Here are the top 10 ways it would harm Black America

I read the entire Project 2025. Here are the top 10 ways it would harm Black America

OPINION: We read every page of Project 2025 and compared it to Trump’s Agenda47 to see what a second Trump administration has in store for Black America.

MICHAEL HARRIOT

JUL 15, 2024

Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.

If you frequent Black Twitter, visited a barbershop recently or could hear the BET Awards over your uncle yelling: “If God made something finer than Taraji P. Henson, he must’ve kept it in heaven,” then you know about Project 2025.

According to my cousin’s beautician who does hair in her kitchen, on Jan. 20, 2025, shortly after the inauguration ceremony concludes, President Donald J. Trump will send jack-booted thugs door-to-door to murder anyone who voted for Biden. He will issue an executive order eliminating the letters C, R, T, D, E and I from the English alphabet. At the same time, newly appointed Labor Secretary Marjorie Taylor Greene implements the Bureau of  Bound Laborers, Agricultural Careers and Kitchen Jobs Only for Blacks. Volunteers in the mandatory BLACK JOB program will generously donate their labor to help create the greatest economy since 1865.

No, Project 2025 is not the name of the upcoming Jordan Peele film. It is an actual, real-life script that’s been in development for years. Although it has terrified more people than the recently released horror movie about the president who turned into a zombie during a debate (the lead actor was compelling), few people have read it in its entirety. 

I did.

To address the rumors, fears and anxiety over the GOP’s latest project, I read all 922 pages of Project 2025 and all the Agenda47 transcripts, the official policy agenda for Trump 2024. Instead of summarizing the entire blueprint for an America with less “economic anxiety,” we specifically looked at the policies and plans that would affect Black Americans.

Here’s what we found:

What is Project 2025? Project 2025 is Donald Trump’s blueprint for how to make the conservative culture wars a permanent part of the federal government.

Officially, Donald Trump has nothing to do with the 900-plus page “mandate for leadership” known as Project 2025. Technically, the “Conservative Promise” is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation, a 50-year-old think tank known for engineering bright ideas like the enduring myth of “welfare queens,” Reagan’s CIA crack cocaine project, and George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. But the Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts is a pro-Trump culture warrior whose only goal is “institutionalizing Trumpism.” To achieve his objective, he assembled policymakers and MAGA extremists from the first Trump administration. The advisory board is comprised of right-wing organizations like the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council, the “anti-woke” 1792 Exchange and Liberty University, “the most conservative college in America.” 

The Trump-approved architects divided the Trumpian document into 30 different chapters. They used Trump-affiliated experts to address every part of the federal government and strategize what a Trump presidency would look like. But, to be clear, the 200 Trump-connected policymakers’ blueprint for a Trump presidency has nothing to do with Donald Trump.

If Project 2025 is not Trump’s agenda, does he have one?Technically, he has some videos. 

Because Trump is not a fan of reading or writing, he filmed a series of videos outlining his official plans for a second term. While Trump’s “Agenda47” is a remedial Cliffs Notes version of Project 2025, there are some minor differences.

Project 2025 is a MAGA employee guide for people who will work in the alleged Trump administration. Agenda47, on the other hand, is a political platform aimed at people who will vote for Trump. The former is a policy agenda; the latter is a campaign document for people who get their politics off YouTube. 

Think of Project 2025 as the instruction manual for Trump’s Agenda47.

Here are the top 10 scariest things Trump has planned for Black America:

10. Make the government white again.Every Black person has a cousin or aunt who works in the federal government. While the civilian federal workforce is disproportionately white at the highest levels, in March 2021, nearly half (46.7%) of low-level government employees were non-white. In fact, African-American government workers are overrepresented in the federal government.

This is the “swamp” that Trump wants to drain.

The “fundamental principle” guiding this pro-white project is a plan to embed conservative-minded political appointees (pronounced “white pee pull”) throughout the federal government. However, it is illegal to discriminate based on race, ethnicity or political affiliation. Trump’s deputy secretaries can’t ask prospective workers if they have accepted Donald J. Christ as their lord and savior. So, how do they plan to draft a minion of MAGA workers into the federal workforce? 

