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Vernellia R. Randall, Weekly Racial Justice Update: September 6–12, 2026, Racism.org (September 14, 2026).

 

 

The Census Bureau is accepting public comments through October 13, 2026, on a proposal that would exclude millions of immigrant residents from the population used for congressional apportionment and remove race and ethnicity questions from the decennial census questionnaire. This proposal would weaken political representation, resource allocation, civil-rights enforcement, public-health research, redistricting, and our ability to document racial inequality. Public opposition must become part of the administrative record before the government portrays the deliberate suppression of essential racial data as a neutral administrative change.  

Submit a public comment through Regulations.gov

 

This week’s developments show how law and government continue to redistribute political power, institutional protection, and public legitimacy along racial lines. The American Bar Association eliminated its law-school diversity requirement. Federal officials intensified attacks on race-conscious education. Texas expanded governmental control over how slavery, racism, Islam, and September 11 may be taught. Immigration policies increased the vulnerability of Salvadoran families and immigrant workers. Voting restrictions threatened mail voters and naturalized citizens.

The Census Bureau also proposed excluding millions of immigrant residents from the population used for congressional apportionment and removing race and ethnicity questions from the decennial census questionnaire. That proposal would weaken one of the country’s most important foundations for measuring racial inequality and enforcing civil-rights laws.

The week also demonstrated resistance. Tribal Nations defended sovereignty, food systems, records, jurisdiction, and public resources. Civil-rights organizations challenged voter intimidation and racial profiling. A federal court refused to end supervision of an Arizona sheriff’s office before constitutional compliance had been firmly established. The only Black juror in a Massachusetts murder trial exercised the independent judgment the jury system required, even as public commentators treated his disagreement with eleven non-Black jurors as illegitimate.

These events are not isolated. Together, they reveal an effort to decide whose history may be taught, whose political participation may be burdened, whose records remain accessible, whose presence counts, and whose judgment is accepted as reasonable.

 

Table of Contents

  1. ABA Eliminates Its Law-School Diversity Accreditation Requirement
  2. Appeals Court Blocks Postal Service Restrictions on Mail Ballots
  3. Civil-Rights Groups Sue to Keep Armed ICE Agents Away from Polling Places
  4. Court Continues Federal Supervision of Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office for Racial Profiling
  5. DHS Campaign Targets Sikh and South Asian Drivers Through Racial Stereotypes
  6. Federal Agencies Accuse Berkeley Law of Favoring Black Applicants
  7. Government Seeks Supreme Court Approval of Citizenship-Based Voter Database
  8. Indigenous Organizations Convene Food Summit on Sovereignty and Traditional Knowledge
  9. Justice Department Holds Tribal Consultation on Violence Against Native Women
  10. Native Hawaiian Programs Face Coordinated Constitutional Challenges
  11. Action Alert: Census Bureau Proposes Removing Race and Ethnicity Questions and Excluding Millions of Immigrants
  12. New Mexico Tribe and Pueblos Defend Sovereignty Against Commercial Sports Betting
  13. New York Advocates Seek Hate-Crime Investigation of Reported Anti-Asian Attack
  14. Only Black Juror Faces Public Attack After Refusing to Find Lindsay Clancy Not Criminally Responsible
  15. Reported National Archives Closures Proceed Without Tribal Consultation
  16. Salvadoran Families Left in Limbo as Administration Refuses to Decide TPS Status
  17. Texas Education Officials Approve Curriculum Promoting a Distorted Account of Islam
  18. Texas Orders Teacher-Preparation Programs to Bar Discussion of the 1619 Project
  19. Trump Administration Proposes Eliminating Post-Employment Grace Period for H-1B and Other Visa Holders
  20. United States Stands Alone Against U.N. “Correct the Map” Resolution
  21. Violence, Vandalism, and Political Rhetoric Target Muslim Communities Around September 11
  22. Bottom Line
  23. Search Note
 

1. ABA Eliminates Its Law-School Diversity Accreditation Requirement

The Council of the American Bar Association’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar repealed Standard 206, which required accredited law schools to demonstrate a commitment to diversity and inclusion among students, faculty, and staff. The standard had been suspended since February 2025.

