Abstract

Victoria M. Beatty, Dismantling White Supremacy: Modern Strategies for a Modernized Foe, 25 Berkeley Journal of Black Law & Policy 14 (2025) (512 footnotes). (Full Document)

Donald J. Trump was born June 14, 1946, to Frederick Trump, Sr. and Mary Trump. Fred was a multi-million dollar real estate developer, so the family lived in an upscale community in Queens, New York. Donald Trump joined his father’s business in 1968.3 He avoided the draft during the Vietnam War with a medical deferment due to a physician diagnosis of bones spurs. Donald Trump’s first big real estate deal came in 1976.5 He wanted to develop a Grand Hyatt Hotel, but he did not have the money to purchase the hotel nor the land. Instead, he used his father’s clout in the Democratic Party to convince New York City government officials to give him a 40-year tax break allowing him not to pay property taxes on the hotel. Because of his father, he was given an abatement valued at $400 million over 40 years. He used the abatement to outbid competitors and secure the deal.

When Donald Trump entered the casino business in 1990, the casino began to fail so his father saved him. Fred purchased more than $3 million in casino chips to infuse his son’s failing company with cash, the purchase was later deemed an illegal loan. Before his father died, Donald Trump received approximately $413 million from his father. Today, President Trump is the first United States President who was elected as a convicted felon on 34 counts of falsifying business records related to hush money payments to an adult film star. In 2023, he was found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll in 1996 and a $5 million judgment was awarded. He had no military or political experience prior to becoming the 45th President of the United States. When he ran for reelection and lost, he encouraged rioters who stormed the Capitol to overturn the election that resulted in the death of five people and, as of January 6, 2025, led to the arrest of 1,583 people.

In the first few days of his second term, his erratic tariff policies “suspended diplomatic ties, shaken markets and confounded entire industries.” In an attempt to eliminate government bureaucracy, he cut thousands of federal jobs and gutted USAID, the effects of which will lead to at least 23 million children across the globe losing access to education and 95 million people losing access to basic healthcare. A year after assuming the Presidency, Trump entered the U.S. in a war with Iran by killing 175 school children and staff at Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school. Trump initially blamed Iran for killing its own children until the findings of a U.S. military investigation revealed the missile belonged to the U.S., to which he admitted the U.S. hit the school by mistake. The damage inflicted by his incompetence, however horrific, pales in comparison to the incompetence of his administration.

On November 12, 2024, Trump nominated Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense. During the nomination process, Hegseth’s former sister-in-law sent an affidavit to Senators alleging he physically abused his former wife and was an alcoholic. In 2007, Pete Hegseth became the executive director of Veterans for Freedom. By 2008, the organization was operating at a deficit of $700,000, having raised over $8.7 million in revenue but spending over $9 million. In 2010, a mere three years later, Veterans for Freedom reported less than $265,000 in revenue. He was fired in 2011.23 That same year Hegseth was appointed executive director of Concerned Veterans for America. By 2016 the organization reported revenue of $15.9 million and $16.4 million in expenses; he was forced to resign. In 2024, the New Yorker revealed a previously undisclosed “whistle-blower report” by Concerned Veterans for America employees accusing Hegseth of sexual misconduct and repeated incidents of public intoxication and at times needing to be carried out of the organization’s events.

Hegseth joined Fox News in June 2014 and became an official host of Fox & Friends Weekend January 2017. In that same year, a woman attending the Republican Women’s Convention claimed Hegseth, the convention’s keynote speaker, drugged her and sexually assaulted her. She filed a police report with Monterey Police Department. The Police Report recommended the case be forwarded to the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office for review. The Monterey County District Attorney’s office refused to press charges. When the victim and her husband threatened to sue in 2020, Hegseth secretly agreed to a financial settlement. In 2021, Hegseth was barred from participating in President Biden’s Inauguration because a military officer was alarmed by his tattoos of a Crusader’s cross and the motto “Deus Vult,” a medieval term coopted by white supremacists and far-right militants. The military officer alerted his superiors that Hegseth may be an ““insider threat.”

