As the Trump administration wages an unlawful assault on civil rights, employers and institutions must resist complicity and stand firm in defending the anti-discrimination laws that remain the backbone of workplace equality.
Every day we witness new sectors—from employers, to the law firms that represent them—targeted by the Trump administration’s unlawful agenda to dismantle essential, hard-won anti-discrimination efforts. The administration relies on these intimidation tactics to execute its Orwellian playbook: censoring words like “inequity”; eradicating programs designed to reverse drastic and embarrassing inequities; extinguishing funding for core civil rights litigation and enforcement; chipping away at collective bargaining rights for workers across the political spectrum; retaliating against lawyers who question government action; and debilitating the economy by deporting large sectors of our essential workforce.
The administration is selling this agenda through “us versus them” rhetoric. But in an interconnected economic system, we all have a stake in ensuring that our neighbors can work and live with dignity. Everyone suffers under a regime that glorifies inequity and takes us back to our pre-civil rights legal infrastructure. We have a collective responsibility to defend our anti-discrimination laws and to be frank about the state of inequity and discrimination in our country. A reality check is in order.
Thus far, the administration has acted as if it has the power to undo employers’ legal obligations to address and eliminate discrimination in the workplace. It does not.
We must fight the administration’s attempts to weaponize our anti-discrimination laws against the communities they were designed to protect.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 still prohibits discrimination in employment based on race, color, religion, national origin and sex, which still includes sexual orientation and gender identity. Subsequent laws have extended protections to people with disabilities, older workers and pregnant workers.
The current administration certainly wants to erase these protections. But the mandates, purpose and intent of our anti-discrimination laws cannot be upended or wiped away by any executive order, no matter how aggressive.
For our part, we must act to safeguard these laws, double-down on compliance and challenge—not bend to—orders that conflict with them.
To support its rhetoric, the administration has inverted the narrative, claiming we have gone too far in our efforts to address inequity in this country. This is false.
The numbers are clear: Our economy continues to give stark preference to white men. Women of color bear the highest financial penalties, shown by our longstanding gender-pay gap. Hispanic women still only make 51 cents, Native women make 52 cents, and Black women make 64 cents for every dollar made by white non-Hispanic men today. As employers retreat instead of stepping up, these gaps will only widen. And since women are key drivers of growth—as consumers, workers and caregivers—the negative impacts will be far-reaching.
We must fight the administration’s attempts to weaponize our anti-discrimination laws against the communities they were designed to protect. Title VII was specifically enacted based on bipartisan recognition that laws were needed to meaningfully reverse racial and other forms of discrimination and segregation against people of color that remained rampant in both public and private life, despite the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
In our efforts to address this lingering problem, affirmative programs to reverse discrimination have been a direct response to the American economy: one of the most effective and comprehensive systems affirmatively crafted to advantage white men at the expense of women and people of color.
Our economy has two tracks defined heavily by systemic and structural discrimination based on race and gender.
- One has allowed for the accumulation of generational wealth predominantly for white men and their families based on access to land and property, educational opportunity, credit, assets, higher pay, voting rights, complex financial instruments and strategic tax exemptions exclusively for these forms of wealth.
- The second has affirmatively excluded—and continues to exclude—women and people of color from accessing the same opportunities using modern-day constructions of slavery, racism and sexism, including discriminatory land-use restrictions, redlining, broad disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, artificially suppressed wages, occupational segregation and the exploitation of unpaid and underpaid caregiving.
As a result of this model, we have inherited artificially created inequities, which are about to get significantly worse. As states like Florida, Iowa and Arkansas respond to immigrant labor shortages by trying to bring back child labor, it is important to ask ourselves who benefits in an economy that so quickly trades one form of exploitation for another.
Lastly, the administration is coercing even the most powerful entities into thinking that they have no choice but to collaborate in efforts to roll back civil rights work. The reality is that many of the administration’s actions are not legal, and we need corporations, institutions and firms—now more than ever—to use their power and wealth to defend civil rights.
Instead of pulling back, these actors must double down on their commitments and funding for anti-discrimination work. Their failure to do so will deepen inequities in a system that is already so inequitable under an administration that is using its power to starve out and eliminate underfunded organizations working to remedy discrimination and inequity. Despite its bluster, the current administration will be gone in four years, but our failure to act will take us back decades. Now more than ever, we need leadership—political, institutional and corporate leadership—to act collectively with integrity and courage to uphold basic rights.