Currently, about 4,000 presidential appointees work in federal agencies, including 1,212 senior officials, cabinet secretaries and deputies that require Senate confirmation. In most cases, the agencies’ deputy secretaries work with the Presidential Personnel Office (PPO) to fill these leadership positions. In contrast, the rest of the agencies are filled with career-level government employees. Using their “personnel is policy” theme, a second Trump administration will essentially make every government employee a political appointee by using Project 2025 to train all president-appointed, Senate-confirmed leaders. Those leaders will use the MAGA handbook to fill lower-level career positions. 

Not only will this employee guide whitewash the entire federal government, but, if you recall, many of Trump’s presidential scandals, including his first impeachment and his mishandling of COVID-19, were sparked by career government workers-turned-whistleblowers. 

If you’re not interested in Project 2025’s level of specificity, you can also read Agenda47’s plan to “Dismantle the Deep State.” 

9. They will fight racism — against white people. 

According to Caucasian race theory, racism against white people is destroying America.

While the federal government has little to do with local school curriculums, Project 2025 alleges that “Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms,” which is why the so-called “small government conservatives” plan to defund Black history. Both plans vow to get rid of anti-white indoctrination, affirmative action, diversity, equity and inclusion and especially the dreaded critical race theory. “Those who subscribe to the theory believe that racism (in this case, treating individuals differently based on race) is appropriate — necessary, even — making the theory more than merely an analytical tool to describe race in public and private life,” explains Project 2025’s chapter on Education. Ultimately, this is how the MAGA government will fulfill Agenda47’s pledge that  “President Trump will cut federal funding for any school pushing Critical Race Theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”

For years, Caucasian Americans have also lamented the decrease in white soldiers signing up for the U.S. military, partly because of efforts to increase diversity among military officers. Project 2025’s section on the Department of Defense includes a section titled: “Stop using the Army as a test bed for social evolution.” But instead of saying: “The U.S. Army wants more white people,” they use more subtle language:

“The Army no longer reflects national demographics to the degree that it did before 1974 when the draft was eliminated,” it explains whitely. “Woke bureaucrats at the Pentagon force troops to attend ‘training’ seminars about ‘white privilege.’ Bureaucrats at the State Department infuse U.S. foreign aid programs with woke extremism about ‘intersectionality’ and abortion.”

Agenda47 calls it: “Rebuilding America’s depleted military.”

8. They actually have a plan to stop anti-Black racism.

To be fair, Trump and his allies do have a comprehensive plan to address white supremacy homophobia and transgender discrimination. As much as it pains me to admit it, their strategy to erase racism throughout America is pretty brilliant.

They are going to officially erase races.

Nearly every federal agency collects demographic data to examine racial and gender disparities. We know Black men get longer sentences than white men who commit the same crimes because of the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s racial data. The numbers from the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Office show that Black students are punished at higher rates. Racial prejudice, harassment and retaliation are the most frequently filed workplace discrimination claims, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). 

A Trump administration would ban many government agencies from collecting racial or demographic data. Not only do they want to discontinue the practice on mortgage applications, government hiring and business loans, but at least 15 of their proposals suggest they “start with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity.” They also want to eliminate nearly every division that fights against discrimination, including the civil rights offices in the Departments of Education, Labor, and Housing and Urban Development.

“The next Administration should work with Congress to amend Title VII to prohibit the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from collecting EEO-1 data and any other racial classifications in employment for both private and public workplaces.”

— Project 2025 Perhaps the most alarming part of the project is the strategy to eradicate the principle of disparate impact.

According to the principle, if the effect of a policy or practice negatively affects a protected group, it is discriminatory. That’s why proving racial bias doesn’t necessarily require intent. For years, conservative groups wanted to repeal an official letter from the Obama administration threatening to withhold funds from any school district that disproportionately punished Black students. Trump’s Department of Education wouldn’t just repeal Obama’s disparate impact threat; it would “eliminate disparate impact as a valid theory of discrimination for race and other bases.”

Trump’s literal policy plan is to stop talking about race.

this article originally appeared here