From the sustained assault on DEI to the recent welcoming of white South African “refugees,” we see evidence everyday of the white nationalist posture of the Trump administration. Trump and his team make little effort to disguise the dangerous and deadly racist animus that permeates every aspect of their political outlook and practice.To find a historical antecedent one has to go back to the Southern racists who forcefully overthrew the Reconstruction governments in the aftermath of the Civil War and violently installed and sustained the draconian system of Jim Crow — separate and unequal — in the Southern states.

That system of governance and every day practice remained in place until the rise of the modern Civil Rights movement eight decades later. A similar movement — but broader, deeper, and more powerful — is on today’s agenda if we hope to defeat the latest iteration of white nationalism — Trump and Trumpism — and finally establish an egalitarian and multi-racial society.