“Your freedom is shackled and chained to mine. And until I’m free, you’re not free either.” – Fannie Lou Hammer
For the past year, I’ve been researching and educating about Project 2025. It’s a massive conservative policy agenda written by a far-right coalition with the help of 140 former Trump Administration officials. As I explained in this webinar (which you can watch here), the project includes a 922-page plan that outlines the policy platforms in the president-elect’s Presidential Transition Project. Many of its principles are also part of Agenda 47, the Trump Republican Platform.
Make no mistake: If implemented as promised, the Project 2025 policies threaten to erase most of the gains our society has made since the height of the civil rights movement. This means it’s time to consider what it looks like to live in an America that has virtually no enforceable civil rights protections.
For many, the initial reaction to such a momentous shift is to boldly proclaim, “We’ve been here before.” However, that is false.
While our ancestors and even some of our remaining elders did indeed experience American life before integration and the protections of the Civil Rights Act, those of us born after Black people received full citizenship rights through federal law (Gen X and younger) have not. We do not yet know what it looks like to organize without the protections of the Civil Rights Act. We do not yet know how to navigate being in public spaces where we are not wanted due to our race – without legal recourse.
We can’t say with certainty which of these dangerous Project 2025 policies the next president will implement. So, it’s essential to know what’s in the plan so our communities can prepare.
Donald Trump has nominated Brendan Carr, who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the Federal Communications Commission, to lead the agency as FCC chair. pic.twitter.com/8FoatcwxzR
— Democracy Forward (@DemocracyFwd) November 18, 2024
How Could Project 2025 Impact Our Communities?
Project 2025 has four key pillars. The first pillar is the policy platform itself. Written in a 922-page document, Pillar 1 of Project 2025 is a right-wing policy wish list. These policies seek to remake the entire federal government in some very significant ways. This includes ending social services and support programs like SNAP ( food stamps), cutting the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), and dismantling Federal Agencies like the Department of Education, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institute of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency and others.
Project 2025 Pillar 1 also includes plans to cancel funding for both Head Start child care programs and Title 1 programs, which provide services to low-income children. According to the plan document, schools that continue to use programs to foster diversity, equity and inclusion programs should be prosecuted. This means programs like My Brothers Keeper, My Sisters Keeper, and pipeline programs designed to build equity in our schools and help disadvantaged NYC students, are at risk. The funding needed to provide support for diverse learners, after-school programs, and teacher training programs could all be on the chopping block in a matter of weeks.
Pillar 1 includes the goal of dismantling the National Labor Relations Board and ending rights to overtime pay. It also intends to reverse other key workplace protections provided by agencies like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which investigates complaints of job discrimination. Unfortunately, cutting entitlement funding and federal agencies are just part of one Project 2025 pillar. There are three additional pillars and they will similarly present incredible challenges for our community.
Project 2025’s Additional Pillars
The second Project 2025 pillar is a personnel database which includes resumes and profiles for more than 50,000 Republican supporters who are preparing to fill thousands of vacancies in the federal government.
What vacancies, you ask? The vacancies created by Project 2025’s third pillar which includes an executive order known as “Schedule F”. Schedule F would allow the next president to fire tens of thousands of current government employees who are not part of the MAGA community. Those new vacancies would be filled with the right-wing loyalist job-seekers identified in pillar two. Pillar three also includes a massive training boot camp program to ensure that when these new employees arrive at the recently opened positions, they will be as effective as possible in implementing the Project 2025 agenda.
However, the fourth pillar in the Project 2025 plan raises the greatest cause for alarm. The fourth pillar is a 180-day playbook that allegedly includes a roadmap to implement all of the above by 180 days after the inauguration on January 20, 2025. This means, if successfully implemented, conservatives seeking to erase the progress we’ve made since the civil rights movement would do so by July 19, 2025—just one month after Juneteenth.
Now more than ever, we must have a clear-eyed understanding of where things lie and the precarious nature of our new reality. This is not the first time European American voters decided to abandon attempts at a multi-racial democracy. It is not the first time that protections for our communities were discarded due to racism and patriarchy. Let’s take a brief moment to review that history – as it appears that we are destined to repeat it.
