure promoting the idea that President Obama was not born in the United States was Donald Trump with an egregious campaign of racial resentment known as birtherism.

This trope follows a long line of viewing "real Americans" as White and because President Obama's father was born in Kenya, the trope falsely pushes the idea that there is no way that President Obama could be American.  (It should be noted that during the 2008 primary election, even the Clinton campaign engaged in the same politics of racial resentment when they circulated a photo of Mr. Obama visiting Africa and wearing traditional garb as an attempt to paint him as unAmerican.)  The Guardian details the history of Trump promoting birtherism here.  And from the Atlantic, here, and birtherism on ABC news here.

In fact, Trump has a long history of racial grievances and racism.  Vox (2020) detailed a timeline of his racism in Donald Trump’s long history of racism, from the 1970s to 2020.  Trump's political career began with racism as he relentlessly promoted lies that President Obama was not born in the United States. And Trump's official launch of his 2016 Presidential began with a speech that attacked Mexican immigrants calling them drug dealers and rapists. 

If there was any doubt that Trump's rise to political power was about racial resentment, the celebrations and racism that manifest itself after the election show that whether Trump intended to stoke racial animosity or not, his candidacy had that effect.  Here is a photo of people celebrating after Trump's win in 2016: 

That is just one example from a whole list of racist hate that was manifest on the first day after his election documented at Medium here.  The 2016 election was about racial resentment.  

 When he won in 2016, his victory was publicly celebrated by the KKK as reported on in the Times of Israel, NBC, and local affiliates; KKK plans to hold a rally to celebrate.  And, former leader of the Klan, David Duke continued to publicly support Trump.

Trump and racism: What do the data say? (8/2019) 

...there is a clear correlation between Trump campaign events and incidents of prejudiced violence. FBI data show that since Trump’s election there has been an anomalous spike in hate crimes concentrated in counties where Trump won by larger margins. It was the second-largest uptick in hate crimes in the 25 years for which data are available, second only to the spike after September 11, 2001. Though hate crimes are typically most frequent in the summer, in 2016 they peaked in the fourth quarter (October-December). This new, higher rate of hate crimes continued throughout 2017.

Is Trump Really That Racist? From NPR's Code Switch (10/2021)

People have talked about Trump breaking norms, especially when it comes to talking about race, going as far as to say that he's the "most racist president in modern history." There are plenty of things you could point at to augment that argument: embracing birtherism, referring to African nations as "shithole countries," telling congresswomen of color to go back to where they came from, calling Mexican immigrants "rapists," refusing to denounce white supremacists during a presidential debate and so on.

Democracy in Color documented Trump's record of racism in part 1 of their report (1/2017 - 8/2018)

Democracy in Color documented Trump's record of racism in part 2 of their report (10/2018 - 7/2020)

From Politico, (10/2024) We watched 20 Trump rallies. His racist, anti-immigrant messaging is getting darker.


Don’t Believe Trump When He Claims He’s Not Racist, The Nation (7/2024)

Racist examples from 2/2016 in Huffington Post's Here Are 13 Examples Of Donald Trump Being Racist

Medium.com reports racist incidents across the U.S. on day 1 after the election:

DEI and Trump's Wages of Whiteness

Trump has capitalized on the growing income inequality and the tendency to turn economic discontent toward minority groups.  .Rolling Stone has detailed a number of catastrophes that Trump has blamed on DEI. And the Daily Show hilariously explains how far down the DEI well Trump will go in his blame game.

 

During his campaign "DEI" has become a target of ire for Trump and his supporters.

The Guardian published a story about it here (9/2024 Racist dog whistle: the right wing has weaponized ‘DEI’). The Guardian also published an explainer article, What is DEI and why is Trump opposed to it? (1/2025).