The repeal occurred while the Department of Education was considering whether to end the ABA’s recognition as the federal accreditor of law schools. ABA officials described the decision as pragmatic and denied that it represented a change in the organization’s values.

Why It Matters

The ABA’s retreat allows law schools to abandon institutional responsibility for racial exclusion while continuing to call themselves committed to equality. Diversity becomes an aspiration that institutions may praise when convenient and discard when enforcement carries political costs.

Black, Brown, and Asian students remain underrepresented in important parts of legal education and the legal profession, particularly in positions of institutional authority. That underrepresentation affects whether their communities have meaningful access to lawyers who understand their experiences, whether their legal needs receive sustained attention, and whether their perspectives influence how law is interpreted, practiced, and enforced.

My study, The Whitest Law Schools, demonstrates that many law schools enrolled substantially larger percentages of white students than would be expected based on their states, regions, and available applicant pools. Removing the accreditation requirement protects that racial imbalance and the white institutional power it reproduces.

Legal education is a gateway to judgeships, government authority, corporate power, legal representation, and control over the meaning and enforcement of law. Removing the diversity obligation does not create neutrality. It permits institutions to preserve racial exclusion without being held accountable by their accreditor.

Sources

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2. Appeals Court Blocks Postal Service Restrictions on Mail Ballots

The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit blocked new Postal Service restrictions affecting the handling and delivery of mail ballots before the November election. The dispute arose shortly before states were scheduled to begin mailing ballots.

Voting-rights organizations and state officials argued that the changes threatened the timely delivery and counting of lawful ballots. The court’s order prevented the federal government from imposing the challenged restrictions while the litigation continued.

Why It Matters

Restrictions on mail voting do not fall evenly. Black, Latino, Indigenous, disabled, elderly, rural, and low-income voters may depend on mail ballots because of transportation barriers, work schedules, inaccessible polling places, illness, caregiving responsibilities, or distance from election offices.

A government cannot create foreseeable delivery failures and then use those failures to invalidate ballots. That is not neutral election administration. It shifts the cost of governmental dysfunction onto voters already burdened by unequal access to political power.

Sources

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3. Civil-Rights Groups Sue to Keep Armed ICE Agents Away from Polling Places

Latino and voting-rights organizations joined the City and County of Denver in a federal lawsuit seeking to prevent the deployment of armed immigration agents at or near polling places. The plaintiffs contend that such a deployment would violate federal law and intimidate lawful voters, particularly Latino voters and naturalized citizens.

Administration officials said ICE would not conduct general polling-place patrols but left open the possibility that agents could appear to perform particular enforcement operations.

Why It Matters

The presence of armed immigration agents near polling places would communicate that Latino appearance, language, birthplace, and citizenship are subject to official suspicion. A voter should not have to calculate the possibility of detention, questioning, family separation, or immigration scrutiny before casting a ballot.

The claimed possibility of selective enforcement does not remove the threat. It strengthens it. An enforcement power made unpredictable can be more intimidating than a formally announced patrol because no voter knows whether they, a family member, or a neighbor will be targeted.

Sources

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4. Court Continues Federal Supervision of Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office for Racial Profiling

United States District Judge G. Murray Snow refused to terminate federal court supervision of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. The supervision originated in findings that former Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s immigration-enforcement operations unlawfully targeted Latino drivers.

The court concluded that the county had not demonstrated that it had achieved the objectives of the remedial orders or established a durable remedy that would prevent renewed violations. Judge Snow questioned the county’s traffic-stop studies and cited continuing unexplained disparities, including longer stops for Latino drivers.

Why It Matters

Court supervision is not punishment for conduct that has disappeared. It is a remedy for an institution that has not yet demonstrated that constitutional compliance will survive after oversight ends.

The county wants the court to trust an agency whose history includes systematic racial profiling, unlawful detention, and resistance to judicial authority. Trust must be earned through verifiable change. Ending supervision before a durable remedy exists would transfer the risk of institutional failure back to Latino residents who bore the original harm.

