Today, racism remains a poisonous force in America. Fascism and authoritarianism are on the rise and President Donald Trump is giving voice to such hate, making it state policy and central to his presidential agenda. Recently, he tried to ban birthright citizenship by executive order to limit the number of babies of color born in the United States, though such an act is clearly unconstitutional. Currently, at least two federal judges have blocked Trump’s executive orders to redefine birthright citizenship. He has also issued executive orders seeking to roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion. He clearly does not want Black, Brown, and Asian people to be on an equal footing with Whites.

All his most recent efforts are consistent with his longstanding attempts to limit voting rights for people of color. Trump has voiced the most vicious comments over the years: he says that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”; he slammed Haitian migrants for trying to enter the United States by claiming hundreds of thousands of them flowing into the country “probably have AIDS”; Haiti, El Salvador, and African lands are “shithole countries”; migrants are “animals“; and, as he also put it, there has to be “some form of punishment” for women who have abortions. Finally, Trump has repeatedly stated his admiration for dictators and strong abusive rulers.

Trump, his enablers in the Republican Party, and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) supporters should really be called Make America White Again (MAWA). He and those groups have generated a blueprint for increasing authoritarianism, racism, and xenophobia. It’s crystal clear that this enmity toward Black and Brown people is driven in part by demographic changes in the United States that threaten to place Whites in the minority. On the subject of race, Trump is sensitive only when it comes to discrimination against White people. Recently, he signed an executive order that would protect White South Africans from discrimination and allow them to resettle in the United States.

As I witness the rise of White supremacy in America (again) and the president’s ever-growing list of unconstitutional and illegitimate acts, I remember the segregation and Jim Crow of my youth in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. And yet, being a member of the last generation of Black Americans to live under Jim Crow and the culture of racism that accompanied it left me, then, with a certain hope and belief in the future. The history of my generation’s efforts to make change lent credence to the idea that all of us have the power to eliminate racism. It’s just a question of doing the necessary work.

On any day of my youth, sitting in our living room in a housing project in Kinston, North Carolina, I could pick up a copy of Jet magazine, Amsterdam News, the Pittsburgh Courier, or Ebony Magazine, and the headline would scream something like: “Another Colored Person Dies on the Highway.” The reason: a “White-only” hospital wouldn’t treat them. This happened with alarming frequency and left me with many visions of Black people bleeding to death on the black tarmac of highways in Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and elsewhere........

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