The Trump regime’s war on education and civil rights protections has been strategically and kaleidoscopically evil. Each turn keeps revealing another point of attack on marginalized students’ ability to learn and resist being disposed of or dominated by those trying to secure a white supremacist future without end.
We’ve witnessed book bans, attacks on K-12 curricula, the whitewashing of history, crackdowns on campus speech, economic divestment in higher education funding, and recent caps on access to student loans. And now, the Trump administration has gutted a 60-year-old civil rights protection against school policies repeatedly shown to disproportionately harm Black students, even if those officials claimed their policies were supposedly “race-neutral.”
[On July 23] the Education Department announced that it was removing the “disparate impact” standard from its Title VI regulations. Don’t be fooled. This is not just some obscure administrative adjustment. It means public schools will no longer face federal civil rights scrutiny based solely on documented racial disparities in suspensions, expulsions, restraints, arrests, or physical punishment of students.
For decades, the “disparate impact” legal principle allowed investigators to examine school policies, not just what authorities claimed they intended. So, if a school district was found to be suspending, expelling, or beating Black children at much higher rates, or closing schools primarily in Black neighborhoods, the pattern itself was enough to determine racial harm. Investigators didn’t need to find a smoking-gun correspondence that said, “We intended to discriminate against Black students.”
With this latest policy change, the Trump regime has effectively told the nation’s public schools, where 80% of teachers and 77% of principals are white, but 54% of students are not, that they may expand punishment practices against Black children and they won’t trigger federal civil rights scrutiny. Just don’t be stupid enough to confess to or leave behind any proof of racist intent because the federal government would prefer not to see it.
Black children will now be left at the mercy of racist educators and hostile institutions pushing them toward the prison pipeline, and their families will face the burden of proving that school officials intended to discriminate against their child.
In its official language, the department was remarkably candid about why it pushed for this change. It complained that schools were found in violation “solely because data indicated the school disciplined more minority students.” And then it said the change would ensure that “teachers retain control over their classrooms.”
There it is, Y’all.
This is not about quality instruction, improving learning outcomes, or protecting the safety and dignity of students. It’s about control. Which means the Trump regime must remove federal scrutiny of racialized punishment as an obstacle to white authority while insisting that all students are treated equally. Given the rapid demographic shifts, with America becoming a non-white majority, the regime is ensuring that the overwhelming white teaching force standing over Black and Brown children retain their coercive racist abuses without having to answer for them.
This rollback also resurrects the old doctrine of “local control” which has long been the familiar refuge of racist institutions that resent federal civil-rights oversight. For generations, this country has witnessed states and school districts invoking local authority to defend segregated schools, unequal resources and racial terror campaigns. Federal intervention was necessary precisely because local officials couldn’t be trusted to police themselves. Now Trump’s federal government is backing away by writing a supposedly universal rule that promises to be administered selectively, and will produce predictable racial harms. Meanwhile, authorities will hide behind the absence of explicitly racist language.
What will this all mean for everyday Black parents?
It means parents will still be able to file complaints, but they will have less federal protection and suffer a much heavier burden when a teacher, administrator, or school policy harms their child. Never mind just providing data or other documents of harm. A parent will now have to prove what was inside a school official’s head. Otherwise, their complaints will get rejected. A child’s school can claim that racial disparities are just a coincidence. Parents will have to bring their complaints before administrators that are investigating their own employees. And families without financial resources, time, or access to legal help will carry the greatest burden.
Civil rights and education organizations have issued a strong condemnation of this latest move. But our children need more than carefully worded statements. They need to sue, organize, collect data and build a parallel enforcement system immediately because the foreseeable consequences will be devastating so that America will not be able to make evidence of racialized punishment of Black children easier and legally invisible.
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THIS CONTENT IS WRITTEN IN THE AUTHOR’S PERSONAL CAPACITY. ANY OPINIONS EXPRESSED ARE THE AUTHOR’S OWN AND SHOULD NOT BE ATTRIBUTED TO HOWARD UNIVERSITY OR MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY.
