September 4, 1954 The Peace Pledge Union (PPU) organized a demonstration against the H-Bomb in London’s Trafalgar Square. The PPU dates back to October 1934. Young Peace Pledge Union members today. The PPU today History of the Peace Pledge Union __________________________________________________ September 4, 1957 Elizabeth Eckford and eight other young Negroes were blocked from becoming the first black student at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Elizabeth Eckford Governor Orval Faubus had called out the National Guard to prevent the court-ordered integration of the public schools in the state’s capital. President Dwight Eisenhower eventually sent in federal troops to guarantee the law was enforced. Elizabeth Eckford followed and taunted by mob, 1957.Read more Read More A very interesting related story: ____________________________________________________ September 4, 1970 Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) began Operation RAW (Rapid American Withdrawal). Over the following three days more than 200 veterans, assisted by the Philadelphia Guerilla Theater, staged a march from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, reenacting the invasion of small rural hamlets along the way. Operation Rapid American Withdrawal 1970-2005: Memories ______________________________________________________________ September 4, 1978 Simultaneous demonstrations in Moscow’s Red Square and in front of the White House in Washington, D.C. were organized by the War Resisters League, calling for nuclear disarmament.
Teaching new Americans culinary skills…and beyond by José Andrés
At Emma’s Torch, refugees get the skills to work in kitchens and make a life for themselves Read on Substack
Hello friends, today I want to tell you about a really special organization here in Washington, DC as well as in Brooklyn, New York. It’s called Emma’s Torch, a non-profit organization that provides culinary training for refugees. Kerry Brodie, the founder of Emma’s Torch, named it after the famous poem written on the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor…”) by Emma Lazarus. The organization runs culinary programs for small groups of students to learn kitchen skills as well as life skills—and they have a network of partners to support students and graduates find housing, seek employment, connect with local communities, and find mental health support.
Soon, the DC program will be expanding to a much larger facility in Silver Spring, opening the door for even more students to be supported. My Longer Tables Fund has given a grant to Emma’s Torch to support this growth as a lead partner as they grow across the DC region, starting with the flagship Silver Spring hub in 2026…building a stronger future where more students can train for meaningful careers, more employers can connect with incredible talent, and more neighbors come together around the table. I’m excited to see the development of the new space and hopefully one day to attend a future graduation!
The Emma’s Torch culinary training program is 11 weeks total, and includes time in a classroom, in a teaching kitchen, in professional kitchens, and in a café that the organization runs. The Emma’s Torch team teaches culinary skills like knife skills, food safety, and recipe execution, as well as training outside the kitchen, like how to write a resume, how to interview, conflict resolution skills, coping methods, and language—mostly focused on culinary vocabulary and kitchen-specific language. Just imagine how important it is to be able to understand the difference between “you did cook that” and “you will cook that”…!
Emma’s Torch also has a relationship with José Andrés Group restaurants in Washington and New York—a program coordinated by our director of people, Eduardo Maia—and some of the program’s students work in our kitchens for a few days…as we say in kitchens, a “stage.” Students have worked at Zaytinya, Oyamel, Jaleo, China Chilcano, as well as minibar in DC, and Mercado Little Spain and Zaytinya in New York…and our teams have been so proud to work with them.
The organization partners with local nonprofits in DC and New York, organizations that support refugees like the International Rescue Committee, the Ethiopian Community Development Council, and other resettlement organizations…many of which have seen a decline in funding, so now more than ever, we need to be thinking about how to support people coming to our country. Today of all days, this week of all weeks, this year of all years, I think we should all be thinking about what longer tables means to us—and how the work of organizations like Emma’s Torch can make our communities, and our country, stronger.
A map on the wall of the Emma’s Torch café in DC showing all the countries that graduates have come from.
My team had the opportunity to visit the DC cafe and meet some of the team members and students from Emma’s Torch (and had an amazing lunch at the café, of course!). Here are some thoughts from Kerry Brodie, the organization’s founder, Justin Edwards, the lead culinary trainer, and two recent graduates, Clara and Mamaissata.
