The Purging of Black Officials Makes Latent Racism Official Policy

by Erin Aubry Kaplan

President Trump’s firings send a clear message that white mediocrity is always preferable to Black achievement.

This article was produced by the nonprofit publication Capital & Main. It is published here with permission.

Back in 1986, when I was a first-year graduate student in theater arts at UCLA, a white professor called me into his office to break some bad news: The term paper I’d turned in wasn’t mine, he said. It was plagiarized. I was astonished. Of course the paper was mine. I had an undergraduate degree in English and had spent years writing term papers. I knew how to construct theses, build arguments, footnote, and cite sources. And — quite unlike my fellow students — I liked the course and had participated enthusiastically in class discussions, something the professor seemed to genuinely appreciate. I assumed we had an understanding.

As it turns out, there was no “we.” Following his bombshell accusation, the professor told me only that “you don’t speak well” and couldn’t possibly have produced something so coherent. That was it. The way he said “you” repeatedly and pointedly, made it clear that he meant not just me, but all people like me. I realized that to him Black people could never ultimately measure up, even when they did. He had no proof of any plagiarism but he didn’t need any: He just knew. Here was racism in all its profound stupidity being expressed by a very educated man, at what was considered a liberal institution. I was thoroughly rattled but not surprised. Such overt bigotry that happened everywhere was the kind of bump in the road to justice that had been experienced by generations of Black people before me. I just happened to run into one now.    

An Expression of Deep-Rooted Antiblackness

In 2025, the overt racism of the Trump administration is not just another bump in the road; it’s trying to end that road for good. The effort started on Trump’s day one executive orders eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and soon after, with the help of Elon Musk and DOGE, he began firing or forcing out Black people from government jobs, from career employees to agency heads to high-profile appointees. Among those summarily dismissed were the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., and Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, who was fired with a two-sentence email so terse that at first she thought it could be fake. Many who were replaced saw their jobs filled by white people with far less expertise or relevant experience.

This wasn’t the usual cleaning house that comes with a new administration, or about making government more efficient. What we may be reluctant to acknowledge even now is that these brutal dismissals are an expression of  deep-rooted antiblackness that says Black people are never qualified to hold the jobs they have, whatever their actual qualifications. Unlike my professor 40 years ago, Trump and his minions are not remotely conscientious or empathetic (when I got up the courage to tell my professor his baseless accusation felt racist, he looked shocked, then uncomfortable). But the antiblack spirit is the same. And in the Trump era, it’s taking over at the highest levels of power. 

But the takeover is having widespread and unprecedented consequences that, while alarming, are also not surprising. The national effort to diminish or entirely eliminate Black people from jobs and hard-fought positions of power and influence is undercutting not just the government that serves us all, but the entire American democratic experiment that has always rested on truly integrating its Black citizens. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that whatever affects one of us affects us all because all Americans are “tied in a single garment of destiny.” It was a lofty ideal, but also a warning that if we ultimately failed to see this interconnectedness, we as a country would fall. We are falling now. 

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