MANSFIELD: Rolling Back Civil Rights

Left to their own devices, some Southern state legislatures would bring back lynching; indeed, the only reason they stopped treating blacks in this despicable manner was due to federal legislation. It took the might of the feds to stop racist crackers from treating minorities any way they pleased.

Unfortunately, it appears as if those days might be set to return. The Trump administration has already virtually given cops nationwide the green light to shoot first and ask questions later (indeed, if any questions are asked at all) when it comes to young black males. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said that he doesn’t support consent decrees, which were the only hope blacks had of reining in rogue cops.

Now Trump has turned his demonic eye towards anti-discrimination legislation. For the last four decades the Department of Labor has had a division that policed bias among federal contractors. The department’s efforts weren’t perfect; there still were cases of discrimination, but far fewer of them.

And the bonus was, other contractors and employers (both inside and outside of government) began to base their employment practices on the standards set by the Department of Labor. Indeed, to whatever extent employment discrimination has disappeared in America — and trust me, it’s still a gnawing problem — it has been because of the enforcement of federal laws.

Many historians posit that the black middle class was created in part by the United States Post Office, which practiced equal opportunity in hiring. The other entity was the railroads, where all Pullman car porters were black … who managed to earn decent wages and were in the vanguard of civil and labor rights movements. The president of their union, A. Phillip Randolph, was a giant of the Civil Rights Movement.

But Trump, clearly playing to his racist base, submitted a budget that will fold the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which now has 600 employees, into another government office in the name of cost cutting. This comes when the current administration has been seeking out any way it can to reduce federal efforts at preventing discrimination, from dissolving offices to appointing administrators that are unsympathetic to civil rights, and fairness for minorities for that matter.

Right-wing ideologues know that when the feds roll back protections for minorities that the private sector will follow suit. This is one of the methods Trump plans to use to increase the availability of jobs for his base — by discriminating against minorities. This is what he was elected to do.

Granted, many other progressives — from environmentalists, to women’s and immigration rights activists, pro-choice proponents and the LBGTQ community — are suffering under the Trump administration and its new policies, but only blacks are potentially losing their lives, and now their shot at a decent-paying job.

From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.

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One Response to “MANSFIELD: Rolling Back Civil Rights”

  1. Robert Tatarko

    Remember it was Trump in the 1990s who had a problem with Indian casinos in California because they were given advantages that he couldn’t have and that was causing him to lose money in Las Vegas. The poor Donald was crying over the unfairness of it all.

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