Making segregation great again [View all]

In a boon for racist businesses, the administration has ended a ban on segregated facilities for federal contractors.

Elie Mystal

When I was 11, I was taken on a trip to Clarksdale, Mississippi, for a family reunion. My mother was born there in 1950, in the deeply segregated and violent South. I remember only two things from the trip: One was the Ticonderoga-class mosquitos that populate the Mississippi Delta; I thought one of them was a dragonfly until it started sucking my blood like I was in a Bram Stoker novel.

My other memory was the drinking fountains. My mom took me to the local library, and told me to grab a drink from a water fountain. I didn’t feel like it, and I was a kid so I told her I wasn’t thirsty. She got really serious, and I think there must have been a cloud that blocked out the sun right at that moment, because the whole scene darkened. She told me again to have a drink, only this time it was an order. I did as I was told. As I leaned in, I could see, plain as day, the “whites only” message etched into the stone on the fountain. It hadn’t even faded.

I realized I was drinking from a fountain my mother wasn’t allowed to drink from when she was my age, but that’s not why the memory has stuck with me. The whites-only sign had been scratched out (obviously ineffectually), but the fountain hadn’t been replaced. It hadn’t been smashed. It hadn’t been thrown away as a relic of a shameful period. The sign was just… dormant. I didn’t know then about the “Lost Cause” and the Federalist Society and all those who were working for the day that the South would rise again, but it was clear to me then that the people who made the original sign (and their progeny) hadn’t given up. They were just waiting for their opportunity to refurbish the fountain and once again exclude Black people from using it ...

In the absence of an ongoing federal investigation into Musk’s business practices, this little anti-segregation rule buried in the federal acquisitions policy could have opened up a new legal front against him. If the government is not allowed to contract with businesses that run segregated workplaces, and Musk allegedly runs a segregated workplace and receives government contracts, businesses that didn’t receive a federal contract might have had standing to sue the government (because the equal-employment opportunity businesses that didn’t receive a contract could say they were harmed by the government’s refusal to apply anti-segregationist prohibitions on federal contractors)—and that claim could require an adjudication on whether Musk is running a segregated company ...

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-musk-lift-ban-on-segregated-facilities/