Kerry Brodie is the founder of Emma’s Torch. She created the organization in 2016 after seeing the challenges of the day—a growing refugee crisis and increasingly hostile attitudes to new Americans, as well as restaurants struggling to find good workers. She’d had difficulty understanding how major change could happen through public policy—so instead, she decided to take matters into her own hands, and start a program training refugees to cook and to enter the workforce. Here’s more in Kerry’s own words.
Refugee resettlement is a long process because there’s the immediate trauma that a person might be escaping, but there’s also the trauma of building something entirely new—something that you didn’t plan for, that might not be plan B for you, but plan Z. Like, this is not where you thought you would be. And so many of our students have a shared experience of coming to terms with that, processing the loss as well as seeing the future with optimism, and working to build something.
And now, that trauma is paired with the constant harassment of headlines telling you that you’re not welcome here, and that you’re a drain on society, or that you are an other.
I think the loss of agency is something that becomes a huge problem because fundamentally, many people who leave their homes as refugees are taken from place to place and no longer given choices…Like, start here, go there, do this class. Instead, we like to frame everything as terms of a choice. We have our program and we’re clear with potential students about the parameters of it: this is what might be possible for you if you want to do it, but it is your choice to show up here, it is your choice to participate. It’s also your choice to accept or not to accept a job on the other end, at one of our employment partners.
We’ve seen more and more situations where families are separated, which leads to a lot of social isolation. It means we need to help people build a whole new social network for themselves, to establish a whole new social capital structure. So of course we’re teaching culinary skills, but we’re also teaching about employment. I like the phrase “knife skills and life skills”—but it’s not just language skills and how to write a resume, but also about equity and empowerment, how to speak up for yourself, to have agency over your life, despite the huge headwinds. (snip-There Is More-Please go read it!)
Understanding the critical role of the sovereign powers of the states as a redoubt beyond the reach of Trump’s increasingly autocratic power is really the entire game right now, at least for the next 18 months and, in various measures, almost certainly through the beginning of 2029. People can march, advocate, campaign, donate to candidates, all the stuff. But in many ways the most important thing right now is both communicating to and demanding of state officials that they act on this latent power.
There are key areas where Democrats in Congress may have moments of power, the ability to slow a few things down. But to a great degree, the battle is already lost within the federal government until the next election. It’s only in the states where opponents of Donald Trump hold executive power outside the reach of and the hierarchies of the federal government. That’s where the whole game is. It is strategic depth not in extent or remoteness of territory but in the structure of government and the state. And states have vast amounts of power, far more than we tend to realize because we’ve never been in a position where the mundane daily activities of state and local government have become so critical — its taxing powers, its policing powers, the ways in which the federal government actually struggles to effectively extend its powers to the local level at scale without the active participation of local government.
Something Jason Sattler wrote yesterday needs repeating this morning:
Everything we do makes it easier for our neighbors to stand up or sit down for this regime. We all know there’s a crisis coming that will force all who pay attention to make a choice that could define the rest of their lives.
Will people do it? In most cases, it depends on what they see us doing next.
SEE us doing. That’s the key.
How the less-engaged make up their minds about political matters, Anand Giridharadas observed (based on Anat’s work), is more akin to how they decide to buy pants: What’s everyone else wearing this year? What are normal people like me doing? Not in one-and-done big rallies but every day. Your resistance must be visible and persistent for that to work and give the less engaged permission to join the resistance movement. Calling your senator five days a week is fine, but which of your neighbors sees that?
Plus, if you want people to join your party, throw a better party. We’re out in the streets multiple times a week now. I bring dance music.
A friend pointed to this TikTok by someone going by @logicnliberty. She advocates a unified front by blue-state governors with trifectas. It’s not that they are not already unified, coordinating, and suing. They are. Govs. Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, Kathy Hochul are speaking out and holding press conferences. (State AGs too.) But not necessarily as a team. Are they leveraging their trifectas proactively to erect firewalls in their states against Trump’s gutting of the Constitution? They should.
