Disinformation campaign

How Black Americans Can Fight Trump’s Plot to Capture a Generation of Minds

“The Trump administration has tried to seduce Black Americans to fall into the trap and illusion of Black capitalism.”

Arianna Coghill

Only two months into his return to power, President Donald Trump has moved with astonishing speed to achieve his goal of ridding American classrooms of so-called “radical indoctrination,” MAGA-speak for educational efforts that prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion. These actions include threatening to cut public schools’ funding unless they scrap DEI initiatives and planning, ever imminently, to launch an executive order to abolish the Department of Education, which would cause irreparable damage to students and educators—especially for those of color.

The fear around the country has been palpable. As the Department of Education’s only civil rights monitor in Alabama, who was fired in February, told my colleague Julia Métraux: “I’m terrified for the children and adults in my state. I’ve sat with these children, and I’ve heard them say, ‘We want a better education. We want a better future.’ I always had the hope that there [would be] federal enforcement of these laws, and now I’m seeing the dismantling of that enforcement agency.”

But as disturbing as they are, Trump’s plans are not exactly original. In fact, as Emory University sociology professor Dr. Karida Brown explains in her forthcoming book, The Battle for the Black Mind, the president is following a playbook centuries in the making.

I called Brown to discuss the conservative war on public education and how Black communities can fight for their right to accessible and culturally relevant education.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s discuss the importance of Black students learning about their ancestors.

I’ve been a college professor for almost 10 years now. I’ve taught over 1,500 undergraduate students. I understand the responsibility, the weight, and the magic of teachers. We’re superheroes and we wield a lot of power. 

So I come to this work from that perspective—and also as a Black woman. Black professors represent just under 4 percent of the professoriate across the country; Black women, less than 2 percent. We are a small but mighty minority, and I know how important it is for all of my students to be able to have the opportunity to experience Black teachers. For many of my students, I’m the only Black professor they will have their whole four years going through college. I also know how important education and children’s learning is not just from my profession, but also from my own family’s history. My parents, Richard and Arnita Brown, grew up in the Jim Crow South and attended the Lynch Colored School. That’s what was etched in stone in the building where they went to school every day, in a segregated community in the coal mining town, where they had separate and unequal education.

The state mandated that my parents were legally not allowed to be able to benefit from all the resources that were available to their white peers. They came through an education system that was designed to subjugate them, that was designed to make sure that they were second-class citizens. 

One of my favorite aspects of the book is how much personal history is woven in. It gave me a sense that as I was learning about this history, I was learning about you as well.

It also puts into perspective how recent this history is. What are your thoughts on the misconception that because slavery is in the past, it doesn’t affect our present? 

It was hard for me to put myself in the book. I’m a very behind-the-scenes writer. (Shout-out to my editor, Krishan Trotman, because she pushed me.) But I realized the book doesn’t feel the same way without [my personal history] because it allows me to debunk that myth about our history.

As for the relative recency of this: If my mother and father are still alive and they went through this, if Ruby Bridges is still alive and has an Instagram page, then it was not that long ago.

When you put it that way, it sums it up so perfectly: Ruby Bridges has an Instagram page.

Exactly. That biographical engine acts as a throughline throughout the book that allows us to see, yes, how far we’ve come, but also that this isn’t distant history, and it can repeat itself.

You delve quite a bit into the history of white missionaries using education to forcibly assimilate freed Black people during Reconstruction. Christian nationalism has played a major role in both Trump’s campaign and his plans as president. Are there parallels between modern-day Christian nationalists and these missionaries?

We’ve got this amalgamation of multiple movements coming together right now, a movement of white evangelical Christian nationalists. We’re seeing the religious and political infusion turn into a social movement. It’s a well-organized machine that has a long game, that has a playbook, but they’re not operating alone. How do these movements build power? There was a cartoon when I was growing up called [Voltron], and when they all got together, they created a giant robot. That’s what these movements do.

You’ve got the MAGA movement, but you’ve also got the technocratic billionaires’ boys club combining with American institutions, the media, and the government, all working together to destabilize the school system and create a feedback loop of rhetoric. This works as a playbook that allows everybody to have a role in this whole system. 

Why target our education system? 

If you capture the school system, you’re going to capture a whole generation of minds. You don’t have to individually push your agenda. You don’t have to go school by school. You just get the whole system.

One thing you emphasize in the book is the outsized role that “white money” played in funding Black schools, as well as in the shaping of the curriculum at the time. Can you speak a little about that? 