Sources

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5. DHS Campaign Targets Sikh and South Asian Drivers Through Racial Stereotypes

The Department of Homeland Security published and later removed a social-media image promoting immigration enforcement against commercial drivers. The image depicted a brown-skinned, bearded man identified as “Mr. Singh” and told him to get off American roads.

Sikh, South Asian, Hindu, immigrant, and civil-rights organizations condemned the campaign for turning a name closely associated with Sikh identity into shorthand for undocumented status, fraud, and dangerous driving. The campaign also encouraged members of the public to report suspected immigration or commercial-license violations.

Why It Matters

The government did not merely communicate an enforcement policy. It used racial and religious imagery to tell the public what an allegedly unlawful immigrant looks like. That invites ordinary people, employers, police officers, and regulators to treat Sikh and South Asian drivers as presumptively fraudulent or undocumented.

Government-generated stereotypes carry official power. Removing the post after public criticism does not erase the message. DHS used the machinery of the federal government to intensify racial suspicion and then left Sikh and South Asian drivers to bear the consequences.

Sources

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6. Federal Agencies Accuse Berkeley Law of Favoring Black Applicants

The Departments of Justice and Education announced that a joint investigation found that the University of California, Berkeley School of Law had unlawfully favored Black applicants in admissions. The agencies characterized the alleged conduct as race discrimination prohibited by federal law.

The government’s announcement is an administrative allegation, not a judicial finding. Berkeley has disputed the contention that its admission practices violated federal law.

Why It Matters

The administration is using Asian applicants as a racial wedge in its effort to dismantle policies intended to address the exclusion of Black, Latino, Indigenous, and other underrepresented students. That strategy treats racial justice as a competition in which one community’s inclusion must be blamed for another community’s disappointment.

Discrimination against Asian applicants is real when it occurs and should be remedied. But Asian students do not achieve equality by allowing the government to use them as instruments for preserving overwhelmingly white institutions and dismantling opportunities for Black and other underrepresented students.

The government’s framing also erases the institutions that continue to advantage wealth, legacy status, elite schooling, and access to professional networks. It concentrates enforcement attention on the limited consideration of racial inequality while leaving the structures that preserve white advantage largely untouched.

Sources

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7. Government Seeks Supreme Court Approval of Citizenship-Based Voter Database

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to allow states to use an expanded version of the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database to examine voter-registration records. Lower federal courts had blocked the program because of statutory, privacy, accuracy, and wrongful-disenfranchisement concerns.

The revised system reportedly permits bulk searches and the use of Social Security information. The government describes the program as an election-integrity measure. Voting-rights advocates warn that inaccurate or incomplete citizenship data could cause naturalized citizens and other eligible voters to be flagged as noncitizens.

Why It Matters

The government is manufacturing an infrastructure of voter-fraud suspicion around a problem it has not shown to be widespread. Once a voter is placed on a government-generated list of suspected noncitizens, the burden shifts to that person to prove a right the government should not have questioned without reliable evidence.

Naturalized citizens, voters of color, and people with names or records that do not align neatly across databases face the greatest danger. A citizenship-screening system does not need to remove every targeted voter to alter an election. Delays, notices, document demands, and fear may be enough.

Sources

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8. Indigenous Organizations Convene Food Summit on Sovereignty and Traditional Knowledge

Indigenous organizations convened a two-day food summit in Portland on September 9–10. The program centered Indigenous food sovereignty, traditional knowledge, land stewardship, cultural practices, Native-owned food businesses, and community control over food systems.

The summit included knowledge-sharing, traditional food preparation, cultural activities, and an Indigenous marketplace. It treated food not simply as a commodity but as part of political sovereignty, health, culture, land, and intergenerational survival.

Why It Matters

Colonization attacked Indigenous food systems by taking land, destroying ecosystems, restricting hunting and gathering, separating children from traditional knowledge, and replacing self-determined food systems with federally controlled ration and commodity programs.

