How should we understand the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI programs and the federal workers assumed to have benefited from these programs? Commentators such as Adam Serwer and Karen Attiah, focusing on the dismissals of senior Black government employees and the purging of a federal workforce largely composed of Black and other racially diverse staffers, have identified the crackdown as part of a project of racial resegregation. This analysis, while accurate, is incomplete. The Trump administration does not merely aim to undermine racial integration; rather, it seeks to bring about the economic immiseration of Black communities, thereby ensuring the entrenchment of a Black American underclass.
Federal government jobs have long been responsible for the creation and maintenance of the Black American middle class. While employment of African Americans by the federal government dates back to the Civil War, the path to the middle class for Black government employees really opened up after World War Two. Since then, government employment has provided opportunity, job security, and generous retirement benefits to African Americans, as well as a meaningful alternative to a private sector wherein Black candidates are systematically overlooked in hiring and promotion. In fact, according to official tallies, the U.S. federal government has hired Black Americans at significantly higher rates than private employers for decades, with the percentage of Black employees at certain agencies surpassing 35%. Beyond providing financial stability, good government jobs have enabled Black public servants to take part in animating and sustaining American democracy.
In the wake of the initial waves of DOGE cuts, Black workers at federal agencies have begun to cry foul, suspecting that they have been targeted for terminations specifically because of their connections, or imagined connections, to diversity and anti-discrimination initiatives. Their fears appear to be well-founded, especially after the online publication of a “DEI Watch List” that listed the names and photos of primarily Black federal health workers and described them as “targets.” As Donald Trump and his collaborators are acutely aware, terminating these African American workers will force them to compete for inferior positions in the private sector, and to do so with a sense of desperation, lest they lose their homes to foreclosure or eviction, and personal property to repossession. Destabilization of Black communities will, in turn, undermine Black economic, political, social, and cultural power—a process accelerated by the Trump administration’s attacks on Black history, access to education, and evidence of Black American contributions to American life. Trump is not motivated by social separation from Black people; he and his allies are hell-bent, rather, on reducing them to peonage as a way of deconstructing Black power and demolishing their individual bargaining power as laborers.
Trump’s vision for an American golden age requires Black and Brown dispossession: it is a vision animated by a desire for the accumulation of wealth, power, and even physical territory by White American men, wholly reminiscent of past eras of westward expansion and literal gold digging by men seeking to strike it rich at the direct expense of Indigenous nations and enslaved Africans. Trump wants to conquer the world and re-conquer America, which he views as having been invaded by Brown immigrants and stolen from deserving White men by Black people given an unfair advantage by the Civil Rights Movement. For Trump, Whiteness is not only property, but it is the right to property—including Black and Brown labor. The boundaries of Whiteness are coterminous with the right to bargain and compete on fair terms, as they are with the bounds of law.
At the core of the Trump-Must-Project 2025 ideology is the zero-sum belief that any Black prosperity is only achieved at White expense, that any dollar earned by a Black person is one that was stolen from a White one. This ideology is one that leaves its adherents in a permanent feeling of being in a race war. When Elon Musk and Donald Trump complain about South Africa’s reparatory land expropriation program, they do not feel it necessary to acknowledge that the redistribution scheme was catalyzed by apartheid. While their more outlandish claims about South Africa are sometimes treated as a form of intellectual dishonesty or deception, a more plausible interpretation is that they fully believe that White theft is an honest White man’s work, and that apartheid, as a system of governance, is a meaningful way to assure the dominance of Western, White civilization.
As President Trump made clear during his 2024 campaign, he has a strong personal sense of what “Black jobs” are and should be, and he sees no place for Black employees in roles that require particular expertise, provide a stable and comfortable quality of life, or which represent agency, authority, or power. When he defines diversity as antithetical to merit, he does not do so only with respect to college admission—the major pathway to competitive employment—or employment itself, but rather as it relates to anything that he considers to be definitionally American. And when he, through Elon Musk, urged federal workers to resign from their “lower productivity jobs in the public sector” and seek “higher productivity jobs in the private sector,” he almost certainly envisioned jobs in which the private sector employer—perhaps himself or Jeff Bezos—has outsized bargaining power vis-à-vis the putative employee concerned about being able to pay their bills.
In the immediate aftermath of the 2024 general election, a significant number of African Americans—including Black schoolchildren—in various parts of the United States reported receiving text messages claiming that they had been conscripted for duty as slaves and would be transported to plantations by vans to which they had been assigned. Most thought the messages were mean-spirited attempts at bullying by white supremacists collaborating on the dark web; few commentators thought the text messages represented serious threats. Within Black communities, however, folks have long feared that the MAGA movement comprises people who would, in fact, like to see Black Americans reduced to servitude. Indeed, a recent Missouri lawsuit against Starbucks explicitly suggests that Black people are not even suited to work as baristas, alleging that “Missouri’s consumers are required to pay higher prices and wait longer for goods and services that could be provided for less had Starbucks employed the most qualified workers.” It is not unreasonable to worry that the Administration believes that any paid work for Black Americans is work they do not deserve.
To those who believe that American democracy is inexorable, that its institutions are strong enough to withstand petty tyranny, such worries seem overblown at best and resemble race-baiting at worst. But viewed through the history of the nation’s history of racial capitalism, post-pandemic concerns by business executives that all workers have too much bargaining power vis-à-vis their employers, and sustained right-wing campaigns over antidiscrimination efforts and diversity initiatives, such fears appear much more well-founded. Black and Brown prisoners are already being put to work and farmed out (sometimes quite literally) to private employers to work for little to no compensation, producing billions of dollars in value for the private sector and the federal government alike. Southern states, which have some of the highest incarceration rates in the world, are particularly reliant on prison labor, making major investments in private prisons and paying prisoners pennies per hour for hard labor. During his electoral campaign, President Trump repeatedly promised to deport millions immigrants—many of whom labor in privately owned fields and factories. Florida is already moving to gut child labor laws, so that children can replace the labor lost through deportations. History indicates that these children will most likely be Black and Brown, corralled into the fields via market-based economic coercion that includes defunding their public schools and eliminating other education and professional opportunities as unlawful, anti-White, diversity initiatives.
Trying to make sense of the Trump administration is time-consuming and exhausting. During my own time as a federal employee, my co-clerk wisely counseled me that whenever political phenomena seemed to make no sense, I should “follow the money.” While Donald Trump and his allies are full of racial animus, their approach to governance is not one that is expressly concerned so much with social order as it is with economic order. When it comes to plunging hundreds of thousands of American workers into financial precarity, cruelty most certainly is the point, but racial capitalism is the Trump administration’s theoretical guidepost, and White economic domination of Black human capital is the goal.