Hegseth was confirmed as Secretary of Defense on January 24, 2025, and now runs an organization that employs over 3 million individuals with an $857 billion budget. Once confirmed, he immediately appointed his younger brother Phil Hegseth, as senior adviser to the secretary for the Department of Homeland Security and liaison officer to the Defense Department. Before assuming his position in the Department of Defense, Phil Hegseth ran a podcast production company and worked on social media podcasts.

In March 2025, The Atlantic reported a journalist was added to a Signal group chat where Hegseth shared top secret information on military operations. A month later he shared more confidential military operations on another Signal chat. House Republicans blocked efforts to open an official inquiry on Hegseth’s incompetent security breaches. As Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth has no senior military, national security, or government experience and has the least overall military experience of any defense secretary in U.S. history.

When President Biden pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021, triggering a Taliban takeover and a disastrous evacuation, Pete Hegseth during his Senate confirmation hearing blamed it on Biden’s “DEI hire.” He was referring to General Lloyd J. Austin III, the nation’s first Black Defense Secretary, who Hegseth has now replaced. Over the course of General Austin’s 41-year career, he served as the 12th commander of the United States Central Command, the 33rd Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, Commander of U.S. Forces in Iraq, Silver Star recipient, recipient of five Defense Distinguished Service Medals, a Legion of Merit recipient, and commanded in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan at the one-, two-, three-, and four-star levels. Despite the General’s commendations, Hegseth, the most unexperienced Secretary of Defense this country has seen, testified to Congress that the General was hired for nothing more than his racial identity.

President Trump appointed Elon Musk to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Elon and his brother Kimball were both born in South Africa and emigrated to Canada in 1989 to avoid South Africa’s mandatory military service. The brothers then moved to California where they founded Zip2.43 Elon and Kimball received funding from their father to launch the company. The brothers sold the company to Compaq for $307 million. Following its sale, Musk founded Paypal, Space X, Open AI, and became CEO of Tesla Motors.

Over the last 20 years, Musk has reportedly received $38 billion from government loans, subsidies, and tax credits to sustain his companies. When Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy, Musk received a $465 million loan from the United States Energy Department and has collected $11.4 billion in regulatory credits. SpaceX has been granted at least $18 billion in federal contracts in the past decade.

DOGE’s stated goal was to reduce government spending and bureaucracy, improve the procurement process, and reform regulations. By November 2025, DOGE fired 271,000 federal workers and federal government spending was $248 billion higher than spending in November 2024.51 He dismantled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and cancelled nearly 2,300 government contracts. In April 2025, a whistleblower testified before Congress that after DOGE infiltrated the personnel records of the National Labor Relations Board, there were several log-in attempts from a Russian IP address. Congress refused to investigate the claims. Shortly after the accusation, Elon’s SpaceX was awarded $6 billion dollars. A month after receiving the grant, Musk left DOGE.

When Boeing commercial jets experienced a series of mechanical and system failures, Elon Musk insisted that Boeing’s DEI programs resulted in the hiring of unqualified pilots and technicians. He went so far to warn his social media followers, “People will die due to DEI.” Of course, he conveniently ignored the story of John Barnett, whose death was “was ruled a suicide” in 2024, shortly after giving deposition testimony on how Boeing was cutting corners on safety and compliance to make a profit. Barnett’s death was two months before the death of Joshua Dean, another Boeing whistleblower who served as a quality auditor at a Boeing supplier who died of a bacterial infection at the age of 45.58

Trump, Hegseth, and Musk are not stories of merit. They are stories of undeserved and unearned wealth accumulation. Meritocracy presumes “opportunity [is awarded] based on individual merit rather than inherited status.” True meritocracy requires the existence of two truths: (1) that discrimination is a thing of the past, and (2) that those who succeed in life earned their success because they were the best.

Meritocracy has become the rallying cry for those in the far-right. Terms like “DEI hire’ or 'Affirmative Action hire’ are used to discredit the talent of people of color and women, presumably because somewhere in the shadows is a more qualified white man who was denied the opportunity.