Food sovereignty is therefore not a lifestyle preference. It is a form of decolonization and self-determination. Indigenous communities are rebuilding systems that federal and state governments deliberately disrupted. Their work should be understood as an exercise of sovereignty, not merely as cultural preservation.

Sources

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9. Justice Department Holds Tribal Consultation on Violence Against Native Women

The Justice Department’s Office on Violence Against Women held its 21st annual government-to-government consultation with Tribal Nations from September 9–11 at the Tulalip Resort Casino in Washington State.

The consultation allowed tribal leaders to address federal administration of programs and policies concerning violence against American Indian and Alaska Native women. Because the consultation had just concluded, no final governmental response or measurable outcome was yet available.

Why It Matters

Native women continue to face extreme levels of violence within jurisdictional systems created by federal interference with tribal sovereignty. Consultation is legally and politically important, but consultation without resources, jurisdiction, enforcement, and accountable action can document violence without ending it.

The federal government must not confuse hearing tribal leaders with transferring power to Tribal Nations. Sovereignty requires authority to prevent violence, prosecute offenders, protect survivors, and design community-based responses—not another record of concerns the government already knows exist.

Sources

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10. Native Hawaiian Programs Face Coordinated Constitutional Challenges

Native Hawaiian education, health, housing, and land programs are facing multiple legal challenges claiming that eligibility provisions involving Native Hawaiian ancestry constitute unconstitutional racial discrimination.

The challenges include litigation against the Native Hawaiian Health Scholarship Program and the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act. Native Hawaiian organizations maintain that these programs arise from the United States’ political and trust responsibilities and from the distinct history of colonization, annexation, and dispossession in Hawaiʻi.

Why It Matters

The lawsuits attempt to rewrite a political and colonial relationship as though it were merely a dispute among racial groups competing for benefits. That framing erases the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, the taking of Native land, and the continuing obligations created by federal and state law.

Programs intended to repair dispossession are being portrayed as the discrimination. That reversal is central to the modern attack on racial justice: white racial power is removed from the history, remedial programs are isolated from the injuries they address, and equality is redefined to require preservation of the status quo.

Sources

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11. Action Alert: Census Bureau Proposes Removing Race and Ethnicity Questions and Excluding Millions of Immigrants

The Census Bureau published a proposed rule containing two independent but related changes to the decennial census.

First, the Bureau proposes new residence criteria under which foreign citizens would be counted for congressional apportionment only if they were United States citizens or lawful permanent residents as of Census Day. Other foreign citizens living in the United States would not be counted for apportionment.

Second, the Bureau proposes a regulation expressly providing that no question about race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation may appear on the decennial census questionnaire or any questionnaire used to enumerate the population.

The proposal would not prohibit race and ethnicity questions on the American Community Survey or other surveys that are not used for population enumeration. It also would not prevent the Bureau from obtaining demographic information from administrative records and other governmental sources.

The Bureau describes race as an “immaterial personal characteristic” and argues that eliminating demographic questions would reduce response burdens, protect privacy, and improve the population count. The proposal has not become final. Public comments must be received by October 13, 2026.

Why It Matters

The Constitution requires counting persons, not only citizens or people whom the government considers politically desirable. Excluding immigrant residents would transfer political representation and federal resources away from communities where people actually live, work, attend school, receive services, and are governed.

Weakening census race data creates an additional danger. As I explain in A Colorblind Census in a Racist Society: We Cannot Eliminate Racial Disparities by Refusing to Count Them, eliminating race and ethnicity questions from the census would not eliminate racism or immediately erase every racial dataset. It would remove the authoritative population denominators and geographic benchmarks needed to determine whether racial disparities exist and how extensive they are.

Without that census foundation, data concerning voting, housing, education, employment, health, environmental hazards, policing, and criminal justice become easier to attack as incomplete, unrepresentative, or methodologically unreliable. Civil-rights plaintiffs, researchers, community organizations, and government enforcement agencies would face greater difficulty and expense proving discrimination.

My work with African-descendant communities in Europe showed me what happens when governments refuse to collect meaningful racial data. Officials repeatedly denied racial disparities because the affected communities lacked the data needed to prove them. During the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, we had to explain that collecting racial data does not declare race to be a biological reality. It documents the social reality and measurable consequences of racism.