(snip-TikTok video embedded on the page)
Would the press cover it if they did? We are already in the slow civil war Jeff Sharlet described. The blue and the gray meets the blue and the red. Run with it. The press loves controversy. Generate more, blue state governors.
There are key areas where Democrats in Congress may have moments of power, the ability to slow a few things down. But to a great degree, the battle is already lost within the federal government until the next election. It’s only in the states where opponents of Donald Trump hold executive power outside the reach of and the hierarchies of the federal government. That’s where the whole game is. It is strategic depth not in extent or remoteness of territory but in the structure of government and the state. And states have vast amounts of power, far more than we tend to realize because we’ve never been in a position where the mundane daily activities of state and local government have become so critical — its taxing powers, its policing powers, the ways in which the federal government actually struggles to effectively extend its powers to the local level at scale without the active participation of local government.
Understanding the critical role of the sovereign powers of the states as a redoubt beyond the reach of Trump’s increasingly autocratic power is really the entire game right now, at least for the next 18 months and, in various measures, almost certainly through the beginning of 2029. People can march, advocate, campaign, donate to candidates, all the stuff. But in many ways the most important thing right now is both communicating to and demanding of state officials that they act on this latent power.
And those actions must be not only public, but in-your-face public. Their actions and yours.
The human heart hangs on to hope until there’s no other choice. People will not fight back in the ways that will work, until they realize there is no other choice, until the only other choice is their own imprisonment or death, or that of someone they love. For many of us, that moment is already here. But for most of us, it’s not.
The excellent Minnesota Vikings cheer squad. Image credit: David Berding // Getty Images)
The American economy has become sluggish, Trump’s foreign policy has been abysmal, and we still don’t have the Epstein files that likely implicate Trump’s role in a massive sex operation that targeted children.
Thus, the distractions keep on comin’, and the latest culture war fiasco being trial-ballooned by rightwing media is… male cheerleaders in the NFL.
If you’ve spent any time on social media over the past few weeks, you’ve probably seen the predictable, manufactured outrage over the Minnesota Vikings adding two men to their cheer squad this season.
Fox News, conservative influencers, and even Republican elected officials are getting in the mix, desperate to find any damn distraction they can to keep folks from paying attention to the massive failures and glaring scandals of the Trump administration and Republican Party across-the-board this year.
But this ain’t a new thing. There have been male cheerleaders in the NFL since 2018, when the Los Angeles Rams and New Orleans Saints became the first franchises to add men to their cheer squads.
Since then, the Carolina Panthers, Seattle Seahawks, Philadelphia Eagles, San Francisco 49ers, New England Patriots, Kansas City Chiefs, Indianapolis Colts, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Tennessee Titans and Baltimore Ravens have selected male cheerleaders.
This season, a full third of NFL teams have men on their cheerleading squads, but what I find truly hilarious is that the past eight winners of the Super Bowl have male cheerleaders.
In fact, the past eight Super Bowls have only featured teams with male cheerleaders.
Yesterday, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama—a former college coach—weakly attempted to fear-monger over the issue with one of the more bizarre claims he’s made in a while:
But if you’re going to be woke and you’re gonna try to take the men out of men’s sports, which is what you’re doing. They’re trying to take gender and say, ‘OK, we’re going to make it more about gender than we are about masculinity.’ Then, you’re going to have a huge problem. It’s coming.
I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about, either. I caught the oblique reference to trans women in women’s sports, but good lord, what an awkward way of framing the argument.
This is all the more amusing when you consider the long history of Republican politicians who were male cheerleaders.
That includes four Republican presidents in their college years: both George W. Bush and his father George H. W. Bush at Yale, Ronald Reagan at Eureka, and Dwight D. Eisenhower at West Point.
Former Texas Governor Rick Perry was a cheerleader at Texas A&M. So was Senator Trent Lott at Ole Miss. So was Mitt Romney at Stanford.