During 

Wages of Whiteness

W.E.B. Dubois wrote about the way that race was used during reconstruction to prevent disadvantaged working class White Americans from uniting with disadvantaged Black Americans.  Dubois theorized that disadvantaged White Americans could cling to their higher racial status as an intangible wage that would prevent them from being too focused on their actually wages. This would prevent a working class alliance between Americans of different races which would far out number their wealthy and powerful white Americans benefitting from economic inequality.  Below is an excerpt from Dubois's Black Reconstruction (1935);

Most persons do not realize how far [the view that common oppression would create interracial solidarity] failed to work in the South, and it failed to work because the theory of race was supplemented by a carefully planned and slowly evolved method, which drove such a wedge between the white and black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule. (Black Reconstruction [1935], 700-701)

Note how relevant Dubois's words are nearly a century later!  In this era of extreme inequality, the bottom 80% of Americans should be united in creating a more egalitarian society.  But instead Trump has led much of America to blame any difficulties in society on "DEI" including racial minorities, foreign migrants, and LGBTQ individuals. And his courts have permitted him to serve a second term and free the largely white working class convicts from the Jan 6 insurrection with many of them vowing revenge and a disdain for the law. 

Politics of Losing

The similarities are not just in reconstruction America.  In their book, The Politics of Losing, sociologists Rory McVeigh and Kevin Estep explain how there is a familiar pattern repeating itself in the US.  During periods of extreme wealth inequality, the white working class scapegoats minorities as the reason for their low income.  To use Dubois's words, McVeigh and Estep find that working class whites cash in their wages of whiteness during these periods.  The result is an increase in racial scapegoating and nativism and a rise in white supremacy.  In 2025 lexicon, it is DEI.  DEI caused the DC airplane collision. DEI caused the train crash in Ohio.  DEI caused just about any catastrophe in the US.  And DEI is causing the lives of white heterosexuals to be more difficult.  Judith Levin from the Guardian explains it like this;

DEI is a capacious euphemism. In the right’s parlance, it stands not for the policy or program but for the Americans the policy serves: people of color, queer people, women and people with disabilities. It stands for the people it did not serve, those unqualified “DEI hires” whisked to high places through government-endowed privilege: VP Kamala Harris, the supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and – we can infer from Trump’s current philippic – the gay former transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg. In Trumpian terms, DEI stands for those who deserve retribution for perpetrating the crises he invents in order to justify retribution against those he claims to have perpetrated them: border invasion, energy shortages, military unreadiness, and, now, aviation disasters.

Trump has no ideology. Ideology contains ideas, and Trump does not traffic in ideas. He mobilizes feelings. The feelings he is mobilizing after 67 bodies fell into the Potomac River go beyond resentment and anxiety among those putatively more qualified white, able-bodied men who believe they have lost jobs to the blind and deviant. Normalizing vilification, making bigotry chic and fun, Trump has disinhibited even his critics to dip their toes in the slime.

Few media pick up on the misdirection but the NY Times explains that while many Democrats and activists are rallying to defend diversity programs, but others say they distract from deeper efforts to address inequality.

The History of the Politics of Race 

"DEI" is just the most recent code language for politicians who wish to use feelings of racial resentment to motivate supporters. There is a long history of racial politics in the US. 

Dr. Carol Anderson is a history professor from Emory University who has research and published about the reaction of whites to black civil rights gains.  She calls the backlash by whites reacting to black gains "white rage" as detailed in her history book at the left.  Below is a summary of her claim:

"Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House, and then the election of America's first black President, led to the expression of white rage that has been as relentless as it has been brutal.
Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage." 

Ian Haney Lopez is a race and constitutional law professor from University of California Berkley.  His book shows how racism has been used subtly since Richard Nixon and the "Southern Strategy".  This subtle racism is sometimes called dog whistles - phrases that only register with some people who are tuned in to hear them.  For example, a politician can say, "welfare costs too much taxpayer dollars" and a neutral person would hear simply that paying money to the poor is expensive.  But to those who believe that the poor are mostly black, this phrase says that Americans who are black are taking advantage of tax payer dollars.

President Obama

Few things could spark the politics of racial resentment like the first black President could.  There are numerous examples that show the use of racism throughout the Obama administration, including this article from NBC news here and this shirt from Romney's campaign against President Obama:

Michael Tesler shows how, in the years that followed the 2008 election—a presidential election more polarized by racial attitudes than any other in modern times—racial considerations have come increasingly to influence many aspects of political decision making. These range from people’s evaluations of prominent politicians and the parties to issues seemingly unrelated to race like assessments of public policy or objective economic conditions. Some people even displayed more positive feelings toward Obama’s dog, Bo, when they were told he belonged to Ted Kennedy. More broadly, Tesler argues that the rapidly intensifying influence of race in American politics is driving the polarizing partisan divide and the vitriolic atmosphere that has come to characterize American politics.