A supposedly colorblind census in a society structured by racism does not produce equality. It protects white racial power by weakening the evidence necessary to identify discrimination, enforce civil-rights laws, distribute resources, and hold government accountable. Governments that refuse to count racial inequality make that inequality easier to deny.

The public-comment period provides an opportunity to place these consequences into the administrative record. Comments should explain how eliminating race and ethnicity questions would damage civil-rights enforcement, public-health research, voting-rights analysis, redistricting, resource allocation, and communities’ ability to prove racial inequality.

Silence will make it easier for the Census Bureau to portray the change as a neutral administrative decision rather than the deliberate removal of one of the country’s most important tools for measuring racism.

Submit a Public Comment

The Census Bureau is accepting public comments through October 13, 2026. Comments should identify the rule by Docket No. USBC-2026-0628.

Submit a public comment through Regulations.gov.

Comments become part of the public record. The Census Bureau states that anonymous comments are permitted by entering “N/A” in required identifying fields. Any personal information submitted voluntarily may be posted publicly.

Sources

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12. New Mexico Tribe and Pueblos Defend Sovereignty Against Commercial Sports Betting

The Mescalero Apache Tribe and the Pueblos of Pojoaque, Sandia, and Isleta completed their presentation in litigation challenging Kalshi’s operation of sports-event contracts in New Mexico.

The tribal governments contend that the company’s activities intrude upon tribal gaming rights and state-tribal compacts by offering products that function as sports wagers without complying with the legal framework governing gaming in the state.

Why It Matters

The dispute concerns more than commercial competition. Tribal gaming is tied to sovereignty, negotiated governmental agreements, employment, and revenue used to provide public services.

A private company should not be able to avoid the regulatory system binding Tribal Nations by relabeling sports wagers as financial contracts. Permitting that result would allow outside businesses to profit from a market developed under tribal compacts while weakening the governments whose sovereignty made that market possible.

Sources

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13. New York Advocates Seek Hate-Crime Investigation of Reported Anti-Asian Attack

CAIR-New York called for a hate-crime investigation following a reported attack on an Asian man in Long Island City. According to the organization, the circumstances warranted investigation of possible racial motivation.

The available public information establishes that an advocacy organization reported the incident and requested a hate-crime investigation. It does not establish an independent police or prosecutorial finding that a hate crime occurred.

Why It Matters

Anti-Asian violence is repeatedly minimized as an isolated confrontation before investigators seriously examine racial motivation. That practice denies the broader environment in which Asian people are blamed for disease, immigration, economic competition, foreign governments, and supposed disloyalty.

Anti-Asian racism is often treated as episodic because public discussion begins and ends with each individual attack. That approach conceals the political rhetoric and institutional practices that repeatedly construct Asian people as foreign, diseased, economically threatening, or disloyal—even when they and their families have lived in the United States for generations.

A hate-crime investigation does not predetermine guilt. It requires authorities to investigate racial motive instead of defining it away. The refusal to look for racism is one of the ways government ensures that racism remains officially invisible, one case at a time.

Sources

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14. Only Black Juror Faces Public Attack After Refusing to Find Lindsay Clancy Not Criminally Responsible

A Massachusetts judge declared a mistrial in the prosecution of Lindsay Clancy, a white mother accused of killing her three children. The central issue was whether Clancy was criminally responsible because of her mental condition at the time of the killings.

After the mistrial, three jurors told reporters that the jury had divided 11–1 in favor of finding Clancy not criminally responsible. One juror identified the holdout as the jury’s only Black member. Those statements are accounts from jurors who disagreed with him—not an official finding—and the Black juror has not publicly explained his reasoning.

The non-Black jurors further claimed that the Black juror acknowledged having reasonable doubt but would not vote for the verdict they favored. Because jury deliberations are private and the Black juror has not given his account, that claim must remain attributed to the jurors making it.