The Republican Party has a long and proud history of producing the nation’s finest male cheerleaders. In the past 50 years, more Republican presidents have been male cheerleaders than seen combat.
So, what’s the play here? We all know it’s a distraction, but why are Republicans and conservative media hoping this’ll stick?
Some rightwing men are angry over male cheerleaders because male cheerleaders distract from their open lusting toward women cheerleaders.
They see male cheerleaders as a distraction because they might “accidentally” objectify a male cheerleader amidst all the pretty ladies and that puts them on edge.
Yet they’re openly lusting for women cheerleaders at a public venue in front of kids.
These are the same dudes who claim any LGBTQ content in any public context is harmful to kids because from the warped and sad perspective of these dudes, merely the presence of LGBTQ visibility is always sexual in nature.
But they’re actually very pleased to ogle sexy women and see no problem doing so in front of kids. Sexual performance is never a problem when it caters to straight men.
As always, this goes back to the male gaze and some straight men being entirely incapable of reconciling their own sexuality and religious hypocrisy and using the “safety of kids” to alleviate their own discomfort.
The problem isn’t the presence of sexy cheerleaders, regardless of gender. It isn’t the presence of children. It isn’t even supposed religious teachings.
The problem, as always, are some straight, conservative men needing the entire world to cater to all their whims and all their discomforts and holding up a Bible to cover for that, which immediately gets set back down the moment there are sexy ladies to ogle.
It’s pathetic, but what would you expect from a political party that’s doing everything it can to distract from its leader, Donald Trump, being connected to a massive sex trafficking operation?
The Republican Party is in desperate need of better crowd chants. Maybe they should ask their own male cheerleaders to help them out.
August 21, 1831 Nat Turner, a 30-year-old man legally owned by a child, and six other slaves began a violent insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia.They began by killing the child’s stepfather, Joseph Travis, and his family. Within the next 24 hours, Turner and, ultimately, about 40 followers killed the families who owned adjacent slaveholding properties, nearly 60 whites, while freeing and inciting other slaves to join them.Militia and federal troops were called out, and the uprising was suppressed with 55 African Americans including Turner executed by hanging in Jerusalem, Virginia, and hundreds more killed by white mobs and vigilantes in revenge. More about Nat Turner Nat Turner’s confession
August 21, 1968 The Czechoslovakian people spontaneously and nonviolently resisted invasion of their country of 14 million by hundreds of thousands of troops and 5000+ tanks from the Soviet Union and four other Warsaw Pact countries.The troops were enforcing the overthrow and arrest of Alexander Dubcek and his government. They had been implementing significant democratic reforms known collectively as “socialism with a human face,” or the Prague Spring. Cover of the magazine Kvety, with a photograph of the statue of St. Wenceslas in Wenceslas Square in the center of Prague. Graffiti on the statue reads “Soldiers go home” in Russian and “Dubcek – Svoboda” in Czech. Hundreds attempted to obstruct invading tanks. Both Czechs and Slovaks argued with the soldiers and refused all cooperation with the occupying armies while showing broad support for the deposed government and its reform program. Moscow relented and returned Dubcek to office, at least temporarily. Prague Spring in retrospect Czech perspective
August 21, 1971 Two grenades killed and wounded members of the leadership of the Philippines’ Liberal Party during a rally in Manila’s Plaza Miranda. Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos accused a leader of the party, Benigno Aquino, of the bombing and arrested him, labeling him a communist. Liberal Party Secretary-General Aquino, an effective young leader and Marcos opponent, was imprisoned, mostly in solitary confinement, for seven years until allowed exile to the U.S., ostensibly for medical treatment.
August 21, 1976 Approximately 20,000 people, mainly women, from both Protestant and Catholic areas of Belfast, Northern Ireland, attended a Peace People’s rally at Ormeau Park.
