Justice Department's Civil Rights Division Instructed to Focus on Discrimination Against White College Applicants

If you read the headline of this post or saw the coverage last week and instinctively had a confused look on your face and said "what?" out loud to yourself, you are not alone.  Nothing should surprise us anymore with this administration and their accomplices, but they keep trying. If only we could joke at the abject absurdity of this, but the directive detailed below is anything but a laughing matter as our country takes enormous steps backwards from our quest to be a more perfect Union.

The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants... The document... seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”  

The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities.

The Department of JUSTICE has turned into a political tool by Trump, Sessions, and their GOP counterparts to seek the alt-right's perverse vision of justice.

The project is another sign that the civil rights division is taking on a conservative tilt under President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. It follows other changes in Justice Department policy on voting rights, gay rights and police reforms.

Responses from rational minds are provided below.

Kristen Clarke, the president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, criticized the affirmative action project as “misaligned with the division’s longstanding priorities.” She noted that the civil rights division was “created and launched to deal with the unique problem of discrimination faced by our nation’s most oppressed minority groups,” performing work that often no one else has the resources or expertise to do.  “This is deeply disturbing,” she said. “It would be a dog whistle that could invite a lot of chaos and unnecessarily create hysteria among colleges and universities who may fear that the government may come down on them for their efforts to maintain diversity on their campuses.”

“The fact that the position is in the political front office, and not in the career section that enforces antidiscrimination laws for education, suggests that this person will be carrying out an agenda aimed at undermining diversity in higher education without needing to say it,” Vanita Gupta, who ran the civil rights division in the Obama administration’s second term, said.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/us/politics/trump-affirmative-action-universities.html