The holdout reportedly maintained that Clancy had not established that mental illness rendered her legally incapable of criminal responsibility. His judgment mattered because Massachusetts law required each juror to evaluate criminal responsibility independently and required unanimity for a verdict.

Public commentary quickly transformed the mistrial into a story about one allegedly irrational Black juror. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis joined the criticism, notwithstanding that he had no role in the Massachusetts prosecution and no direct knowledge of the deliberations.

Why It Matters

The eleven non-Black jurors were treated as the neutral measure of reasonableness. The only Black juror was treated as the racial deviation requiring investigation and public condemnation. Yet unanimity does not mean that a juror must surrender an independently reached judgment because eleven other people disagree.

My newly published essay, “Reasonable Doubt Is Not Color-Blind: Black and White Experience in Maternal Mental Illness Cases,” examines the racial assumptions beneath that response. It compares the treatment of Clancy and other white mothers with cases involving Black mothers, including Kenisha Berry, Dimone Fleming, LaShaun Harris, and Latarsha Sanders.

Reasonable doubt may be formally color-blind, but judgments about what is reasonable are shaped by experience. Black and white Americans have not experienced policing, health care, motherhood, mental illness, or the presumption of innocence identically. What appears to some white observers as obvious compassion for a mentally ill mother may appear to a Black observer as a form of grace the legal system has not distributed equally.

Race may not have been the only influence on the disagreement. But white experience was treated as neutral while Black experience was singled out as bias. The public investigated the Black juror’s race while leaving the racial experience of the non-Black jurors unnamed.

The mistrial should not be reduced to the claim that one Black juror prevented justice. The legal system required his independent judgment. Treating that judgment as illegitimate because it did not validate the conclusions of eleven non-Black jurors reproduces the racial hierarchy the jury system is supposed to resist.

Sources

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15. Reported National Archives Closures Proceed Without Tribal Consultation

The National Archives facility in Chicago was scheduled to close by the end of September. Reporting based partly on an interagency email also indicated plans affecting facilities in Seattle and San Francisco.

The facilities hold extensive Bureau of Indian Affairs and other federal records concerning tribal enrollment, trust funds, land, treaties, boarding schools, and government relations with Tribal Nations. Tribal representatives and advocates reported that meaningful government-to-government consultation had not occurred before the closure decisions.

Why It Matters

These are not merely federal records about Native people. They include the documentary evidence Tribal Nations and families may need to establish citizenship, land rights, trust claims, family histories, boarding-school experiences, and federal misconduct.

Closing or relocating the archives without tribal consultation continues the paternalism that produced many of the records in the first place. The federal government asserts control over Indigenous history, decides where that history will be kept, and then tells Tribal Nations when and how they may gain access to it.

Digitization is not a substitute for consultation, especially when enormous portions of the collections have not been digitized. The government has no legitimate basis for making tribal records inaccessible for years while treating the affected Tribal Nations as outside observers.

Sources

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16. Salvadoran Families Left in Limbo as Administration Refuses to Decide TPS Status

The administration had not announced whether it would extend Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans, leaving families uncertain about whether they would retain work authorization and protection from removal.

TPS decisions affect not only recent arrivals but people who have built lives in the United States over many years. Delay threatens employment, housing, health coverage, family stability, and the ability to make even basic plans.

Why It Matters

Legal uncertainty is itself a form of governmental control. The administration does not have to order an immediate mass removal to destabilize a community. It can withhold a decision and force families to live under the continuing possibility of job loss, detention, deportation, and separation.

Salvadoran families are being required to prove their worthiness again and again while the government claims unlimited time to decide whether their lives may continue. That imbalance is not administrative inconvenience. It is power exercised through uncertainty.

Sources

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17. Texas Education Officials Approve Curriculum Promoting a Distorted Account of Islam

Overlooked Development from the Previous Week

On September 4, the Texas State Board of Education approved high-school instructional material that links “radical Islam” with the September 11 attacks and other violence. Subsequent reporting during this update period brought wider attention to the curriculum.

The issue is not whether schools may teach accurately about organizations that invoke Islam to justify political violence. They may and should. The problem arises when instructional framing encourages students to associate Islam and Muslims generally with terrorism while failing to provide comparable historical and political context.