August 21, 1983 Exiled popular Philippine political leader Benigno Aquino was assassinated by soldiers of the Aviation Security Command as he crossed the tarmac at Manila International Airport. Benigno Aquino He had spent three years of asylum in the U.S. Upon his return, he intended to lead the political opposition to President Ferdinand Marcos and the martial law he had imposed. During the plane trip across the Pacific, he had commented to reporters, “I suppose there’s a physical danger because you know assassination’s part of public service . . . My feeling is we all have to die sometime and if it’s my fate to die by an assassin’s bullet, so be it.” Hundreds of thousands demonstrated against Marcos.
Ferdinand Marcos The Aquino funeral drew millions and gave impetus to the broad-based People’s Power movement which eventually forced Marcos from power. Read more about Aquino
August 21, 1991 A coup against Soviet Union President Mikhail S. Gorbachev by hard-line Communist Party members (State Emergency Committee), collapsed in the face of popular opposition. Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin, having quit the Party the previous year, had called for a general strike. Mikhail S. Gorbachev | Boris N.Yelsin
August 21, 1998 Samuel Bowers, the 73-year-old former Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was convicted in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, of ordering a firebombing that killed civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer 32 years before. Bowers had also been instrumental in the killing of three other civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi for which he was never charged. On Vernon Dahmer’s tombstone are the words, “If you don’t vote, you don’t count.” Samuel Bowers 32 years to justice Dahmer’s home after the bombing
(It’s a newsletter I receive, and I don’t have a link for what I’ve copied and am pasting, but there are links within the piece. Enjoy.)
AUGUST 17 — AUGUST 23
Angela Davis debuts on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. In 1969, the legendary author and activist Angela Davis was a newly minted assistant philosophy processor at UCLA. But she was also an avowed Communist, and as a result, then-Governor Ronald Regan tried to have her fired before she’d begun any actual teaching. No luck: Davis’s dismissal didn’t hold up in court, and her first class had to be moved to a bigger classroom to accommodate the 2,000 students who had signed up for it—but she would finally be fired again nine months later, for “inflammatory rhetoric” in public speeches. Davis was an outspoken supporter of the Black Panthers and was fervently against the Vietnam War, but arguably her most scandalous activist activities at the time were in defense of the Soledad Brothers, three Black inmates imprisoned in Soledad, CA, who were accused of killing a white guard. In 1970, guns registered to Davis were used in an attack on the nearby Marin County Civic Center; the perpetrators hoped to take hostages to bargain for the inmates’ release, but instead left four casualties. Davis, despite not being at the scene, was charged with murder, kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy charges. She couldn’t be found, and so on August 18, 1970, by order of J. Edgar Hoover, Davis became the third woman ever to be included on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Eight weeks later, Davis was finally arrested in a New York motel; the trial that followed catapulted her to international fame—and turned her into a revolutionary icon—as her supporters, who viewed her as a political prisoner, chanted “Free Angela!” across the globe.In 1972, after 16 months in prison, she was acquitted of all charges by an all-white jury. “It took a worldwide movement of people to acquit Miss Davis,” noted one of her attorneys, Howard Moore Jr., but it shouldn’t have. “Justice should be the routine of the system,” he added.
THIS IS WHY THEY BAN IT: “Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation. ” –Angela Davis
This is more of the rights push to erase the LGBTQ+ from society. They are trying to return to the past when people could be fired simply for being gay. These people really carve the society of the 1950s when the LGBTQ+ were not in public society and the normal was considered straight and cis with any divergence considered an illness. I think it is because they can’t imagine something if they don’t feel it or understand it. They are straight so straight should be what everyone feels, to feel differently is weird and yucky to them. They view same sex acts as yucky because it doesn’t appeal to them, but they don’t stop to think that is how gay people feel about mixed sex relationships. Hugs
The 2-term School Board member just took over as Executive Director of Project Pride SRQ.
Sarasota County School Board member Tom Edwards just joined a nonprofit promoting diversity programs. Now, local Republicans say he should resign his public office, but the incumbent brushed that off as a desperate attempt to distract from other bad news for the GOP.