On March 26, 2024, a large container ship lost power, navigation, and engine controls before crashing into the Francis Scott Key Bridge killing six maintenance workers. The operator of the ship had to pay the Department of Justice over $100 million to settle a lawsuit for breaches of maintenance and safety protocols. Nonetheless, the duly elected Black mayor, Brandon Scott, a man who received over 70 percent of the vote was blamed and called “Baltimore’s DEI mayor.”

Rep. Phil Lyman, a failed gubernatorial candidate, went so far as to chastise Maryland’s Governor, Wes Moore, a Black veteran who graduated from Johns Hopkins University and received a master’s from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, became an investment banker in New York, published five books, and was CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation, for prioritizing diversity over the wellbeing and security of citizens. Even in the face of Black men and women operating at the pinnacle of their industries, meritocracy is used by white people to demean Black success.

Vice President Kamala Harris served as attorney general of California for 7 years, was a 4-year U.S. Senator, and first Black, first female, and first Asian American Vice President in U.S. history. Congressman Tim Burchett called her a “DEI hire” and warned President Biden of choosing mediocrity. Tim Burchett does not have a graduate degree. In 2006, Burchett failed to report PAC contributions. In 2008 he was fined for the offense. In 2018, he failed to report income on his disclosure forms and the FBI questioned him about tax evasion. No formal charges or investigations were brought even after he used $20,000 in campaign donations to pay for a personal attorney in 2024.71

Justice Ketanji Jackson, a Harvard Law School graduate, editor of the Harvard Law Review, was the judicial clerk of Supreme Court Justice Breyer and served as a federal judge for 8 years. The Federalist Society wrote President Biden handed Jackson a position on the highest court in the land based on her sex and race.

In White by Force and the Racialized State of Exception, Vincent Jungkunz constructed a model of white supremacy. He argues white supremacy is grounded in a term he coined Aspirational Failure. Jungkunz opined that at the heart of white supremacy is the cognitive dissonance that occurs when white people, who are told and tell themselves that they are better because they are white, begin experiencing a life of setbacks, failures, and deep-seeded feelings of inadequacy that “do not even come close to such a position of superiority.”

Jungkunz argues Aspirational Failure leads to a Perpetuation Emergency. The Perpetuation Emergency creates in white people an urgent need to justify their superiority, and so they create a public enemy, often a racial group “who have taken what is rightfully theirs: success.” The public enemy becomes the scapegoat and the excuse for their own mediocrity and failure through the creation of a threat that the racial group is “violent and dangerous, will steal their jobs and promotions, and threaten their way of life and their lives.”

Jungkunz defines this scapegoat as “ignorance with a purpose.” The ““us versus them” framework is an aged tool of the white elite to coax the white middle and lower class to believe their failure is a result of a racial group taking something from them: “This deadly combination leads the white underclass to focus their anger, fear, anxieties, and hatred toward racialized groups whom they blame for the fact they will never attain whiteness.”

Jungkunz asserts, when white people fail where Black people succeed, the inherent fallacy of white supremacy is exposed, requiring them to ensure Black failure through other means. Jungkunz calls this Force Failure: “[i]f we consider just how much energy has gone into trying to dominate, control, criminalize, and scapegoat Black people in America, the reality of enormous Black success becomes a terrifying emergency for whites, because it completely undermines their claims that they are 'better than.”’

Jungkunz’s white supremacist model has two principles: (1) an ideology of whiteness that claims a non-existent innate superiority based upon race, and (2) the materiality which requires “the maldistribution of life’s chances, opportunities, and resources in favor of those designated white to the detriment of those defined as the racial 'other.”’

The two principles are the foundation for his three-pronged theoretical model of how white supremacy is preserved. First is “Victim Blaming” where the victims of racism become the sole cause for their unjust living conditions.84Second is “Undue White Success” which conceals the illegitimacy of white wealth and power: “white people use racially symbolic words such as, 'merit,’ 'hard work,’ 'deserving,’ 'equal opportunity,’ or “I/You did it on my/your own,’ ... when the white supremacy project has, to some extent, worked for them ...” Third is the “Spin Cycle of White Victimhood” which emerges once the inevitability of white failure occurs, white people become victims of circumstances that focus on a “racially imbalanced framework of deservingness,” like the migrant who wants their job or the affirmative action program that preferred the less qualified Black person over them.

