On election night, I watched the results come in like everyone else, with my own fears acting as a filter for the news that Donald Trump would be our next president. The following day, it was clear to me as a civil rights lawyer and a Black man, that the future of civil rights and their protections in America were going to come under swift attack by the incoming administration.
Even as we have read the myriad ways in which Project 2025 stands to erode, if not altogether erase our civil rights, the bigger and more troubling matter is the removal of the system's guardrails that serve as the backstop for accountability.
For many, especially Black and LGBTQIA+ people, the sense of danger that has risen since Election Day is not imagined, it is so real it's palpable. Curbside bigotry has already been emboldened and given an upgrade, now using technology. Only days after the election, Black Americans across the country—many of them young and in school—have been micro-targeted with hateful racist text messages.
The swift timing of these messages, some referencing cotton picking and a return to the days of chattel slavery, suggest that we are entering yet another era for heightened racialized violence. Instead of crosses burning in the yards of Black people and those opposed to racial injustice, text messages and cyber-attacks are being curated to accomplish the end, terror and harm.
As disturbing as these actions may seem, what's worse is that they are a signal that more is coming. It also prompts important questions about how our civil rights laws will be enforced, who will be charged to protect them, and when they are violated, whether those responsible will be held accountable.
If history is any indication, there is more than just cause for concern. Under the previous Trump administration, the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division was on the wrong side of seemingly every substantive issue related to America's most targeted and most vulnerable. We witnessed the repeal of several consent decrees that resulted from findings of impropriety as it related to police activity.
In many respects, these court enforced decrees were one of the few vehicles of accountability and redress that reminded already problematic law enforcement agencies that they were being watched.
Still, under Trump's administration and a Jeff Sessions Department of Justice, these safeguards were removed. That same Civil Rights Division also refused to investigate the Minnesota Police Department for deeper systemic issues following the killing of George Floyd and, during a period where reported hate crimes had risen, federal investigations and prosecutions of these crimes did not happen at a rate consistent with the increase in reported occurrences.
A consideration of police violence and Trump's comments around absolute immunity for cops is terrifying. But equally frightening is the possible removal of any protections of our civil liberties. Consider that both Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery were killed in 2020, during Trump's administration. We know their names now only because organizers and protesters took to the streets then and would not allow their stories to be buried along with their bodies.
Without peaceful demonstrations that called attention to their respective cases, it is likely that they would have never gotten the attention that they did to have pressure applied in the manner that it was in order to bring about further investigation and prosecution of the police in Ms. Taylor's case and the vigilante murderers in the case of Mr. Arbery. (An important point of clarity is that these investigations and actual prosecutions were propelled not under Trump appointed Attorney General Bill Barr, but during President Joe Biden's tenure with Kristyn Clarke as the head of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division.)
When viewed in the context of a second Trump administration, the Project 2025 blueprint calls for deploying U.S. military against protesters. Which is to say, with our right to peacefully assemble threatened, we may not ever learn the names nor hear the stories of countless others who are victimized though racialized violence borne out of an emboldened sense of disregard for the protections our civil rights are intended to afford us. It is both a dizzying and cyclical paradigm to consider, and a sobering reality that is much closer than many of us may understand.
Our civil rights in America are among the few but hard-fought guarantees that are designed to keep America's brand of freedom a unique standard in the free and democratic world. In large part, this positions these rights as a cornerstone of American democracy and their protection as paramount. We have already seen that former President Trump was not a defender of American's civil rights and there is even less hope for newly-minted President-elect Trump, armed with a shiny toy in the Project 2025 playbook, along with a Congress, and Supreme Court that all seem poised and ready to do his bidding. The only thing that can accelerate the real threat to the safety of the lives of Black American and others whom these civil rights are intended to protect, is for us to continue to misunderstand the urgency of the moment.
If justice, democracy, and liberty die in the dark, we must immediately place the vulnerability of our civil rights at center stage in our national dialogue. If the DOJ under Trump II proves derelict in its duty to protect our rights and enforce these laws, then that requires us to exponentially increase our support to the network of organizations like the Legal Defense Fund, American Civil Liberties Union, Lawyers Committee, and others whose litigation programs have held the line on protecting civil rights where government may have shirked its own moral imperative.
We cannot escape the sad reality that there are those who see this as a space to violate our rights. However, when those laws are seen as less than worth enforcing and accountability becomes negotiable, if not altogether non-existent, the net effect is to not only dissolve our collective faith in our democratic institutions but to fundamentally alter the very nature of the democracy itself.
Charles Coleman Jr. is a civil rights attorney and former Brooklyn, NY prosecutor. He is a MSNBC legal analyst and co-host of the MSNBC special Black Men in America: The Road to 2024. (X: CFColemanJr)
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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