Project Pride SRQ last week announced that Edwards, a second-term School Board member, had taken over as Executive Director of the Sarasota organization.
“Project Pride envisions a silo-free community that is proud, resilient, and unified by shared values, not tribal policies,” Edwards said last week. “I am so excited that Project Pride has given me this platform to do this important work.”
But the Republican Party of Sarasota (RPOS) immediately called out Edwards’ new job as a conflict.
“In his new role, Tom Edwards will have overt conflicts of interest. The press release announcing this new job said Edwards will work to establish multiple programs in the schools and after school to further this radical ideology rejected by the vast majority of Americans,” reads a statement from the party.
“Tom Edwards can do whatever that he wants in his private life. But this position leverages him as a School Board member to push programs in the public, taxpayer-funded schools of which he has enormous influence. He cannot hold this position and look out for the well-being of all students. He clearly is incentivized to prioritize a small minority.”
Edwards made clear he has no intention of stepping away from his new work.
“Mr. Brill, is this a political ploy created as another distraction from the (Jeffrey) Epstein files? Or perhaps, with the upcoming School Board elections, you are concerned about two of your previously-endorsed School Board members’ reputations spoiling the chances of election for their replacements? If that’s the case, is it the one who was embroiled in the ‘Throuplegate’ scandal along with her husband, who was terminated as the State Republican Party chair because of rape allegations? Or is it the one who behaved like a spoiled child, refusing to return to her post and complete her term after losing her election? I must have missed it when you called for their resignations,” Edwards said in a statement.
“Only you can answer what keeps you up at night. In the meantime, I will continue to do the good School Board work that the community – from both sides of the aisle – overwhelmingly reelected me to do. Additionally, I will use my new position at Project Pride SRQ to build a stronger, kinder, more resilient community that can respond to the bullying tactics frequently deployed on members of the LGTBQ+ community. I remain steadfast in building coalitions that foster inclusivity and stand against the elimination of human rights for any element of the population.”
Edwards, who is openly gay, has faced criticism since his election to the School Board in 2020, when he defeated incumbent School Board member Eric Robinson. Gov. Ron DeSantis listed the School Board member as a top target in the last election cycle, but Edwards won re-election regardless.
Edwards walked out of a School Board meeting in 2023 after members of the public hurled homophobic slurs at him. A few months later, he was among those members calling for fellow School Board member Bridget Ziegler to resign amid her own sex scandal; she remains on the board.
Now, Republicans want Edwards to step down, and labeled his agenda as extreme.
“School Board Member Tom Edwards is a supporter of radical LGBTQ beliefs and has pushed them as a School Board member — completely out of touch with what the Sarasota County community of parents want,” reads a statement sent out by RPOS Chair Jack Brill. “But now he has been named Executive Director of Project Pride SRQ, which consistently pushes ideas far outside the mainstream.”
Project Pride SRQ leaders had a different take on Edwards’ record.
“We’re thrilled to welcome Tom as our new executive director,” said Justyn Hunter-Ceruti, Project Pride SRQ Board President. “His leadership, experience, and deep ties to the community will be invaluable as we step into this next chapter. I look forward to working with Tom to advance our mission and ensure that Project Pride continues to be a powerful force for inclusion, connection, and resilience in Sarasota and beyond.”
Added Harry Cicchetti, Vice President of the organization’s board: “Tom brings a passion for our mission, a wealth of experience, and a dedication to advancing equity, justice and inclusion not only for LGBTQ+ people but for all who face barriers, which our organization is committed to addressing at this pivotal time in our culture. The board looks forward to working with Tom as he leads our organization into our next chapter of growth and impact.”
Regardless, the fact that the organization also said Edwards will work on issues like a peer-to-peer Support Squad of students to identify bullying and mobilize around victims has GOP leaders concerned.
