The Colorblind Crusade

Red Lines, White Lies, and the High-Tech Hunt for “Waste”

How America’s leaders – from New Deal bureaucrats to modern demagogues with AI chatbots – perfected the art of “efficient” oppression, marginalizing minority communities under noble pretexts.

By Frank Gallagher, Columnist, The Alibi

America has a long, bipartisan history of oppression packaged as progress, and the sales pitch hasn’t changed much. One day it’s a Democratic hero drawing red lines on a map to “boost homeownership” (by excluding Black families, of course); the next it’s a Republican president wielding an AI chatbot to “streamline bureaucracy” (by purging diversity programs). Left wing, right wing – surprise! – it’s the same old bird. Today’s supposed crusade for “efficiency” and “merit” is just the latest branding for policies that keep certain communities underfoot, all while assuring the rest of us it’s for our own good. Call it the Colorblind Crusade: an Orwellian campaign to ignore race, trumpet “meritocracy,” and thereby entrench the very injustices it claims not to see.

Let’s start with a little history, the part they often prefer we forget. In 1921, the Greenwood district of Tulsa – a prosperous Black enclave dubbed “Black Wall Street” – was literally burned off the map. Over 18 hours, white mobs (including plenty who were deputized and armed by city officials) slaughtered Black residents and leveled 35 blocks of homes and businesses. This orgy of violence, now known as the Tulsa Race Massacre, remains one of the worst incidents of racial terror in U.S. history – hundreds killed, thousands left homeless. And what did authorities do after this horrific “efficiency exercise” in ethnic cleansing? They covered it up with bureaucratic precision. The local newspaper removed the initial incendiary story from its archives; police and militia records mysteriously disappeared; for decades the massacre wasn’t taught in schools or mentioned in polite company. Oppression accomplished, memory erased. If you want a dark laugh, you might call that government efficiency: they eliminated an entire Black community and then efficiently eliminated the evidence.

Fast-forward to the 1930s and 1940s. While Tulsa smoldered in silence, Washington bureaucrats were busy perfecting institutional oppression with a technocrat’s touch. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vaunted New Deal, federal housing agencies rolled out a policy so neat and clinical it could fit in a spreadsheet: redlining. They literally drew red lines on city maps around Black and immigrant neighborhoods, branding them “hazardous” for loans . Banks and insurers got the memo – if you lived inside a red line, no mortgage for you, no insurance, no investment. This wasn’t a bug or unintended consequence; it was the whole point. Redlining was “intentionally created by the government to oppress Black people and other minorities and ensure that White people remain prosperous,” as one account summarizes. In other words, a racist policy by design, masquerading as sound economic practice. And it worked all too well: generations of Black families were denied home ownership and wealth, while white families in segregated “safe” zones amassed equity subsidized by federal programs. The repercussions are still visible today – literally in the air we breathe. A 2022 study showed that neighborhoods graded “D” nearly a century ago (those redlined districts) suffer far worse air quality even now, thanks to deliberate disinvestment and zoning that placed highways and factories in “those” parts of town . Poisoned air, plummeting property values, entrenched poverty – all courtesy of a color-coded efficient system.

Consider another “efficient” policy choice: environmental racism. It’s a clunky term, but all it means is that we concentrate the worst environmental hazards in communities of color. Take Chicago’s South Side. After WWII, the city built Altgeld Gardens, a public housing project for Black veterans, hoping to give returning Black GIs a piece of the American Dream. The catch? They plunked it down amid a ring of landfills, toxic waste sites and a sewage treatment plant. Locals grimly nicknamed it “The Toxic Doughnut” – an apt image of a neighborhood surrounded by pollution . Environmental activist Hazel Johnson, a resident who lost her husband to lung cancer at age 34, helped uncover the damage: Altgeld Gardens residents had sky-high cancer rates and disease clusters far above the city average . This was no coincidence. It was the logical outcome of planners siting “undesirable” facilities where they thought people mattered less. The pattern repeats nationwide. Black and brown neighborhoods get the waste dumps, oil refineries, diesel bus depots, and leaking pipelines; white neighborhoods get…well, not those things. The EPA’s own data found that Black Americans are 54% more likely than others to live near toxic industrial facilities. Fifty-four percent! That’s not a fluke – that’s policy. For decades, both parties mostly ignored these disparities. Zoning boards, highway planners, corporate lobbyists, city halls in blue and red states alike – everyone played their part in this grand bipartisan experiment of dumping on the vulnerable. When activists call this environmental racism, some politicians bristle at the term. But if you don’t call it out, guess what? It doesn’t magically become “colorblind” – it just continues, silently, efficiently, destroying lives.

