Trump & MAGA Are Worse than Re-Segregationists

(script for the video)

Call Trump and his followers caste preservationists because that’s exactly what they are.

I want to help you better understand Trump, his administration, and the broader MAGA movement’s treatment of Black people in America. This goes beyond superficial awareness—you must grasp how they fit into American history and what exactly they aspire to achieve. Understanding their centuries-old playbook allows you to anticipate their moves.

I spent five years writing Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System to expose their ideology.

What we’re enduring now isn’t an aberration but rather the latest chapter in the nation’s oldest story.

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America has a racial caste system—a hierarchy enforced by law, policies, and norms that confines the Black population to an inferior legal, political, and social status, from womb to grave. Caste preservationists fight to maintain that system. That’s exactly what Trump and his followers crave: eternal primacy for the White population. They want White people on top. Black people, and all other racial or ethnic identities, on the bottom. And for the sake of themselves and their descendants, they want this arrangement to last forever. So now you understand what makes them caste preservationists.

Writers I deeply respect have called MAGA “re-segregationist.” But we must go further. I’m not dismissing these thinkers. I’m warning that we confront a threat far fiercer than re-segregation. 

In his well-received essay in The Atlantic, Adam Serwer criticized the Trump administration for pursuing “The Great Resegregation,” castigating schemes to dismantle both Diversity, Equity & Inclusion programs and civil rights laws against the backdrop of the administration’s opposition to Black opportunity. Washington Post’sKaren Attiah likewise dubbed anti-DEI efforts as a maneuver to advance resegregation. New York Timescolumnist Jamelle Bouie too endorsed the re-segregationist framework.

Intentional segregation—the purposeful separation of the races to mark Black people with a badge of inferiority—has seared itself into the national vocabulary. We know what segregation is. Its memory never fades. So, Serwer, Attiah, and Bouie invoking it is natural.

The urgency of the moment, however, demands the adoption of language that precisely depicts Trump, his administration, and the MAGA movement. This calls on you and me to look past a segregationist comparison that falls short for at least two reasons.

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First, it fails to capture the depths of depravity and the range of villainy that a MAGA government might unleash. Comparing them to segregationists limits our imagination of what Black people are confronting now, and how much worse it could become. 

Instead, those of us committed to ending racial oppression must name them accurately: caste preservationists. They are caste preservationists. They aren’t chasing the simple goal of unstitching Blackness from the national fabric. They do not labor to merely mark Black people as inferior. No, they wish to fortify a racial caste system they feel progressive victories have weakened. They wish to reduce Black folk to a powerless, shushed, and unseen caste. They insist upon bleeding Black citizenship of its value.

Trump’s people don’t fixate on separate water fountains. They pursue grander purposes—permanent Black subjugation. And those of people of color generally. They strive to silence the questions Black existence raises about America’s need for reform, atonement, and real equality. They reject the notion that America should change in any regard to improve Black existence. They work to sabotage the creation of a democracy that serves everyone, regardless of race. That looms as more perilous than segregation.

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In 1881, Tennessee passed the first Jim Crow law, requiring segregated train cars. This was one rung on a ladder to total racial domination. One rung to a durable post-slavery racial caste system. Voter disenfranchisement provided an additional rung. As did compulsory labor to pay off debt, better known as peonage. Jury discrimination, the exclusion of Black folk from juries, added another. As did employment discrimination. And denials of municipal services. Lynchings. 

I want you to understand that targeting DEI programs and attempting to nix civil rights laws is, like segregation was before, just one tactic of a broader plan for racial domination. 

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Here’s the second problem with the re-segregationist label: It inaccurately describes the nature of the opponent, which makes determining what we must crusade for harder. Identifying them as segregationists orients us to fight for integration. And simple integration, an ideal that fails to dismantle structural inequality, mustn’t stand as our target.

In contrast, holding them to account for their true objective—the preservation of a caste system—orients us to fight for the abolition of caste. Because they champion caste preservationism, we must operate as caste abolitionists.

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In 1849, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, a caste abolitionist, unsuccessfully represented Sarah Roberts, a five-year-old Black girl proposing to integrate Boston public schools. “The separation of children in the Schools on account of race or color,” he argued before Massachusetts’s highest court, “is in the nature of Caste, and, on this account, a violation of Equality.”

Do Sumner’s words inspire you? They fueled me and grounded the core argument of my book, which exposes the Supreme Court’s betrayal of these anticaste principles.

In Their Accomplices Wore Robes, I explained that because of the Thirteenth Amendment, which guarantees freedom, the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equality under the law, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which guarantees equal voting rights, each of us has the individual right not to be treated as a member of a degraded caste. We all have a right to freedom from caste—a right the Supreme Court has brazenly negated repeatedly. 

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Please know this: The centuries-long struggle for equality has always been best understood as a struggle for freedom from caste. Slavery gave the antebellum South its caste system. What shackled Sarah Roberts was a caste system terribly like the post-slavery separate-but-equal racial caste system.

When Alabama governor George Wallace thundered, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” he was not merely endorsing segregation. He was vowing to uphold a racial caste system. During Jim Crow, as during antebellum America, caste preservationists could create a subordinated, and economically exploited, underclass identified by color. The MAGA movement attempts to maintain this White-over-Black hierarchy through tactics more suitable to current realities and workable under present-day constitutional restraints.

Today’s caste preservationists cannot force Black folk into separate train cars, but they can block the remedying of centuries of racial oppression. And they can strive to strip legal protections to worsen Black life.

Please do not square up against segregation—instead bear arms in a war for freedom from caste.

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Victory requires that we succeed as caste abolitionists, demanding nothing less than the destruction of this system. That’s how you defeat Trump, MAGA, and the caste preservationist worldview that came into existence once the feet of enslaved Africans touched the shores of Virginia in 1619.

Tagging the abusers of Black skin as segregationists directs attention to a symptom and not the pathogen itself. Only if we behave as caste abolitionists can we secure for everyone—regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation—the right to freedom from caste.

War has always ensnared the Black population—war not just against racism, but against caste. Caste poisons America. Abolition provides the only antidote. Now, tomorrow, and forever.