{"id":849574,"date":"2025-05-19T22:14:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-20T03:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/19\/the-trump-musk-regime-wants-to-make-segregation-great-again\/"},"modified":"2025-05-19T22:14:00","modified_gmt":"2025-05-20T03:14:00","slug":"the-trump-musk-regime-wants-to-make-segregation-great-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/19\/the-trump-musk-regime-wants-to-make-segregation-great-again\/","title":{"rendered":"The Trump-Musk Regime Wants to Make Segregation Great Again"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n Politics<\/a>
\n <\/span>
\n <\/span>
\n \/ <\/span>
\n March 19, 2025<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In a boon for racist businesses, the administration has ended a ban on segregated facilities for federal contractors. <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

<\/instaread-player><\/p>\n

A segregation-era sign that hung over a water fountain in Montgomery, Alabama.<\/p>\n

(Meg Kinnard \/ AP Photo)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When I was 11, I was taken on a trip to Clarksdale, Mississippi, for a family reunion. My mother was born there in 1950, in the deeply segregated and violent South. I remember only two things from the trip: One was the Ticonderoga<\/em>-class mosquitos that populate the Mississippi Delta; I thought one of them was a dragonfly until it started sucking my blood like I was in a Bram Stoker novel.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My other memory was the drinking fountains. My mom took me to the local library, and told me to grab a drink from a water fountain. I didn\u2019t feel like it, and I was a kid so I told her I wasn\u2019t thirsty. She got really serious, and I think there must have been a cloud that blocked out the sun right at that moment, because the whole scene darkened<\/em>. She told me again to have a drink, only this time it was an order. I did as I was told. As I leaned in, I could see, plain as day, the \u201cwhites only\u201d message etched into the stone on the fountain. It hadn\u2019t even faded.<\/p>\n

I realized I was drinking from a fountain my mother wasn\u2019t allowed to drink from when she was my age, but that\u2019s not why the memory has stuck with me. The whites-only sign had been scratched out (obviously ineffectually), but the fountain hadn\u2019t been replaced<\/em>. It hadn\u2019t been smashed. It hadn\u2019t been thrown away as a relic of a shameful period. The sign was just\u2026 dormant. I didn\u2019t know then about the \u201cLost Cause\u201d and the Federalist Society and all those who were working for the day that the South would rise again, but it was clear to me then that the people who made the original sign (and their progeny) hadn\u2019t given up. They were just waiting for their opportunity to refurbish the fountain and once again exclude Black people from using it.<\/p>\n

That opportunity has come to them in the form of Donald Trump and his copresident, Elon Musk. Under this new regime, all of their white supremacist and neo-apartheid ideations<\/a> can be realized again. Literally. Last month, NPR reports<\/a>, the Trump administration made a racist change to its rules for business that get federal contracts, so that \u201cthe federal government no longer explicitly prohibits contractors from having segregated restaurants, waiting rooms and drinking fountains.\u201d<\/p>\n

The change to the Federal Acquisition Regulation<\/a>\u2014which is promulgated by the General Services Administration\u2014doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that people are free to segregate to their heart\u2019s desire. Technically, for now at least, anyone that contracts with the federal government still has to comply with all relevant civil rights laws, including the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits segregation.<\/p>\n

But the change to the rules is not just symbolic. Everything we know and have seen from this administration tells us that compliance with anti-segregation laws will not be enforced by Trump\u2019s government. The Department of Justice will not bring<\/a> discrimination lawsuits against companies that reimpose segregation. And now, any business that does segregate its workforce can still get a federal contract, even if the business is in blatant violation of the Civil Rights Act, which won\u2019t be enforced against them anyway.<\/p>\n

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\n Current Issue
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There is one man who stands to benefit above all others from this change in federal acquisition rules, and that man is of course Elon Musk. Musk had been under an intense investigation about allegations of (wait for it) segregationist policies at his Tesla facilities<\/a>. Trump shut that investigation down<\/a> as one of his first acts in power, but the allegations remain. Meanwhile, Musk has been gobbling up federal contracts like a (grand) dragon hoards gold.<\/p>\n

In the absence of an ongoing federal investigation into Musk\u2019s business practices, this little anti-segregation rule buried in the federal acquisitions policy could have opened up a new legal front against him. If the government is not allowed to contract with businesses that run segregated workplaces, and Musk allegedly runs a segregated workplace and receives government contracts, businesses that didn\u2019t<\/em> receive a federal contract might have had standing to sue the government (because the equal-employment opportunity businesses that didn\u2019t receive a contract could say they were harmed by the government\u2019s refusal to apply anti-segregationist prohibitions on federal contractors)\u2014and that claim could require an adjudication on whether Musk is running a segregated company.<\/p>\n

Thanks to the rule change, that cause of action is gone. While I\u2019m only learning about the rule change now, thanks to NPR, the GSA actually changed the rule<\/a> back on February 15, five days after Trump ended the DOJ investigation into Musk and Tesla.<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s just a coincidence that Trump changed an anti-segregation government contracting rule less than a week after he ended an investigation into whether his chief contractor was a segregationist. Maybe Clarksdale, Mississippi, simply couldn\u2019t afford to replace its drinking fountains. Maybe the white folks who run this joint \u201cdon\u2019t have a racist bone in their body\u201d and are just trying their best.<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t a fool when I was 11, and I\u2019m not about to start acting like one now. I know what white supremacy looks like when I see it, and I\u2019m not distracted when the white folks doing it make pathetic attempts to cover it up.<\/p>\n

\n
\n Elie Mystal<\/a>
\n <\/h5>\n


\n \n\t\n<\/svg>
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

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Elie Mystal is\u00a0The Nation<\/em>\u2019s justice correspondent and a columnist. He is also an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author of two books: the New York Times<\/em> bestseller Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy\u2019s Guide to the Constitution<\/em><\/a> and Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America<\/em>, both published by The New Press. You can subscribe to his Nation<\/em> newsletter \u201cElie v. U.S.\u201d here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\t\t Elie Mystal
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Politics \/ March 19, 2025 In a boon for racist businesses, the administration has ended a ban on segregated facilities for federal contractors. A segregation-era sign that hung over a water fountain in Montgomery, Alabama. (Meg Kinnard \/ AP Photo) When I was 11, I was taken on a trip to Clarksdale, Mississippi, for a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":849575,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27342,141794],"tags":[16704,144023],"class_list":{"0":"post-849574","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-regime","8":"category-trump-musk","9":"tag-regime","10":"tag-trump-musk"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=849574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849574\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/849575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=849574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=849574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=849574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}