Why It Matters

Muslim students should not enter a classroom where their religion is treated as a public-safety problem. When Islam is introduced primarily through terrorism, the curriculum teaches more than history. It teaches students which classmates should be feared.

The distortion is especially dangerous because anti-Muslim policy has repeatedly relied on the assumption that Muslim identity is evidence of foreignness, extremism, or disloyalty. Schools should equip students to recognize that racialization—not reproduce it under the authority of the state.

Sources

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18. Texas Orders Teacher-Preparation Programs to Bar Discussion of the 1619 Project

Texas officials directed teacher-preparation programs to prevent faculty from teaching or endorsing concepts associated with the 1619 Project. The directive extends the state’s campaign against so-called critical race theory from public-school classrooms into the institutions that prepare and certify teachers.

The 1619 Project centers slavery and its continuing consequences in the history of the United States. It has generated legitimate historical debate, but the Texas directive does not merely invite examination or criticism. It uses state certification power to restrict whether future teachers may engage with the project at all.

Why It Matters

This is government censorship aimed at controlling how teachers understand race before they enter a classroom. The state is not simply deciding what students must learn. It is policing the intellectual preparation of adults and threatening programs that refuse to enforce the approved historical narrative.

The target is not one publication. The target is any framework that treats slavery and anti-Black racism as constitutive parts of American law, politics, wealth, and democracy. Texas is training teachers to avoid historical analysis that may expose how white racial power was created and preserved.

Sources

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19. Trump Administration Proposes Eliminating Post-Employment Grace Period for H-1B and Other Visa Holders

The Department of Homeland Security proposed eliminating the discretionary 60-day grace period that may allow certain nonimmigrant workers to remain in the United States temporarily after their employment ends.

The proposal covers workers in E-1, E-2, E-3, H-1B, H-1B1, L-1, O-1, and TN classifications. Unless they obtained another lawful basis to remain, affected workers could be required to leave immediately after the cessation of employment.

Why It Matters

Eliminating the grace period would give employers greater power over immigrant workers. Losing a job could mean simultaneously losing income, immigration status, housing stability, children’s schooling, and the ability to remain in the country.

That threat discourages workers from reporting discrimination, wage theft, unsafe conditions, or retaliation. A worker whose legal presence depends on uninterrupted employment does not bargain freely with an employer. The proposed rule would turn immigration status into an even sharper instrument of labor control.

Sources

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20. United States Stands Alone Against U.N. “Correct the Map” Resolution

Overlooked Development from the Previous Week

On September 3, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution urging governments, international organizations, educational institutions, publishers, and media organizations to use world maps that more accurately represent the relative size of countries and continents. The resolution addressed distortions associated with the Mercator projection.

The United States cast the only vote against the resolution. The measure was recommendatory, not a legally binding order requiring countries to adopt one specific map.

Why It Matters

The Mercator projection enlarges Europe and North America while dramatically reducing the apparent size of Africa and other regions near the equator. That distortion has shaped generations of students’ understanding of which nations and continents are geographically central, large, and powerful.

Maps are not politically innocent. A projection developed for navigation became a visual language of empire. Correcting that distortion does not change geography; it changes the inherited image through which people have been taught to see geography. The United States’ solitary opposition reflects resistance even to symbolic challenges to the spatial assumptions of colonialism and white supremacy.

Sources

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21. Violence, Vandalism, and Political Rhetoric Target Muslim Communities Around September 11

Muslim civil-rights organizations reported threats, mosque vandalism, inflammatory political statements, and other incidents surrounding the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

The individual incidents remain subject to their own investigations and evidentiary records. Together, however, they occurred within a predictable annual escalation of rhetoric treating Muslim, Arab, Middle Eastern, and South Asian communities as collectively responsible for terrorism.

Why It Matters

Muslim communities have been forced for 25 years to relive September 11 as both a national tragedy and a recurring justification for surveillance, exclusion, vandalism, threats, and violence against them.

