The civil rights case against UK turns civil rights upside down | Opinion

We continue to spiral toward an authoritarian state which privileges white Christian males by prohibiting anything which celebrates any form of diversity, including programs intended to assist those against whom society, including the government, has historically discriminated. This has been driven home this week by three events: the bizarre double-barreled lecture that President Trump and “Secretary of War” Hegseth gave to a captive audience of the country’s military elite; the announcement that the University of Kentucky was in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act; and the ICE/DEA raid on an apartment complex in Chicago.

At the Quantico Marine Corps base, Pete Hegseth declared that, under his watch, there will be no more “woke” days honoring particular racial or gender groups. According to the former Fox News anchor, the new model for America’s armed forces is the “supermensch” who is, needless to say, white and Christian. Just to be sure everyone got the message, Hegseth announced that the days of promoting persons because of their race or gender were over. In Trump’s military, only merit will count. What he didn’t add was that in this administration, merit means being a white guy who looks “right out of central casting,” as Trump himself had remarked about his audience at the outset of this sorry spectacle. All they have to do is to be fierce warriors, no longer hamstrung by archaic rules that prevent one from acting the way rage dictates. An administration that lives by violence and intimidation is no longer making even a token effort to disguise the ultimate goal – to make America white again by whatever means it takes.

This revanchism was on display at the Department of Education which flagged more than50 universities, including the University of Kentucky, for violating the Civil Rights Act. And what was the violation that brought the full weight of the US government against these institutions of higher learning? In UK’s case, it was for participating in a program called the PhD Project, an organization which helps minority doctoral students complete their degrees. To the investigators of the project, this constituted the very discrimination prohibited by the 1964 law. They concluded that the PhD Project was “a blatantly discriminatory program designed to benefit certain favored students based on their race or national origin to the clear detriment of other students who did not have access to the program because of their race or national origin.”

Given that Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice has virtually shut down its Civil Rights division, this statement has to set a new low for government hypocrisy. One can almost hear the raucous laughter emanating from certain quarters of Budapest or Moscow. MAGA operatives have taken a law written to advance progressive goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and turned it against the liberals. A fundamentalist reading of the law enables those professing to be conservatives to restore discrimination, by claiming to be simply adhering to the 1964 act which prohibited discrimination in any federally assisted program.

This, of course, is pure sophistry which totally ignores the context within which the Civil Rights Act became law. The whole purpose of the act was to put an end to the white privileging which had been the law and custom of the land since before our founding as a republic. The programs, like the PhD Project, which grew out of the Civil Rights Act, were intended and are intended to compensate for the consequences of this centuries-long privileging, consequences which do not disappear in a day or a decade or, dare say, in even a half century.

At the same time that UK was announcing that it was severing ties with the PhD Project, ICE and the DEA were staging a swat-like, middle-of-the-night, warrantless raid on an apartment complex in Chicago. They broke down doors, hauled out in zip ties everyone they found inside the building, ranging from infants to the infirm, and detained them all for hours. It was a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment, among other aspects of the law. But don’t expect President Trump’s judicial arm, the Supreme Court, to make any noise about this latest brutal assault on civil rights. After all, Justice Kavanaugh has said that racial profiling is fine, depending on what racial group one is targeting.

The Trump administration keeps crossing red lines. Congress and the Supreme Court keep showing their approval. Relatively few seem to notice. This does not bode well for any of us.

Robert Emmett Curran is a Professor of History Emeritus at Georgetown University who now resides in Richmond.

This story was originally published October 16, 2025 at 11:33 AM.