White Americans have faced racial discrimination for decades. The Trump administration wants to end it.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued The New York Times for racial and sexual discrimination. The EEOC claims the newspaper didn’t promote “a well-qualified white male employee because of his race and/or sex.”
What’s surprising isn’t the allegation. What’s surprising is the federal government working to stop discrimination against a white male. Bypassing white men wasn’t a closely guarded secret. For many major corporations, it was an implicit part of their public goals following the George Floyd riots.
“In The New York Times’s 2021 ‘Call to Action’ and throughout numerous other publications, the company stated goals and action plans to increase non-white and female representation in its leadership positions,” the EEOC wrote.
The Times wasn’t alone in adopting racially discriminatory goals.
“Wells Fargo, Delta join a nascent push into racial hiring quotas,” Bloomberg reported in September 2020.
Major companies followed through. In 2022, ResumeBuilder.com surveyed 1,000 hiring managers throughout the country. One in six had “been asked to deprioritize hiring white men.” Nearly half had “been asked to prioritize diversity over qualifications.”
“The year after Black Lives Matter protests, the S&P 100 added more than 300,000 jobs — 94 percent went to people of color,” Bloomberg reported in 2023.
Even after the Supreme Court struck down racial quotas in 2023, white Americans still face discrimination in higher education. On Wednesday, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division found that “UCLA’s medical school discriminated based on race in admissions.” Admitted students who were white and Asian had median MCAT scores in the 88th percentile. Black and Hispanic admitted students had median scores in the 68th percentile.
The DOJ found that Alisa Lopez, the medical school’s executive director of admissions, sent out a document that outlined “workarounds to achieve medical school ‘diversity goals.’ ” This isn’t a surprise. After the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in higher education, the Biden administration urged colleges to find ways around the ruling.
This call to rename and continue racially discriminating attracted little scrutiny on the left, let alone outrage. One reason is that some leftists don’t believe that it’s possible to racially discriminate against white people. This nonsense claim comes straight from critical race theory.
Fortunately, the law disagrees. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 doesn’t just protect racial minorities. It prohibits employers from discriminating “against any individual” based on race.
But the law doesn’t enforce itself. This is one example of why conservative leaders must reject libertarian passivity. You win the war of ideas so you can govern aggressively, just like the Trump administration is doing here by fighting anti-white racism.
This is how you turn Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream into a reality.
Victor Joecks’ column appears in the Opinion section each Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Contact him at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow
@victorjoecks on X.
