It is all part of a decades-long conservative campaign to co-opt the language of the civil rights movement and use it to dismantle any programs that might actually help bring about equality for descendants of slavery by claiming these efforts amount to anti-white “reverse” discrimination. As sociologist Stuart Hall once wrote, “Those who produce the discourse also have the power to make it true.”

What we are witnessing, once again, is the alignment of white power against racial justice and redress. We now have a legal landscape that takes the very laws created to eliminate the anti-Black caste system and uses them destroy racial justice efforts. The Supreme Court has determined actual school segregation is fine, but efforts to remedy it are unconstitutional.