Given the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on the legacy of the civil rights movement, I found myself wondering what the White House would even say about the holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
After all, President Trump recently handed a senior role to Paul Ingrassia, who in 2024 used a racial slur while saying MLK Day should be “eviscerated” and “tossed into the seventh circle of Hell.” Trump’s team also quietly dropped MLK Day and Juneteenth from the list of holidays that allow free entry to national parks. Trump’s close ally Elon Musk—now funneling money into Republican midterm campaigns—routinely amplifies overt racism and calls for “white solidarity.” Trump himself recently referred to Somalis and Somali Americans as “garbage.”
Trump has also complained that the civil rights movement resulted in white people being “very badly treated.” That comment fits neatly into his long record of stoking racial resentment among white Americans who feel threatened by the country’s growing diversity. Vice President JD Vance is playing the same tune, recently calling diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts a “deliberate program of discrimination primarily against white men.”
This isn’t just ugly rhetoric—it’s policy. The Justice Department has banned disparate impact analysis, one of the most important tools for identifying racial discrimination. It is retreating from its historic role of investigating police brutality, including cases like the recent ICE killing of a protester in Minneapolis. The department’s civil rights division is now carrying out Project 2025’s agenda to punish state and local governments, nonprofits, universities, and businesses that support DEI initiatives.
Attacks on the civil rights legacy are showing up everywhere: library purges, censorship demands in college classrooms, and pressure campaigns targeting national parks, monuments, and museums. The Smithsonian is being pushed by Trump officials—working alongside white Christian nationalist groups—to sanitize and whitewash American history.
At the same time, Stephen Miller is using his power to turn long-standing bigotries into official policy, pushing ever more aggressive actions against immigrant communities and anyone who stands with them. The consequences are not theoretical. They are deadly.
ICE and Border Patrol agents, emboldened by White House encouragement and a permissive Supreme Court, are engaging in open racial profiling—targeting citizens and noncitizens alike. After an ICE agent killed Minneapolis mother Renee Good, the Department of Homeland Security posted a recruitment video featuring an anthem embraced by white nationalists. Experts have described this pattern as “firehosing the internet with white supremacist propaganda.”
In a moment when global conflicts have displaced millions of people who have lost everything, Trump has effectively shut the door on refugees. At the same time, he’s making race-based exceptions for white South Africans—and possibly white far-right activists from Germany.
Watching people cheer thinly veiled appeals to white nationalism is deeply disturbing to me—not just as an American, but as a Black man from a mixed-race family who grew up in a predominantly white community in upstate New York. In 2016, I drove to New York City hoping to celebrate Hillary Clinton’s election. The next day, driving back to Ithaca, I stopped at a rural gas station I’d visited countless times without worry. Seeing people there celebrating Trump’s victory made me wonder how many of the people around me had never really believed I belonged.
But that isn’t the whole story. For every kid who bullied me growing up, there were more who stood up for me. Voters repeatedly elected me to public office in a predominantly white city. Many of my mentors, supporters, and heroes are white.
Elon Musk is telling his white followers that they should fear Black and brown people gaining power, that those people hate them. That kind of crude racial division may thrill his Nazi and Nazi-adjacent fans, but it doesn’t reflect the reality most Americans live every day. And it certainly doesn’t reflect our history.
Dr. King appealed to Americans of all races, faiths, and backgrounds to form a broad coalition grounded in human dignity and decency. He rooted the civil rights movement in shared values and in nonviolent resistance—showing that nonviolence is not weakness or passivity, but a principled way to confront immoral uses of power.
That’s the coalition we need now—and the one we are building. We see it at No Kings rallies defending democracy. We see it in the multiracial, multigenerational support for families and neighbors terrorized by masked agents of the regime. And we see it in the steadily shrinking public support for Trump and his administration’s cruelty.
This Martin Luther King Jr. Day, let’s recommit ourselves to building—and expanding—that coalition.
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