Jungkunz’s three-pronged theoretical model is useful but lacks a fundamental component. Specifically, he neglected to incorporate the ubiquitous nature of white supremacy. In America, racism evolves and recreates itself, particularly when its methods are exposed. “The rules and reasons the political system employs to enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy, evolve and change as they are challenged.” Michelle Alexander, in The New Jim Crow, termed this “preservation through transformation,” essentially it is the process of maintaining whiteness through “rules and rhetoric change.”

The only mission of white supremacy is that it persists. Thus, to defeat this ancient foe, it is necessary to critically assess the tools used in each iteration. Part I of this Article examines post-slavery America and the federal government’s brief efforts across all three branches to remedy slavery’s effects. Part II explores the historical evolution of color blindness, its eventual adoption as sound legal doctrine, and how it was ushered into the Oval Office, legislatures, and courthouses by the New Right. Part III advances two legal strategies to dismantle the newest iteration of white supremacy: first, that universities can satisfy heightened scrutiny by confronting their own role as architects of the racism that affirmative action seeks to remedy; and second, that the First Amendment may shield DEI--and thus affirmative action-- when it is a core institutional commitment. Part IV concludes by honoring the hundreds of millions of Black souls sacrificed to sustain whiteness.

Perhaps a disclaimer is necessary before proceeding further. This Article and my contentions herein are not about all white people, so I beg you, do not color these pages with a politicized projection that permits you to look away. I write to dismantle the system built on the backs of Black Americans, and to do that requires first, we tell the truth about what happened.

[. . .]

The fight for Black citizenship is but a part of a human rights movement to remove the veil of ignorance from everyone’s eyes. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander asked, who are civil rights advocates fighting for? She noted that according to the 1950 census, the majority of southern whites were semiliterate and only a tiny minority were affluent. They were victims of low pay and harsh working conditions, but remained appeased because at least they were superior to Black people: “[t]ime and time again, poor and working-class whites were persuaded to choose their racial status interests over their common economic interests with blacks, resulting in the emergence of new caste systems that only marginally benefited whites but were devastating for African Americans.” In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin wrote, “[t]his is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, ... that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it ...”

Unity through truth is the only way to achieve Dr. King’s dream of equality. Black people must seek more than reforms that allow a few to ascend the present racial caste system and instead build a new system that acknowledges the humanity and dignity of all persons. Middle- and lower-class whites must learn the truth about what happened to Black people in America to understand how and why they were used to preserve the privilege of a few. Honestly, no one article could ever tell the entire story, but in honor of the lives lost, the pages that follow are a meager attempt.

Between 1501 until 1866, the transatlantic slave trade and American slavery killed approximately 50 to 60 million Africans. Between the arrival of Columbus and the beginning of the 1900s, 2.5 to 5 million Native American people were enslaved. From 1865 to 1877, the Reconstruction Era, to preserve white supremacy in the face of Black progress, more than 2,000 Black people were lynched and thousands more murdered in 34 documented acts of white mob violence across 26 states. Between 1864 and 1876, there were 631 attacks on African American schools. Wilberforce University, the first Black-owned college was set on fire in 1865.465 LeMoyne-Owen College, a historically Black college or university, was destroyed by fire in 1866.466

During the Jim Crow Era, 1880s through the 1960s, there were reported 4,000 racial terror lynchings, and white terrorism killed countless more:

Major race riots occurred in Phoenix, South Carolina (1898); Lake City, North Carolina (1898); Wilmington, North Carolina (1898); New Orleans, Louisiana (1900); Atlanta, Georgia (1906); Chattanooga, Tennessee (1906); Greensburg, Indiana (1906); Brownsville, Texas (1906); and Palestine, Texas (1910). These riots were generally instigated by whites to maintain their supremacy and to enact revenge.

