AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Bans on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, closures of federal civil rights offices, stopping the collection of data about diversity and discrimination - civil rights lawyers and scholars say that these things are part of a push to dismantle and even to end civil rights in America. NPR's Sandhya Dirks reports.
SANDHYA DIRKS, BYLINE: For a while now, Victor Ray, a professor at the University of Iowa, has felt almost afraid to say what he's been thinking out loud.
VICTOR RAY: Because when you say that people on the right are attempting to overturn the Civil Rights movement, you sound kind of unhinged.
DIRKS: The idea that civil rights has gone too far has been getting more explicit on the right. Charlie Kirk is a far-right influencer with close ties to President Trump's family and his campaign. On his talk show a year ago, he spoke with Jeremy Carl of the Claremont Institute, an anti-diversity think tank with ties to the far right.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE CHARLIE KIRK SHOW")
CHARLIE KIRK: The Civil Rights Act, though, let's be clear, created a beast, and that beast has now turned into an antiwhite weapon.
JEREMY CARL: Yeah, and that's the reality. And so we just need to fundamentally relook at a lot of our civil rights legal regime.
DIRKS: One of the great victories of the Civil Rights movement happened just over 60 years ago, when President Lyndon Baines Johnson spoke to Americans from their grainy, black-and-white TV sets.
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LYNDON B JOHNSON: I'm about to sign into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
DIRKS: That act did not end racism, but it made segregation in businesses, in public places, in schools illegal.
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JOHNSON: My fellow citizens, we have come now to a time of testing. We must not fail.
DIRKS: Professor Ray says while things got better, the U.S. never really passed all the tests. Many schools remained segregated, unequal outcomes continued, and other civil rights laws, like the Voting Rights Act, have been chipped away at. But he says at least there was some imperfect mechanism in place to enforce civil rights law and monitor the realities of racism. Now he says the federal government is dismantling all that.
RAY: Threatening universities that have antidiscrimination policies with loss of funding, calling classes like the kind I teach about America's history of racial inequality discrimination against white students.
DIRKS: Maya Wiley, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which worked in the '50s and '60s to get civil rights legislation passed, says it also means rebranding civil rights - rebranding it to focus on what groups like the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 calls antiwhite racism.
MAYA WILEY: It says we want to flip the script, and the script means the interpretation of our laws to say white men have been abused by civil rights.
DIRKS: Wiley says Project 2025's plan calls for disabling the regulatory apparatus of civil rights laws and putting a stop to the collection of data that measures racism, sexism and other bigotry. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo is a key storyteller of a narrative that claims antiwhite racism is rampant. Here's Rufo on The New York Times "Matter Of Opinion" podcast earlier this month, talking about the two strains of conservative arguments about civil rights.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "MATTER OF OPINION")
CHRISTOPHER RUFO: The argument would be that the Civil Rights Act is a fundamental infringement on civil liberties and freedom of association, freedom of speech, and therefore it, you know, requires abolition.
DIRKS: Rufo acknowledges abolishing civil rights is probably not going to happen. Instead, he favors this plan.
RUFO: The right needs to have its own interpretation of civil rights law.
DIRKS: He says that means what he calls colorblind enforcement - prioritizing antiwhite racism as much as anti-Black racism. Jamelia Morgan, director of the Center for Racial and Disability Justice at Northwestern University, says that actually means a co-option of civil rights that requires erasing the reality of discrimination today and yesterday.
JAMELIA MORGAN: If you can't tell the history, it's very hard to purely and fully advocate for DEIA anything. Because again, the central foundation of these programs was in response to this history of exclusion.
DIRKS: Janai Nelson heads the Legal Defense Fund, an organization founded by but long separated from the NAACP. She says the Civil Rights movement was and is about repairing the past, but she says diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility are not just remedies - they are beliefs.
JANAI NELSON: You would be banning a viewpoint. You would be banning an idea, which violates the First Amendment off the bat.
DIRKS: She says you can't ban her belief that the world is better when it's more diverse, when people have equal opportunities. But she says that's exactly what the Trump administration and the activists that influence it are trying to do. Sandhya Dirks, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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