60 Years After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Project 2025 Aims to Make White Men Victims and Everyone Else Inferior

Congressman Tim Burchette called Vice President Kamala Harris “DEI Employment” with a racially charged undertone suggesting that she is unfit for office because she is a lady of color. Not only are the vice chairman’s qualifications undeniable, but the insult is representative of a deeper, more organized, and more disturbing attack on the very civil rights protections which have created equal opportunity for all. Harris is undoubtedly qualified. The attacks on her have been racist and sexist, as her qualifications as a district attorney, California attorney general, and U.S. senator clarify. But something more sinister is at work here. It is an element of a bigger effort to persuade Americans to turn away from civil rights and their universal protections, fanning the divide in the debate.

The ideological and particularly extremist group of groups and individuals has detailed its anti-liberty agenda in Project 2025, a 900-plus-page “how-to” guide for a presidential administration hostile to the civil rights laws we take without any consideration. In the document, white men are the victims of protections for people of color, women, and LGBTQ people, especially transgender people, of all races. It explicitly wants to “reverse the DEI revolution” that it claims is harming men, and that features ending the census count of our residents and seizing ways to understand whether an employer discriminates based on race, gender, and religion, even when that literally includes protections for everybody, including white men.

Imagine a broad set of laws that may lead to longer lives, higher educational outcomes for youngsters, and help people find higher jobs. We wouldn’t just have fun it—we’d protect it. We have those laws on the books now. In its sixtieth 12 months, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 promoted equal opportunity in countless ways. In July 1964, schools, restaurants, public restrooms, and even drinking fountains were strictly segregated across much of the South, while redlining and other forms of discrimination were common in the North. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prolonged the life of the actliterally about three to 4 years into the life expectancy of black people when health care had to open its once segregated doors. More black students they saw their education improvewhile white students continued their education at the same level. This helped reduce “intense segregation—schools with 10 percent or less white students—of black students in Southern schools from 78 percent in 1978 to 24 percent in 1988. With job protections, opportunities for black employees, while still removed from adequate, improved significantly, with a smaller wage gap and a smaller employment gap.

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This law has helped protect every American from discrimination anywhere in our country. But we’re removed from done, as the data and research confirm—and the data and research extremists want to block. Project 2025 outlines a plan to significantly weaken the federal government’s power and resources to implement the Civil Rights Act, opening the door to reversing the gains now we have made as a rustic and making it nearly unimaginable to proceed to achieve them. This would mean that the Department of Education, which Project 2025 wants to shut down entirely, would not give you the option to investigate complaints that Asian, Latinx, Muslim, or transgender children are being harassed and unprotected because of bans on books and teaching behaviors that create a hostile environment for them. Imagine a Department of Justice that might not use its resources and investigative powers to determine whether police departments are systematically abusing Black, Brown, or Native American communities.

But the extremists are few and far between, and we who imagine in rights are the majority. 2023 Leadership Conference Survey found that greater than 80 percent of Americans are concerned about the loss of rights and freedoms today. Nearly 60 percent agreed with this statement: “The strength of America is its diversity…we are a nation defined by diverse people who have come together and brought truth to the ideal that we as people can achieve anything together.”

To distract from what unites us, extremists try to persuade us that the qualified are unqualified because they’re women, women of color, transgender people, or another version of “other.” That’s called discrimination, and that’s why we’d like the Civil Rights Act and federal enforcement. Many of the leading civil rights activists who worked to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law didn’t live to see its full impact. Instead, they did what they may and passed the baton to us. Now it’s our turn to protect that progress.

Diversity, (*60*), and Inclusion (DEI) just isn’t the problem. The problem is the destruction of civil rights.