“We call on Tom Edwards to resign his School Board seat if he wants to be Executive Director of this organization,” reads the RPOS statement. “Holding both positions is antithetical to ethical behavior and harmful to public school students.”
Jacob Ogles
Jacob Ogles has covered politics in Florida since 2000 for regional outlets including SRQ Magazine in Sarasota, The News-Press in Fort Myers and The Daily Commercial in Leesburg. His work has appeared nationally in The Advocate, Wired and other publications. Events like SRQ’s Where The Votes Are workshops made Ogles one of Southwest Florida’s most respected political analysts, and outlets like WWSB ABC 7 and WSRQ Sarasota have featured his insights. He can be reached at jacobogles@hotmail.com.
Education advocates are afraid that the administration’s getting hold of admissions racial data could make colleges a more hostile place for students of color.
“The student data could be used to challenge the admission of Black students in particular under assumptions that they are presumptively unqualified because of their race,” Janel George, a law professor at Georgetown University, told HuffPost.
“Woke is officially DEAD at Brown. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Donald Trump declared in a Truth Social post last week.
He was celebrating the fact that the prestigious Providence, Rhode Island, university had just agreed to a settlement with him. In order to restore its federal funding, the school agreed to implement anti-transgender policies and hand over its race and admissions data.
It was similar to a deal the federal government had struck with Columbia University in New York after Trump relentlessly attacked the school in the wake of on-campus pro-Palestinian protests.
And then on Thursday, Trump went further: He signed an executive order demanding that every college in the country hand over its admissions data, citing a 2023 Supreme Court decision prohibiting the use of race as a factor in college admissions. “Greater transparency is essential to exposing unlawful practices and ultimately ridding society of shameful, dangerous racial hierarchies,” the order reads.
Already, there is growing fear from legal experts and higher education advocates that he could weaponize this data in order to get higher education institutions to fall in line with his administration’s goals.
“They can misuse the data, they can interpret it in any way they want,” said Mariam Rashid, the associate director for the Center for American Progress’ racial equity and justice program. “And they can misuse it in order to misinform the public, too.”
For example, the Trump administration could use the racial data to claim a university is discriminating against a certain race, or infer that not enough Trump supporters are being admitted because the freshman class doesn’t have a high enough percentage of students from red states.
Trump’s latest strike on American institutions connects his war on diversity and his administration’s assault on colleges across the country in a way that could turbocharge both. It’s not just that Trump will have an extraordinary amount of information about colleges; it’s how he’s likely to use it to further his false narrative about both race and higher education. And it’s students who will bear the brunt of the consequences.
“Given the administration’s flawed interpretation of our civil rights law, they might use this data to accuse schools of discrimination and threaten universities,” Donya Khadem, an attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told HuffPost.
“It’s unprecedented scrutiny by the federal government.”
– Donya Khadem, attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund
Some schools refused to play the game. In April, Harvard University wrote a letter to Trump saying that his demands flew in the face of free speech laws and would stifle the kind of learning and research that happens at a place of higher education. But other schools, like Columbia and Brown, bent the knee and gave Trump what he wanted.
“It’s very concerning because it’s unprecedented scrutiny by the federal government,” Khadem said.
This time, the administration is taking aim at an aspect of educational life that has long been a bugbear for conservatives. There is a widespread belief among conservatives that colleges and universities have given advantages to students of color at the expense of white students.
By allowing race to be a factor in admissions, the claim goes, schools are taking spots away from certain groups of students and instead admitting students they claim are less qualified, based solely on their race. (In reality, race has been one of many factors admissions officers consider when choosing between fully qualified applicants.)
“This is all motivated by a racist myth that Black people don’t deserve to be in these elite spaces,” Khadem said.
And now that Trump is back in office, getting his hands on this data is likely just the beginning of his attempt to turn back the clock on admitting students of color.
Asked for comment about how it intends to use the admissions data, the Department of Education directed HuffPost to a press release about the new executive order Trump signed on Thursday.
“We will not allow institutions to blight the dreams of students by presuming that their skin color matters more than their hard work and accomplishments,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said.