Here are photos of opposition during President Obama's Administration:

The most persistent and damaging conspiracy theory was that President Obama was a Muslim who was not born in the United States as such, was anti-American detailed by Factcheck.org. 

Trump's Words and Actions on Race

The most prominent public figure promoting the idea that President Obama was not born in the United States was Donald Trump with an egregious campaign of racial resentment known as birtherism.

This trope follows a long line of viewing "real Americans" as White and because President Obama's father was born in Kenya, the trope falsely pushes the idea that there is no way that President Obama could be American.  (It should be noted that during the 2008 primary election, even the Clinton campaign engaged in the same politics of racial resentment when they circulated a photo of Mr. Obama visiting Africa and wearing traditional garb as an attempt to paint him as unAmerican.)  The Guardian details the history of Trump promoting birtherism here.  And from the Atlantic, here, and birtherism on ABC news here.

If there was any doubt that Trump's rise to political power was about racial resentment, the photo below is from the first day after Trump's election.  

That is just one example from a whole list of racist hate that was manifest on the first day after his election documented at Medium here.  The 2016 election was about racial resentment.  

Whether he did it consciously or not, 

In fact, Trump has a long history of racial grievances and racism.  Vox (2020) detailed a timeline of his racism in Donald Trump’s long history of racism, from the 1970s to 2020.  Trump's political career began with racism as he relentlessly promoted lies that President Obama was not born in the United States. And Trump's official launch of his 2016 Presidential began with a speech that attacked Mexican immigrants calling them drug dealers and rapists.  When he won in 2015, his victory was publicly celebrated by the KKK as reported on in the Times of Israel, NBC, and local affiliates; KKK plans to hold a rally to celebrate.  And, former leader of the Klan, David Duke continued to publicly support Trump.

Trump and racism: What do the data say? (8/2019) 

...there is a clear correlation between Trump campaign events and incidents of prejudiced violence. FBI data show that since Trump’s election there has been an anomalous spike in hate crimes concentrated in counties where Trump won by larger margins. It was the second-largest uptick in hate crimes in the 25 years for which data are available, second only to the spike after September 11, 2001. Though hate crimes are typically most frequent in the summer, in 2016 they peaked in the fourth quarter (October-December). This new, higher rate of hate crimes continued throughout 2017.

Is Trump Really That Racist? From NPR's Code Switch (10/2021)

People have talked about Trump breaking norms, especially when it comes to talking about race, going as far as to say that he's the "most racist president in modern history." There are plenty of things you could point at to augment that argument: embracing birtherism, referring to African nations as "shithole countries," telling congresswomen of color to go back to where they came from, calling Mexican immigrants "rapists," refusing to denounce white supremacists during a presidential debate and so on.

Democracy in Color documented Trump's record of racism in part 1 of their report (1/2017 - 8/2018)

Democracy in Color documented Trump's record of racism in part 2 of their report (10/2018 - 7/2020)

From Politico, (10/2024) We watched 20 Trump rallies. His racist, anti-immigrant messaging is getting darker.


Don’t Believe Trump When He Claims He’s Not Racist, The Nation (7/2024)

Racist examples from 2/2016 in Huffington Post's Here Are 13 Examples Of Donald Trump Being Racist

Medium.com reports racist incidents across the U.S. on day 1 after the election:

 economic discontent toward minority groups.Rolling Stone has detailed a number of catastrophes that Trump has blamed on DEI. And the Daily Show hilariously explains how far down the DEI well Trump will go in his blame game.

During his campaign "DEI" has become a target of ire for Trump and his supporters.

The Guardian published a story about it here (9/2024 Racist dog whistle: the right wing has weaponized ‘DEI’). The Guardian also published an explainer article, What is DEI and why is Trump opposed to it? (1/2025