The End of Integration (Again)
After the Civil War, from 1865 until 1877, America went through its first attempt at integration in a period known as Reconstruction. During this time, American elected officials passed laws to protect the 4 million formerly enslaved Africans and the other free Blacks who had not been enslaved from the racial violence of those who sought to re-enslave them.
These laws included the 13th Amendment (which partially ended slavery), the 14th Amendment (which gave Black people citizenship and equal rights and due process under the laws) and the 15th Amendment (which prevented discrimination in elections). They passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1870 and 1871 (which prohibited racist terrorist groups from harming Black people and gave the federal government power to protect Black people from racialized terror).
Relying upon the protections provided during Reconstruction, formerly enslaved Black people organized. They built up towns, designed education systems, opened stores and established communities. Thousands of Black people ran for office for the first time and were elected as public servants. It was a time when America attempted to reinvent itself from a slave-holding nation to something that resembled a multiracial democracy. It was American Integration 1.0.
In 1876, however, there was a contested presidential election. White American power brokers and elected officials in the north and the south decided to strike a deal that brought this brief attempt at integration to a violent end. The North pulled the Union troops out of the South and abandoned Black people to the violence of racial terror groups and the White American enslavers who were determined to “take their country back” and “make America great again.” Those newly elected Black officials were driven out of office. The laws protecting Black people were destroyed by the Supreme Court and collectively, Black Americans were left to fend for themselves.
After Reconstruction ended in 1877, it wasn’t until 1964 that Black people were able to once again secure the protections of a second Civil Rights Act. The decades in between were marked by struggle so severe that many referred to it as the nadir, a time worse than slavery.
A New Normal Today
“History shows that it does not matter who is in power or what revolutionary forces take over the government, those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning.” – Dr. Carter G. Woodson
Like our ancestors who witnessed the end of Reconstruction, we are now witnessing the dismantling of the second integration effort which started in the Civil Rights Movement. Project 2025 seeks to dismantle each of the advances our ancestors and elders worked on to improve our status in this nation. We are now poised to undergo a transition that our community will reckon with for decades to come. As the potential challenges we face become clearer, it will be incumbent upon all of us to delve deeply into a spirit of service to each other and mutual aid.
A first step in this process is to play the following game: make a list of all of the resources that our communities rely upon and consume on a daily basis. Then, ask yourself how many of these resources do we provide for ourselves and compare those resources to the ones that are provided for us by people or entities who are not part of our community. For the resources that we do not provide ourselves – imagine what would happen if the people or entities who do provide those resources one day decided to stop.
How quickly could we adjust and provide the resource for ourselves? The answers to those questions represents the gap we need to fill. Those answers tell us our true measure of independence and self-sufficiency.
Rep Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) brilliantly exposes Project 2025 for what it is, a manifesto that furthers White Supremacy. Take 90 seconds to watch the Congresswoman and then let's all VOTE🗳️to #DumpTrumpsProject2025 by electing Dems up and down the ballot. pic.twitter.com/nD00KZyKS6
— Brian Cardone 🏴☠️🇺🇦 (@cardon_brian) September 24, 2024
Now more than ever, you need to consider how you can build community so that you can learn how to organize and connect to those who are actively working in our collective best interest. In this new era, we will need to rely on each other like never before, which means our clubs, civic groups, D9 organizations, and faith-based institutions must center the following questions: how do we use our gifts, skills, and talents to keep our communities safe? How do we prepare to provide ourselves with the resources that our communities need?
These are not easy questions to answer. For those of us who have only benefitted from integration without having to fight for it, this time period may cause significant shock. However, I’m comforted by the words of Marcus Garvey: “When all else fails to organize the people, conditions will.”
We are now entering the “find out” phase. Our need to turn to each other and build supportive communities has never been greater. Let’s tap into our collective power to protect and strengthen our people. We have not yet begun to fight.
