At his first news conference since the fatal crash of the American Airlines passenger jet, Trump – along with his secretaries of transportation and defense and his vice-president – took turns hammering their opinion that DEI programs** (read: POC and Black people specifically) were the cause of the crash, despite having zero evidence that federal hiring practices had any connection to this particular crash.
Trump and his fellow Republicans have regularly attacked “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs as the reason for divisiveness in the country. In his first days in office, the administration has focused on undoing decades of policy designed to level the playing field for BIPOC, as structural racism has left them out of opportunities for homeownership, jobs, healthy neighborhoods, safe births, and long life times.
This administrations effort to condemn DEI as an entrypoint for inferior workers is not the first time the narrative of BIPOC as a subpar workforce has been used to protect racism. At the news conference Trump stated, “African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, we took care of everybody at levels that nobody’s ever seen before.” But the FAA “determined that the workforce was too white,” he claimed. “Too white—and, uh, we want the people that are competent.”
The American government has a long history of blaming POC widely and Black people more specifically for societal problems, often as a means to justify systemic oppression, reinforce white supremacy, and divert attention from larger structural issues. This pattern spans from slavery to today and has been used to uphold economic, social, and political control.
During the years of Slavery and Post-Emancipation, enslaved people were regularly blamed for their own condition. Enslavers would justify slavery by portraying Black people as inherently inferior, lazy, or incapable of self-governance. Enslaved Africans were subjected to grueling labor from sunrise to sunset, often in brutal conditions. However, enslavers needed to justify slavery as an institution, so they created the myth that Black people were naturally lazy, unintelligent, and in need of white control to be productive. Ironically, enslaved people were seen as both lazy and essential to the economy—a contradiction that highlights the myth’s political purpose rather than any basis in reality. After the Civil War, newly freed Black Americans were scapegoated for economic struggles in the South, even though white elites and former Confederates actively sabotaged Reconstruction through means of legislation, terror, and brutality. Additionally, the myth of Black laziness became even more prominent as formerly enslaved people demanded fair wages and autonomy. White Southerners, angry about the end of slavery, claimed that Black people refused to work and were dependent on the government.
After Reconstruction Black laborers were falsely accused of being unproductive to justify lower wages and sharecropping exploitation. Black Codes & Vagrancy Laws criminalized unemployment among Black people. If they were not working under white landowners, they could be arrested and forced into convict leasing—a new form of slavery. White landowners claimed Black farmers were lazy to justify keeping them in exploitative sharecropping arrangements, which trapped them in debt.
As Black people moved North in search of better opportunities, white employers often refused to hire them for well-paying jobs and then used their economic struggles as “evidence” of laziness. When Black families received public assistance during the Great Depression, white politicians and media portrayed them as dependent and unwilling to work. Reagan further popularized this idea by creating the “welfare queen” narrative- a wholly inaccurate story of Black women exploiting welfare programs despite the fact that white Americans make up the majority of welfare recipients. Today’s politicians still use the “lazy Black person” trope to argue against Medicaid expansion, food stamps, and universal basic income. In addition to these anti-Black tropes about Black women, the white polity has also bought into the image of Black men as dangerous and unmotivated, a narrative that reinforces the idea that Black people are poor due to personal failure rather than systemic racism. Black households have about 1/10th the wealth of white households due to generations of exclusion from homeownership, higher education, and well-paying jobs.Yet, Black poverty is still blamed on “lack of work ethic”, not structural racism.
In the1980s the crack epidemic took hold in primarily in Black and Latino urban communities. At the time many large cities, including, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Detroit were experiencing deindustrialization. This led to factory closures and job losses that left Black communities with few economic opportunities. At this same time the Reagan administration reduced funding for welfare, housing, and drug treatment programs, increasing poverty and desperation. Drug traffickers*** taking advantage of this desperation converted powder cocaine into crack (a cheaper, smokable form) to make it affordable to low-income users. Crack’s low price and intense, short-lived high made it highly addictive and easy to sell in poor neighborhoods. Rather than addressing addiction as a public health crisis, as the government did with the opioid crisis which has overwhelmingly impacted white communities, the Reagan and Bush administrations criminalized drug use.
The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 codified into law a 100-1 sentencing disparity between crack cocaine (used primarily by Black people) offenses and powder cocaine (used primarily by white people). Black communities were blamed for drug crime, leading to extreme prison sentences, while white users of powder cocaine faced lighter consequences. Politicians (including Bill Clinton and Joe Biden) pushed the “superpredator” narrative, which framed Black youth as violent and beyond rehabilitation and in need of extreme policing. The myth of Black laziness merged with the myth of Black criminality to justify extreme policing and mass incarceration. By 1995, Black men were incarcerated at six times the rate of white men, mostly for nonviolent drug offenses. Harsh sentences broke up families, creating cycles of poverty. Felony drug convictions led to job loss, housing discrimination, and voter disenfranchisement, worsening racial inequality. The U.S. government created the conditions for the drug crisis (economic neglect, lack of social services) by enacting laws that disproportionately criminalized Black communities and failing to address the crisis as a public health issue.
Blaming Black people has been a political tool to justify racist policies, economic exploitation, and social control. It has allowed white elites to deflect attention from systemic inequalities and reinforce racial divisions. The myth of Black laziness has always been a tool for maintaining racial and economic inequality. White elites created it to justify slavery, reinforced during Reconstruction to control free Black labor, and continues to be weaponized in modern politics, as we saw just the other day.
Check your Facts!
This is the first major commercial airline crash in the United States since 2009, when 50 people died after a plane crashed while landing near Buffalo Niagara International Airport.
Trump’s Racist Rants Coneal the Right’s Air Safety Failures
**It is important to note that Trump also targeted people with Developmental Disabilities as part of his tirade.
**In the mid-1990s, journalist Gary Webb (in his Dark Alliance series) revealed evidence that the CIA was complicit in cocaine trafficking, fueling the crack epidemic. The Reagan administration secretly funded Nicaraguan Contra rebels fighting the leftist Sandinista government. To raise money, the Contras allegedly trafficked cocaine into the U.S. with the CIA’s knowledge. Much of this cocaine ended up in Los Angeles, where it was converted into crack and sold in Black neighborhoods. The CIA denied direct involvement but admitted that some Contra drug traffickers were protected from investigation. Webb’s reporting led to government pushback, and he was discredited by mainstream media. However, declassified documents later supported some of his claims.