Students pass the statue of John Harvard in Harvard Yard on their way to baccalaureate services ahead of commencement at Harvard University on June 17, 1951.
Photo by Sam Hammat/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Conservatives celebrated when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-conscious college admissions processes in Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard in 2023, saying that schools can not use race as a factor in college admissions.
Harvard, together with fellow defendant the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had argued that schools needed to be able to consider race as one factor among many to ensure the educational benefits of a diverse student body. The high court disagreed, saying the schools did not have a “compelling interest” in considering race as a factor and thus violated the 14th Amendment.
But education law experts say that the federal government is using that ruling and expanding it far beyond its original intent.
In the same ruling, the court expressly said that “nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.”
Now, Trump’s order undermines that.
“They’re using the Students For Fair Admissions [decision] in ways that are not what the justices meant when they wrote it,” Khadem said.
Education advocates are afraid that the administration’s getting hold of admissions racial data could make colleges a more hostile place for students of color.
“The student data could be used to challenge the admission of Black students in particular under assumptions that they are presumptively unqualified because of their race,” Janel George, a law professor at Georgetown University, told HuffPost.
“This is all motivated by a racist myth that Black people don’t deserve to be in these elite spaces.”
– Khadem
It could also turn off otherwise qualified students from attending some of these colleges. “I think it’s a big deterrent,” Khadem said. “Columbia’s campus has become and will continue to become less welcoming to Black students.”
Columbia and Brown did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Systemic racism and inequality are already significant barriers to college attendance. Research shows that Black students and other people of color are more likely to be from low-income families and struggle to afford college. Then there’s the fact that standardized tests frequently used in college admissions are biased toward white students and those from wealthier families.
Studies have shown that race-neutral admissions processes lead to a drop in diversity. In 1996, after California voters approved a measure that would ban affirmative action at the state’s public universities, the state’s most prestigious schools saw a drastic drop in diversity. Indeed, one of the arguments made by Harvard during its legal fight was that no race-neutral admissions process offers the same diversity benefits.
The first college classes to be enrolled after the Students for Fair Admissions ruling varied in their diversity. Some schools, like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, saw a decrease in Black and Hispanic enrollment, while other schools’ racial compositions stayed roughly the same.
Not only could these changes further hinder access to higher education for nonwhite students, but there’s a question of how making this data public could harm students. If the Trump administration publicly calls out a school for having a certain number of nonwhite students, that could become a problem for people on campus.
“I do think it’s harmful,” Rashid said. “[The data] is not going to be attached to a name, but they can make up whatever narrative they want.”
Experts warn that it could create a hostile environment on campuses, where nonwhite students feel as if their peers believe that they’re unqualified to be there. “At schools with higher admissions of Black students or faculty, some people are going to feel a certain way about how they’re perceived at school,” Khadem said.
There is a direct line from Trump’s attacks on colleges to his administration’s larger anti-diversity campaign.
In an attempt to begin removing people of color from public life, Trump signed an executive order in January that sought to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs at different institutions, including nonprofit organizations receiving federal grants, law enforcement agencies and institutions of higher education. The penalty for not ending DEI, though vague, was the loss of crucial federal funding.
The Department of Education followed up with guidance for educational institutions, telling them they must end “racial preferences” and restore “merit.”
The Department of Justice joined the crusade too, launching investigations of colleges and universities it alleged were not complying with the Supreme Court’s ruling on using race in college admissions under the pretense of combating “illegal discrimination.”
“The [DOJ] will put an end to a shameful system in which someone’s race matters more than their ability,” acting Associate Attorney General Chad Mizelle said in a press release in March.
To the Trump administration, American society, and colleges in particular, have been beset by a racial regime that disfavors white conservatives — and this executive order was intended to combat that. Others, though, see a very different agenda.
“What they want to do is make everything race-neutral,” Rashid said. “In other words, make everything white.”
Jacob Ogles
Scottie's Playtime 