Trump Administration Claims Illinois’ Anti-Black Housing Discrimination Reparations Program Is Racist

Because it’s a day of the week that ends with “Y,” the Trump administration is, once again, proving itself to be a white supremacist organization that is dedicated to turning any effort to correct systemic racism against Black people into imaginary systemic racism against white people.

In 2024, we reported on a group of white and fragile right-wingers who filed a lawsuit against the city of Evanston, Illinois, over the creation of the U.S.’s first government-funded reparations program for Black Americans, which was implemented not over slavery, but far more recent anti-Black housing discrimination, which, by the way, President Donald Trump should know plenty about. On Tuesday, the federal government joined the existing lawsuit, asking a judge to halt payouts for the reparations program, which have already begun.

From the Associated Press:

The program, launched in Evanston, Illinois in 2021, is the first and only one of its kind in the U.S., allotting $20 million to Black residents — their direct descendants — who lived in the city between 1919 and 1969 and suffered housing discrimination because of city ordinances, policies or practices. Residents, regardless of race, who experienced discrimination due to the city’s policies or practices after 1969 also qualified.

The city has already distributed over $7 million — using revenue from a local tax on legal marijuana sales — to hundreds of people in $25,000 increments to be used for home repairs, down payments on property, and interest or late penalties on property in the city.

The U.S. Department of Justice called the program “racially discriminatory” in a court filing Tuesday, saying that it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution because it allotted different benefits on the basis of race.

And therein lies the true Caucasian conundrum.

As AP mentioned, the program is available to anyone of any race who has experienced, or is a descendant of those who experienced, housing discrimination between 1919 and 1969. White Americans have never experienced race-based housing discrimination anytime or anywhere in U.S. history. Not in Evanston. Not anywhere else in Illinois. Not anywhere else in America. Not in 1919. Not in 1969. Not in 2024. Not in 2026. For a white person to be eligible for the fund, they would have to have been discriminated against or come from a family that has a history of being racially oppressed. So, the question for white people is this: Would you go back in time and put several generations of your family line through centuries of cruel, racist, structurally debilitating, systemic oppression — just so you can be eligible for bare-minimum restitution in the modern day?

When we say “white people want to be oppressed so bad,” this is what we mean.

“There are sound ways for a city to remedy past discrimination or direct resources to its most vulnerable citizens and neighborhoods. Simply handing out money based on race, however, is not the answer,” Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement.

OK, but why not? That certainly was the answer just last month, when the same Justice Department announced Trump’s now-defunct “anti-weaponization” fund for conservatives pretending to be victims of political lawfare, which was panned as an attempt to pay reparations to Jan. 6 rioters, which, by the way, Trump has absolutely contemplated in the past.

So, reparations are fine for white people who broke the law, or were simply investigated for crimes they may have committed, but, for Black people who suffered proven, well-documented discrimination, they are simply “not the answer.” Got it.

And, just as a reminder, the idea that the federal government, under Trump, is against race-based reparations is undermined by the fact that the administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has literally solicited white men and only white men to come forward with whatever discrimination claims they might have, and the fact that the administration only seems eager to launch investigations, file anti-discrimination lawsuits, or join lawsuits that it has nothing to do with when said lawsuit involves a white person making a discrimination claim.

Conversely, the administration has done nothing regarding anti-Black discrimination claims except reverse legal decisions to correct discrimination, attack all things related to pro-Black civil rights as “illegal DEI,” cut funding for programs that seek to remedy systemic racial disparities, remove all history that highlights the very anti-Black discrimination that paved the way for the discrimination Black folks still face today, and end federal policies that aid in the study racial disparities, including but not limited to the use of “disparate impact” data to identify, you guessed it, systemic anti-Black housing discrimination.

So, let’s remember all of that the next time President Donald “Black Jobs Are In The Factory“ Trump claims “Black people love me,” while showing us every day that, even if it were true, he does not love or even respect us back.

Seriously, how many different ways can he and his administration show it?

SEE ALSO:

Right-Wing Group Sues Evanston Reparations Program

Why Repairing State-Sponsored Theft Isn’t ‘Discrimination’