Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Andrew Ross Sorkin, the founder of Dealbook. Every year, I interview some of the world's most influential leaders across politics, culture, and business at the Dealbook Summit, a live event in New York City. On this year's podcast, you'll hear my unfiltered conversations with Gavin Newsom, the CEO of Palantir and Anthropic, and Erica Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk.
Listen to Dealbook Summit wherever you get your podcasts. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Of all the seismic changes that President Trump has made in his second term, perhaps the most overlooked and consequential is the speed with which he has upended 60 years of civil rights, much of it under the guise of attacking DEI.
Today, Nicole Hannah-Jones on the end of an era and the growing fear of what a post-civil rights government will mean for Black Americans. It's Tuesday, October 21st. Nicole, before we get started, I want to reestablish your background for listeners who maybe haven't heard you on the show in a little bit.
You are, I would argue, the preeminent authority on the subject of race and civil rights in this country. Not just, I would say, at the New York Times, but in American journalism. You're the creator of the 1619 Project, for which you won a Pulitzer Prize in commentary.
And so when we learned that you were looking into the Trump administration's big moves around DEI, that's their description of this, we were very eager to have this conversation with you. So thank you for making time for us. Well, maybe I would quibble with the preeminent expert, but thank you for having me on. And here, I want to begin with an admission on our part.
We had been trying to wrap our arms around these decisions that the Trump administration was making when it comes to DEI for quite some time. Because I think it's fair to say it was easy to see the big moves they were making and how wide-ranging this effort was to root out anything, even mentioning the words diversity, equity, and inclusion.
But it was harder to understand what all of it was driving at, what this larger framework was that this fit into. But that's exactly, as it happens, what you were trying to do. So where did your reporting begin? So my reporting began really immediately looking at the executive orders that Trump rolled out on his first, second, third day of office.
And seeing that, you know, despite him saying he was running on an economic campaign and securing his victory on the idea of economic anxiety, that his very early policies were racial policies. On his first day back in the Oval Office, Donald Trump signed an executive order ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in federal agencies.
The president calls DEI programs illegal, immoral, and discriminatory. This is a big deal. Merit. Our country is going to be based on merit again. Can you believe it? They were targeting what he was broadly describing as DEI. And one of the very first things Trump did... President Trump revoked an executive order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965.
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Chapter 2: What seismic changes did Trump implement regarding civil rights?
And presumably didn't even exist back when Lyndon B. Johnson was president. Exactly. And so I was really startled that one of his very first acts was to rescind this executive order that's trying to enforce civil rights law, but also that he was labeling it DEI and labeling DEI illegal.
So once your antennae are up and your sense is that the president's campaign to go after DEI is something else, what do you do? What do you see? Well, this was day two. You know, I'm a magazine writer. And so, you know, I don't cover breaking news. You take your time in the best possible way. Right. I try to sit back and really see what's the larger story that is unfolding here.
So I'm just watching everything. And a lot is happening in those early days. As of five this afternoon, every federal DEI office in the country got shuttered. DEI employees woke up this morning and found out their emails are suspended and they've been put on leave.
NBC News has learned that the Defense Intelligence Agency has ordered a pause on all events related to MLK Day or Black History Month. Juneteenth, Pride Month, Women's History Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, all paused. You were seeing kind of the purging of federal websites that were talking about Black First or Women's First.
The National Park Service has removed a reference to abolitionist Harriet Tubman from its webpage that's dedicated to the Underground Railroad. Military websites also taking down tributes to the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, the fabled Navajo Code Talkers of World War II, and Ira Hayes, a Native American and one of the Marines who raised the flag...
There was a lot of erasure that was happening in a lot of different ways in this blitzkrieg of targeting of all sorts of efforts to really catalog the history of this multicultural country. Mm-hmm. So I'm talking with my editor and she's really wanting me to do a story that is cataloging that erasure. And I thought that was important.
And yet at the same time, I'm also looking at what's happening across all of these different federal agencies. And I'm like, there's something much, much bigger that's happening here that is more than erasure. That's actually about basic civil rights. Hmm. Well, just explain that. What exactly did you see happening across federal agencies?
So the first sign, like I mentioned before, was the rescinding of the civil rights era order against employment discrimination. And then it quickly got deeper than that. So the Trump administration said they were going to slash 90 percent of the staff for this civil rights enforcement arm of the Department of Labor. The Trump administration was also gutting the civil rights division of the U.S.
Department of Education. threatening to lay off all of these civil rights lawyers at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, going agency by agency and making it impossible to enforce civil rights.