In the halls of power, “government efficiency” has become a euphemism for gutting civil rights initiatives. The latest target? Diversity and inclusion programs, now flagged as “wasteful” by leaders keen on rewriting history.

Given this legacy of efficient injustice, you’d think leaders in 2025 might try something radically different – like, say, expanding opportunity or addressing those toxic dumps and loan denials. Alas, you’d be wrong. Instead, we’re seeing a tech-powered revival of the same old oppression. President Donald Trump – back for a second term that feels more like a bad reboot – has set his sights on dismantling Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government. And he’s doing it with a straight face and an outstretched hand, claiming it’s all in the name of a fair, neutral, “merit-based” society. “We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based,” Trump proclaimed at his inaugural address in January. (I can almost hear the ghost of George Wallace cheering.) To prove just how colorblind he is, Trump’s very first executive orders were aimed at scrubbing away four years of federal DEI efforts overnight. He overturned policies that required agencies to make equity plans, terminated “all…activities” related to DEI in every corner of the government, and even banned federal agencies from taking any new DEI measures at all. One order explicitly revoked an Obama-era initiative that had pushed agencies to address systemic inequalities; another went so far as to invalidate a Lyndon B. Johnson-era rule from 1965 (dating back to the civil rights movement) which required federal contractors to adopt equal opportunity hiring practices. Yes, you read that right: in the year 2025, the president effectively canceled a basic anti-discrimination safeguard from the 1960s. That’s how “merit-based” this vision is – it apparently includes the merit of being free to discriminate again, as long as you call it “colorblind.”

To enforce this rollback, the administration has created something out of a dystopian satire. Trump announced a new panel grandiosely named the Department of Government Efficiency, or with a wink, “DOGE.” (In a karmic twist, the acronym also invokes a certain doge meme cryptocurrency – fitting, since there’s something cartoonishly absurd about all this.) The purported head of DOGE is none other than Elon Musk, a billionaire with zero public administration experience but plenty of Twitter trolling experience. Musk has gleefully embraced the role of efficiency czar, and DEI programs have been singled out as Enemy Number One. Reports indicate this Musk-led team is combing through agencies hunting for anything that smells like diversity, inclusion, or equity – branding it “government waste” to be axed. According to one analysis, Musk’s DOGE panel has identified an eye-popping $120 billion in what they call “woke” spending to eliminate. What counts as woke waste? For starters, programs that assist Black farmers who have faced decades of discrimination in agriculture are on the chopping block. Funding for minority-owned small businesses – gone, presumably because in a truly merit-based market, everyone competes on an “equal” footing (never mind the unequal access to capital). Even a Biden-era rule that set aside a modest 15% of federal contracts for minority-owned businesses is likely to be scrapped. In the new logic, helping marginalized groups catch up is somehow an unfair “preference” – so back to the status quo we go, tilting the playing field to favor those who’ve always had the advantage.

The purge goes beyond dollars and cents – it’s cultural and bureaucratic warfare. The administration wasted no time warning federal employees that DEI is now a dirty word. In fact, workers received chilling emails instructing them to report any colleagues who they believe are furthering DEI efforts “in disguise.” Fail to snitch, and face “adverse consequences,” the emails threatened . This is the stuff of witch hunts and loyalty oaths, not a healthy workplace. Picture it: Sally from HR dares to organize a mentorship program for Latina employees – but uh oh, that might count as “inclusion,” better call the tip line! It would be laughable if it weren’t so destructive. And to ensure no good deed goes unpunished, the Department of Government Efficiency has deployed cutting-edge AI to sniff out dissent. Reuters reports that Musk’s DOGE technologists are using artificial intelligence to surveil federal agencies’ communications for signs of “hostility” to Trump and his agenda. In practice, that likely means any emails or reports where an analyst raises concerns about, say, racism or climate justice might be flagged as subversive. Musk’s team has “heavily deployed” his new Grok AI chatbot in their slash-and-burn campaign across the bureaucracy – though tellingly, Reuters couldn’t pin down exactly how Grok is being used. (Trade secret, perhaps? Or maybe it’s just spewing out lists of programs with titles that include words like “minority” or “equity.”) The whole operation is so opaque and unaccountable that even government ethics experts are alarmed: with private tech bros scraping through federal data on a partisan mission, who knows what norms are being broken .