As I explain in “Twenty-Five Years After 9/11: Whiteness, Racism, and the Lives America Chose to Value,” the United States did not limit its response to pursuing the people responsible for the attacks. It turned a national tragedy into permission to target entire populations.

Within hours, millions of people were placed under suspicion because of their names, religion, clothing, ancestry, skin color, or perceived nationality. Muslims, Arabs, South Asians, Sikhs, and people mistakenly perceived to belong to those communities were threatened, assaulted, fired, denied services, and attacked in their homes, businesses, and places of worship.

The attackers did not need to know who their victims were. They acted on who they believed the victims to be. That is how racialization works: it takes people with different nationalities, cultures, histories, and religions and constructs them as a single dangerous race.

The government condemned some private acts of violence while embedding similar assumptions into immigration enforcement, detention, surveillance, airport security, and national-security policy. Private citizens were told not to assault Muslims, but government agencies treated Muslim identity, Arab ancestry, immigration status, religious practice, and national origin as evidence of possible danger.

The demand that Muslims continually condemn terrorism imposes a collective responsibility that is not demanded of white Christians after violence committed by white Christian extremists. Political rhetoric sustains that double standard by presenting Muslim belonging as conditional and Muslim citizenship as permanently suspect.

The lesson of September 11 should never have been that American fear authorizes unlimited government power. Grief does not justify racism. National security does not erase constitutional rights. Violence against one population cannot be answered by making another population disposable.

Commemoration cannot become an annual license for racialized suspicion. A country does not honor its dead by denying the humanity of other people. Twenty-five years after September 11, remembrance must become accountability.

Sources

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Bottom Line

Across education, voting, immigration, law, and public memory, government institutions are narrowing who may participate, whose history may be taught, whose records remain accessible, and whose judgment counts as reasonable.

The administration’s policies do not simply withdraw protection. They redistribute governmental power toward institutions already structured by white racial hierarchy. Diversity requirements are removed. Racial data are placed at risk. Teachers are instructed not to confront slavery’s continuing consequences. Immigrant workers are made more dependent on employers. Naturalized citizens are subjected to unreliable voter screening. Sikh drivers are transformed into enforcement targets through official stereotypes.

At the same time, resistance continues. Tribal Nations are defending sovereignty in court and rebuilding food systems outside colonial control. Civil-rights organizations are challenging voter intimidation. Courts are refusing to terminate remedies before constitutional violations have been durably corrected. A Black juror exercised the independent judgment the jury system required, even when eleven non-Black jurors and a hostile public demanded a different conclusion.

The Census proposal is not final. Public comments are due October 13, 2026. Anyone concerned about voting rights, health disparities, education, housing, employment discrimination, environmental justice, policing, or enforcement of civil-rights laws has a direct interest in opposing the removal of race and ethnicity questions from the decennial census.

Submit a public comment here.

Racial justice requires us to identify the legal rules, administrative practices, historical narratives, and definitions of reasonableness through which white racial power reproduces itself—and to intervene while those systems can still be challenged.

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Search Note

This update was prepared through a comprehensive search conducted from the beginning of the research process rather than through a limited preliminary review.

The search included government and primary legal materials; court decisions and filings; Federal Register notices; agency announcements; national and regional reporting; civil-rights organizations; and community-based sources covering Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian and Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, Arab and Muslim, Haitian, Salvadoran, and other immigrant communities.

Subject-matter searches included criminal justice, education, employment, health, housing, immigration, Indigenous sovereignty, voting rights, religion, racial violence, federal civil-rights enforcement, data collection, and international human rights.

Inclusion in this update does not mean that every allegation has been adjudicated. Verified facts, litigants’ allegations, advocacy claims, juror accounts, reported administrative plans, and unresolved investigations have been identified according to their evidentiary status.

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 Vernellia R. Randall, Professor Emerita of Law, University of Dayton School of Law.  This article is the sole intellectual and scholarly work of Vernellia Randall. ChatGPT was used only as a drafting aid comparable to a research or editing assistant. All concepts, analysis, legal reasoning, interpretations, and conclusions are entirely the author’s own, and the author assumes full responsibility for the content.