To escape the racial violence and in pursuit of economic and educational opportunities, over 7 million Black people fled the South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states in one of the largest movements of people in United States history. The Great Black Migration (1910-1970) changed racial demographics across the Nation. Between 1917 and 1921, another wave of race riots occurred in the cities to which Black Americans migrated for safety:

Race riots occurred in East St. Louis, Illinois (1917); Houston, Texas (1917); Chester and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1918); Chicago, Illinois (1919); Elaine, Arkansas (1919); Washington, D.C. (1919); Omaha, Nebraska (1919); Charleston, South Carolina (1919); Knoxville, Tennessee (1919); and Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921).

In 1919, between April and November, there were at least 25 race riots and over 97 recorded lynchings. White mobs killed so many Black people that the period is dubbed the “Red Summer” of 1919.473 The violence was sparked by 380,000 Black veterans returning from WWI: “Because of their military service, Black veterans were seen as a particular threat to Jim Crow and racial subordination.” In Elain, Arkansas alone, over 200 Black men, women, and children were murdered over 3 days. During the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, a white mob killed 300 Black people in one of the worst instances of racial violence in American history.

Between 1947 and 1970, the Ku Klux Klan was linked to over 50 dynamite explosions targeting Black homes and Black churches. White supremacists were responsible for the brutal lynching of 14-year-old Emmet Till in 1955477 and the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four Black girls in 1963.478 The NYPD, CIA, and FBI have been accused of concealing evidence related to the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965,479 the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, and the murder of Fred Hampton in his sleep by Chicago police in 1969.480

The War on Drugs began in the late 1970s through the late 1990s, and undoubtedly targeted the Black population, particularly Black men. According to the National Survey of Drug Use and Health, Black and white drug use became increasingly similar over time. In 1979, the difference in drug usage by race was approximately 3 percent, by the late-1980s, the difference dropped to less than 1 percent. Despite this fact, in 1980, Black drug arrests were 500 arrests per 100,000, and by 1989 the rate increased 200 percent to 1,500 arrests per 100,000. But white drug arrests in 1980 were approximately 200 arrests per 100,000, which increased only 50 percent to 400 drug arrests per 100,000 by 1989.483

With the enactment of the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988, first-time traffickers were sentenced to mandatory minimums of 10 years for the distribution of 5,000 or more grams of powder cocaine and 50 grams or more of crack cocaine. For drug users, the Acts required a 5-year mandatory minimum for possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine or 500 grams of powder cocaine. The 100-to-1 ratio difference in sentencing was a direct attack on the Black community since “[t]he overwhelming majority of crack cocaine offenders were Black: 91.4 percent in 1992 and 84.7 percent in 2000.” Prior to 1986, the average federal drug sentence for Black defendants was 11 percent higher than for whites, four years after the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts, the average federal drug sentence for Black people was 49 percent higher than the average federal drug sentence for whites. In 1985, 22,000 newly admitted inmates had a drug offense as the most serious conviction, 39 percent were Black and 38 percent were white. By 2003, 112,000 newly admitted inmates had a drug offense as the most serious conviction, 53 percent were Black, 30 percent white.

What made the mass incarceration of Black males for crack cocaine particularly violent was the link between the CIA and the explosion of crack cocaine in Black communities specifically. In 1996, Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News wrote a 3-part series entitled Dark Alliance. Webb claimed the CIA sold $54 million worth of cocaine at bargain-basement prices to a South Central crack dealer named Ricky Donnell Ross to fund the CIA-backed Contra army. Ricky converted the cocaine to crack and wholesaled it to gangs across the country. In 1988, the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations concluded the U.S. State department paid drug traffickers from funds authorized for humanitarian assistance to the Contras.