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Chapter 3: How does Nikole Hannah-Jones define her expertise in civil rights?
Well, let's just define these terms. In your mind, the president is using the concept of DEI to pause, reverse, in some cases it sounds like perhaps even eviscerate civil rights. But quite simply, what exactly is the difference? Because clearly there's a strong relationship between the two.
Civil rights are laws and legal protections, mostly passed in the 1960s as part of the civil rights movement, that exist to ensure basic and essential rights. So these laws protect our freedom of thought and speech and religion. And typically in the United States, we think of civil rights as protecting minority groups from discrimination. So we're talking about actual rights. Mm-hmm.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion as an ideology, it arises out of civil rights and the protections that civil rights ensure, but they aren't the same things. We don't really see what we today know as DEI until 2010 or so. And you don't see the proliferation of DEI across nearly every American institution until after 2020. with the murder of George Floyd and the racial reckoning.
What we typically think of today as DEI, I mean, it really doesn't have a single definition. So DEI could be that corporate training that you had to go through about privilege and how race works. It could be a training about gender, or it could be programs to try to make workspaces more inclusive of people of color or other marginalized groups. It could be really just about anything.
And that's a little squishier, obviously, than civil rights. And look, I myself was a critic of DEI because I felt so much of it was performative. That, you know, you had companies where you could look at their hiring track record. What percentage of Black people do you employ in management?
And yet they're putting out these statements and hiring DEI officers who would have no budget and no power and yet had this very public position. Some of it became virtue signaling. Yes, there was a lot of that. And so, you know, a lot of people probably roll their eyes at DEI. That's where we are in this country.
And so weren't really realizing that something much, much more essential and dangerous was happening. But I was seeing... kind of agency by agency, this entire civil rights infrastructure that had been set up over decades being dismantled. And that was happening at a pace and a rate and a sophistication that we had not seen before. Well, Nicole, I just want to linger on that idea for a moment.
How exactly could it be possible that what begins as a dismantling of DEI somehow becomes the dismantling of civil rights itself? Because so many of the civil rights in this country come from constitutional amendments, come from laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that would seem to make them not at all easy to roll back or dismantle. in the first place. So just explain that.
Well, laws are not self-enforcing, right? This is why you have laws against murder and robbery, but you still have a police department that has to go out and enforce the law. And so that's the same thing with federal agencies. Most people I've found are actually surprised that every major federal agency actually has a civil rights enforcement division within that agency. Hmm.
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Chapter 4: What executive orders did Trump sign that affected DEI programs?
But what you've seen under the Trump administration is they shuttered most of the regional divisions charged with enforcing those rights. So what does that mean? One of the major things that the Department of Education does is it enforce the rights of students who have disabilities. Students with disabilities are supposed to receive special services, but those services are often very expensive.
And so sometimes school districts won't provide them. The Department of Education's Civil Rights Division will ensure that students, if they have a complaint, if they're not receiving the services that they are entitled to, that those districts comply. And also, they enforce the law for English language learners who have a right to an appropriate education.
They enforce equal access to sports under Title IX. And then they also enforce against all of the racial disparities that Black and other students face really across every level of education. So when you see these efforts to dismantle the Department of Education, which is what the Trump administration has said, is he really wants to shutter the entire Department of Education.
What they're really shuttering is the ability to enforce civil rights law across American schools. And as you said earlier, when that federal enforcement goes away, then any complaint, any lawsuit, any objection really falls back to the local school district, which for a variety of reasons may not have much of an incentive to do anything.
Exactly, because if your local and state government are the actors who are committing the discrimination, where do you go? Now, really, the only avenue for redress that people would have would be to pay a private lawyer or to find a civil rights organization who might represent them.
And so where we once had the full weight and power of the federal government, the federal government has gutted nearly all the offices that will enforce the law. Okay, take us inside, if you could, another agency where we are seeing this dismantling of civil rights enforcement.
There's probably nowhere where this gutting is more profoundly troubling than what's happening at the Department of Justice. So, of course, the Department of Justice is this nation's most foundational law enforcement agency. And in fact, the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice is considered kind of the crown jewel of civil rights enforcement in the country.
It was created by the Civil Rights Act of 1957 precisely to protect the voting rights of Black citizens and to prosecute crimes that were being committed against civil rights workers. Mm-hmm.
But now, under the Trump administration, if you look at what that civil rights division has actually done, it's moved to dismiss voting rights cases and civil rights cases involving police departments under the guise of enforcing Trump's anti-DEI mandate. So, for instance, the Justice Department walked away from overseeing the Louisville Police Department.
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