And with April 23, 2025 Executive Order by President Donald Trump – RESTORING EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY AND MERITOCRACY – the march back towards eliminating anti-white racism enshrined by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 begins. Hopefully, the complete repudiation of this act (or simply ensuring white individuals are collectively protected by it).
This is why I voted for Donald J. Trump three times. Heather Mac Donald of City Journal nails it. [Trump Takes His Biggest Step Yet Toward Restoring Meritocracy: The administration’s executive order eliminating disparate-impact theory restores the 1964 Civil Rights Act to its original meaning., City Journal, April 24, 2025]:
Measured in Trump time, it took them eons to get around to it, but the White House has finally taken the most important step it can to restore meritocracy to American society: eliminating disparate-impact theory from civil rights analysis and enforcement.
Disparate-impact theory holds that if a neutral, colorblind standard of achievement or behavior has a disproportionately negative effect on underrepresented minorities (overwhelmingly, on blacks), it violates civil rights laws. It has been used to invalidate literacy and numeracy standards for police officers and firemen, cognitive skills and basic knowledge tests for teachers, the use of SATs in college admissions, the use of grades for medical licensing exams, credit-based mortgage lending, the ability to discipline insubordinate students, and criminal background checks for employees and renters. It has been used to eliminate prosecution for a large range of crimes, including shoplifting, turnstile jumping, and resisting arrest; to end police tactics such as proactive stops (otherwise known as stop, question, and frisk); and to purge safety technologies like ShotSpotter and speeding cameras from police departments.
In none of those cases has it ever been demonstrated that the disfavored standard was implemented to exclude blacks or other minorities from a position, opportunity, or right. The genius (if a diabolical one) of disparate-impact theory was that it obviated any need to show discriminatory intent on the part of a targeted employer or institution. Discrimination was inferred simply by the effect of the colorblind standard.
Disparate-impact theory preserved the hegemony of the civil rights regime long after the original impetus for that regime had all but disappeared. One would be hard-pressed today to find any mainstream institution that discriminates against blacks in admissions, hiring, or promotion. The reality, in fact, is the opposite: every mainstream institution is desperate to hire and promote as many remotely qualified blacks as possible; it is white males who are disfavored and excluded from positions based on their skin color.
If those black-welcoming institutions continued to employ a single standard of achievement, and that standard disqualified blacks at a disproportionate rate, civil rights enforcers would declare that they had uncovered yet another redoubt of white supremacy. The diversity bureaucracy in universities and the corporate world would send out the message that blacks continue to face discrimination at every turn and that they should take refuge in a victim identity.
Disparate-impact analysis was the linchpin of the “systemic racism” argument, since the only present-day proof of racism in American society is the underrepresentation of blacks in the professions and their overrepresentation in the criminal-justice system.
Meantime, the real cause of disparate impact—the yawning academic skills and crime gaps—was kept assiduously offstage.
Now all that may be changing. The presidential Executive Order of April 23, 2025, “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” sets out the policy of the United States to “eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible.”
To that end, it starts the process of repealing disparate-impact regulations accreted to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by subsequent administrations and requires the cataloguing of state laws that impose disparate-impact liability, among other actions.
Most momentously for law enforcement, the executive order initiates the review of federal consent decrees that rely on disparate-impact analysis (i.e., almost all of them), with the implied goal of dissolving those decrees. (A consent decree is a negotiated settlement, overseen by a judge and his representative, binding a government entity to an elaborate set of reforms.) Dissolving such decrees will not only liberate police departments from a costly yoke of superfluous red tape but will also defund the federal monitor racket, whereby monitors earn millions of dollars declaring for years on end that the overseen police department has yet to comply punctiliously with an average of 200 or so mandated reforms, often regarding paperwork.
Left-wing groups are understandably up in arms. They charge the administration with a “fundamental shift in legal philosophy.” That is true, but it was disparate-impact theory itself that constituted a radical departure from the premises of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. President Donald Trump merely restores the 1964 law to its original understanding. That pioneering legislation banned intentional discrimination only; disparate-impact theory was a judicial amendment made six years later in response to how, even in 1971, finding invidious intentional discrimination was becoming too difficult to satisfy the advocates.
The Left complains as well that Trump’s’ executive order embraces a “formalist, colorblind conception of equality.” Yes—and so does the Constitution.
In a multi-racial country, such a conception of equality without regard to race (being colorblind) should be the only way to interpret the implementation of the law. If not, you have the exact same society disparate impact mandates created in the United States to completely disregard notions of being colorblind, but interpreting every facet of American life through the lenses of a default position of systemic inequality and implicit bias in favor of whites.
Of course, simply overturning Griggs v Duke Power and Shelley v Kraemer restore Freedom of Association to the United States of America, which is precisely what disparate impact theory and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (when not applied to protect the rights of white individuals) only further enhanced the states ability to discriminate against White Americans.