On June 17, 2015, a mass shooting by a white supremacist at the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina killed 9 people. On March 20, 2017, a white supremacist killed a Black man after travelling to New York for the sole purpose of killing Black men. August 12, 2017, a white supremacist killed one and injured 19 people protesting a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. After a failed attempt to enter a Black church, a white supremacist murdered 2 Black people at a grocery store on October 24, 2018.495

On March 27, 2019, S. titled Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2019 was introduced to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The bill noted, “White supremacists and other far-right-wing extremists are the most significant domestic terrorism threat facing the United States.” Two years later on September 29, 2021, the Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Division of the FBI, issued a joint statement with the Assistant Attorney General to the Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties stating, “RMVEs [racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists] driven by a belief in the superiority of the white race continue to pose the greatest domestic violent extremist threat to commit lethal violence against civilians.”

Color blind proponents are indeed correct, Chief Justice Earl Warren in Brown demanded that all races be treated equally under the law; but never did he argue the use of race harmed Black Americans and whites equally. Chief Justice Warren was not ignoring the needs of white students when he based the reasoning of Brown on the unique harm state-sanctioned racism had on the development of Black children.

White supremacy is more than a theory about the superiority of the white race; it far exceeds the work of extremist demagogues. Neither is white supremacy an individual delusion or a mental illness. It is more than just a weapon to be deployed in the pursuit of material gain. White supremacy is an operating system; it is the foundational architecture of the United States and is forged in pure, unadulterated violence. It is a self-replicating algorithm whose nature is so ubiquitous and fundamental to American capitalism, not a single Black American, even those of the highest order, can escape it; and not a single white American, even those of the lowest order, is not privileged by it.

When the issue of remedying the harm to Black Americans is raised, it is often met with the claim that white people today should not have to pay for the sins of their ancestors. Such an assertion reflects a fundamental lack of understanding of what white supremacy is in America. According to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the slave trade was valued at $2.7 billion. By 1860, four million Black slaves produced over 60 percent of the nation’s wealth with the value of Black slaves exceeding $3 trillion. In 1861, cotton alone produced $250 million for this Nation. In 1828, $2.5 million in slave bonds were purchased by European investors. By 1859, $25.7 million in bank credit from the mortgaging of slaves was issued in Louisiana alone.

JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America accepted slaves as collateral for loans; Wells Fargo owned slaves and accepted slaves as collateral. Aetna and New York Life insured slaves; AIG insured the lives of slaves; Citigroup benefitted financially from slavery. The U.S. Government used slaves to build the White House; the U.S. Military forced slaves to serve in the army; the Catholic Church owned slaves. Knight Ridder, Tribune, and USA TODAY all had links to slavery. Brooks Brothers made clothes for slaves and Tiffany’s was founded with cotton mill profits from slaves. Harvard Law School was endowed with money from slave owners and Harvard University, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Rutgers, Brown, Dartmouth, University of Delaware, Princeton, and University of Virginia all recruited and raised money from slave owning families.

It is impossible to separate slavery’s trillion-dollar industry from the privileges enjoyed by white Americans today when the systems of today that work to preserve whiteness were built and funded from the profits of that very institution. White supremacy built this Nation for white people; white supremacy violently sustains this Nation for the benefit of white people; and silence, denial, and blindness are the tools deployed to ensure its preservation.

The story of the Black American began thousands of years before the first European dawned the shores of Jamestown, Virginia. But the story of the United States of America is the story of the racial caste system and subjugation of the Black race. At every point in U.S. history, the white elite have relied on Black bodies for wealth accumulation, and at every point in U.S. history, the white elite have concocted new justifications to exploit those bodies. Color blindness is not a form of constitutional interpretation; it is merely the latest iteration of ideological vocabulary used by an ancient demon.

Dr. King’s dream is a dream deferred. True freedom cannot be obtained until the children of Lady Liberty, in all their colors, genders, and faiths unite to defeat this ancient foe. The soul of this great Nation cannot be saved until white America and the institutions that serve it acknowledge the truth: that white supremacy has in fact made slaves of us all.

Associate Professor of Law, Barry University School of Law; B.A., Spelman College; M.Ed., University of Miami College of Education; J.D., Howard University School of Law.