Let’s decode the doublespeak here. “Efficiency” in this context doesn’t mean doing the same job with fewer resources – it means excising anything that doesn’t align with a certain ideological agenda. Diversity officers, equity task forces, civil rights advisory boards – out they go, not because they failed or wasted money (many were low-budget to begin with), but because they dared to address the very real gaps our society created. Trump’s allies claim DEI programs are a form of “immoral…pernicious identity-based spoils system” and that they amount to “reverse discrimination” against white people. This is the tired refrain of those who have never faced actual systemic bias: the mere act of acknowledging others’ struggles feels like an attack on them. It’s the same victim-complex we’ve seen throughout history. When Black Americans fled the Jim Crow South during the Great Migration and found jobs up North, some whites cried that they were being displaced. When civil rights laws passed, we heard grumbling that “special treatment” for minorities would undermine white workers. Now, when a company or agency tries to ensure its workforce looks a bit more like America at large, or invests a tiny fraction of its budget in outreach to marginalized communities, the cry goes up: Help, we’re being oppressed! The Trump-Musk response to these crocodile tears is to swing the pendulum all the way back. Never mind that the federal workforce had become one of the fairest, most inclusive institutions – with the smallest gender and racial pay gaps in the country, thanks in part to those DEI efforts – that achievement is precisely what they intend to destroy. Can’t have a government that actually practices equal opportunity; it sets a bad precedent for the private sector, where old boys’ networks and nepotism might get jealous.

What’s most infuriating is the human cost of this regression. This isn’t some abstract culture-war tussle where nobody gets hurt. Real people in vulnerable communities will feel the consequences. Think of the Black farmer in the rural South who, for the first time, was getting technical assistance or a loan guarantee to undo decades of USDA discrimination – now that program is stamped “canceled”. Think of the small business owner on Chicago’s South Side or in Detroit, who was finally securing a government contract to revitalize a neighborhood – now the “colorblind” contracting rules will shut them out again. Or consider the young student of color who benefited from a college diversity scholarship or a mentorship program – future kids like her may find those gone, replaced with rhetoric about how “merit” means everyone competes on equal footing (in a rigged race where some started 10 laps ahead). Even public health and the environment won’t escape harm. By stripping out anything associated with environmental justice (since that concept explicitly acknowledges race and poverty), we risk sweeping toxic problems back under the rug. Who will advocate inside the government for communities like Altgeld Gardens now, if mentioning racial disparities is forbidden? The logical end-point of this crusade is a bureaucracy that is literally prohibited from addressing or even mentioning inequality. That is insanity – and a surefire recipe for exacerbating the very inequities all these programs were trying, modestly, to fix.

Look, I have no issue with genuine efficiency. By all means, cut redundant paperwork, streamline procurement, digitize records – yes, please. But don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining. Don’t tell me that firing diversity officers and dismantling anti-bias training is about “efficiency”. We know what it’s about. It’s about power, fear, and reactionary backlash. As Everett Kelley, president of one of the largest federal employee unions, aptly put it, “Ultimately, these attacks on DEIA are just a smokescreen for firing civil servants… and turning the federal government into an army of yes-men loyal only to the president”. There’s the rub. A diverse, empowered workforce that thinks critically about equity is harder to control; it might question unethical orders or blow the whistle on corruption. Far easier to purge those folks and intimidate the rest. In the end, the “government efficiency” drive looks a whole lot like the old “loyalty oaths” and purges of the McCarthy era – with a high-tech gloss. Instead of a blacklist of alleged communists, we have an algorithm quietly flagging the résumé of anyone who served on a diversity committee. Instead of Army-McCarthy hearings, we have anonymous tip lines to report colleagues who say the word “equity” too fondly. It would be comical if it weren’t already ruining careers and undermining trust.

The great irony is that the very people this crusade hurts the most are the ones it claims to help. The Trumpists say they’re defending the interests of the “average American” against some elite DEI cabal. Well, newsflash: most Americans are women, racial or ethnic minorities, or other folks who benefit from equal opportunity initiatives. Gutting DEI doesn’t uplift the mythical Average Joe; it just preserves the status quo for Privileged Pete. And history shows that when you address disparities (in housing, education, health), the whole society benefits – the economy grows, innovation happens in unexpected places, social tension eases. Conversely, when you double down on exclusion, the whole society fractures. The 1921 Tulsa massacre obliterated a Black economic success story and left wounds that city still feels; the redlining of mid-century created inner-city poverty that led to crime and urban unrest; the environmental racism of dumping toxins in poor neighborhoods costs us billions in healthcare and lost productivity. Now this DEI rollback threatens to perpetuate lower hiring and promotion of qualified people just because they don’t fit someone’s comfort zone – effectively wasting talent in the name of stopping “waste.” It’s self-sabotage on a national scale.

In my darker moments, I imagine the “ghosts of Greenwood” – those killed in Tulsa – looking at us now and shaking their heads. After a century of struggle, is this really where we’ve ended up? A nation with unprecedented diversity and resources, harnessing cutting-edge AI, not to solve inequality but to entrench it? A country where leaders openly brag about being “colorblind” while picking the pockets of communities of color (and calling it patriotism)? The satirist in me wants to laugh at the absurdity: Jim Crow has upgraded to 5G. He’s got a Silicon Valley badge and talks about “algorithms” and “efficiency” now. But some things never change – he’s still keeping the black folks in the worst part of town and calling it just the way things are.

As an American and a human being, I’m not laughing. I’m angry. And you should be too. This isn’t just a left-right feud or a bureaucratic scuffle; it’s a moral emergency. Both parties’ establishments have failed communities of color repeatedly, through action and inaction, and now those communities are being targeted anew, overtly, under the phony guise of “fairness.” We can’t sugarcoat it: our government – including figures from both the conservative and liberal traditions – has oppressed minority communities with policies like these for generations. It was wrong in 1921, wrong in 1933, wrong in 1968, and it’s still wrong in 2025. No algorithm or faux-populist catchphrase will make it right.

The question is, what do we do about it now? We could start by calling this crusade what it is: a cynical rollback of hard-won civil rights, a high-tech lynching of the social contract, an attempt to drag America backward. Trump’s GROK 3 AI (or whatever he’s dubbing Musk’s latest toy) might be “kind of scary” and powerful, but so are the voices of millions of Americans who actually believe in liberty and justice for all. Those voices need to speak up – loud, satirically if necessary, but also sincerely – to demand that we not become a nation that efficiently oppresses its own people. The great James Baldwin once wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Well, it’s time to face it: the oppression hiding under this cloak of “efficiency” is the same old monster we’ve fought before. Face it, name it, fight it. If we don’t, the joke of history will be on us – and it won’t be funny in the slightest.

Sources:

• History.com – Tulsa Race Massacre
• NPR – Redlining’s Legacy
• Bellwether Housing – Redlining Intent and Impact
• VISIBLE Magazine – Altgeld Gardens “Toxic Doughnut” and Hazel Johnson
• VISIBLE Magazine – EPA on Pollution and Race
• PBS NewsHour / AP – Elon Musk on DEI and AI under Trump
• The 19th News – Trump Revokes Federal DEI Guidelines
• The Guardian – Trump’s Anti-DEI Orders
• The Guardian – Federal Employees Ordered to Report DEI
• Reuters – Musk’s “DOGE” Using AI to Monitor Agencies
• The Guardian – Union Response to DEI Crackdown
• The Guardian – Conservative Rationale vs Reality of DEI