There is an old African American saying: All money ain’t good money.

American Big Philanthropy as we know it today originated with education in the South. The two of the first philanthropic organizations that were endowed with over a million dollars in the US were the Peabody Education Fund and the Slater Fund. They both were founded to help establish a Southern education system. The Slater Fund, which was founded in 1882 right after the fall of Reconstruction, solely focused on Black schools. That money was greatly needed, because the Southern states were not going to fund Black schools. You also have the Rockefeller Foundation being born during this time, the Carnegie Corporation being born during this time, and many others. They’re all interested in Black segregated schools.

Do disadvantaged Black communities need funding to have equitable resources and education? Absolutely. However, it came with thick strings attached. The first demand that America’s billionaires put on those schools was control of the curricula. If a school did not abide by this, you could say goodbye to that grant funding, and that would be the difference for many Black schools over whether they were going to be able to open their doors the next day or whether an entire community of Black children was going to be able to learn.

That is equivalent to Elon Musk getting on stage today and saying, “You know, I really want to help Black communities, and I’m going to get together with Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel, and we’re going to set up educational programs in disadvantaged Black communities.”

Trump often tries to relate to Black audiences in bizarre ways, many of which use capitalism as a tool. For example, his comments about protecting “Black jobs” during last year’s presidential debate, or inviting several Black rappers to this year’s Black History Month reception, many of whom have claimed that Trump will make them richer.

What are your thoughts on this tactic and the Black conservative leaders who co-sign it?

As the revolutionary Fred Hampton said, we’re not going to liberate ourselves or free ourselves from capitalism. The Trump administration has tried to seduce Black Americans to fall into the trap and illusion of Black capitalism.

But Republicans are one-trick ponies. They’ve only got the same four or five plays over and over again. Once you know what they are, then you can see them when they’re trying to be used on you to dismantle or disrupt the strategy. What we saw with how Black capitalism was cultivated and used was an effort to try to capture the political imaginations of some African Americans in the post-emancipation, early 20th century.

Black capitalism in particular has often been used as a carrot by conservative movements to divide and conquer and create chaos within Black communities. They try to cultivate a Black minority group subset to accompany a majority-white conservative movement.

There are a lot of Black people in America who voted for Donald Trump for those very reasons: “I might not agree with everything that he’s saying, but no politician has done anything for me, and at least I can get rich under Donald Trump.” This is rhetoric steeped in the logic of wealthing or classing your way out of racial violence, racial terror, authoritarianism, and fascism. In the case of conservative and billionaire boys club movements, they weaponize these tropes and tokenize people to parrot these tropes so that they can poison their own wells. And when they’re done with them, they discard them.

What happens to tokens? They get spent.

Let’s talk about Thomas Jesse Jones, a sociologist who W.E.B. Du Bois dubbed the “the evil genius of the Negro race.” In 1916, Jones released a pseudoscientific study arguing against the efficacy of Black-led higher education. That study then launched a disinformation campaign against historically Black schools, with critics treating Jones’ bigotry as fact.

Talk to me about the disinformation we see today and the relationship to Jones’ efforts.

This book is the culmination of eight years of archival research. So I’ve been tracing this man in the archives for almost a decade of my life, and he is sneaky. It’s important to note that he was a sociologist. [Jones’ influence] is a testament to how powerful the social sciences are and the legitimacy that academics can lend to ideology.

I believe that educators are superheroes, and Thomas Jesse Jones used his superpowers for evil, to sell his science to the highest bidder, toward the aims of ideology and pseudoscience that was meant to cause harm to a whole swath of the American population. A modern example that is analogous to what Jones was doing back then with his billionaire boys club would be PragerU, a conservative right-wing organization that is funded by billionaires from the fracking industry.

PragerU puts out short, digestible conservative propaganda, educational clips that are made to teach parents and children about a “non-woke curriculum.” They’re rewriting history, framing enslaved Black people as laborers, and softening the histories of disenfranchised, marginalized populations.

It’s offering a script to white parents for how to spot “wokeism” and DEI in their child’s curricula. Now, why do I point to PragerU when I talk about Thomas Jesse Jones? These are the same kinds of apparatuses of propagandized pseudoscience that are being marketed to a broader public. It’s made to stoke latent dispositions of white rage, racism, and anti-Blackness.

What are some ways that the average person can detect when they’re being fed propaganda?

The digital age makes this difficult because of the onslaught of information that we are presented. I love TikTok, and I learn a lot from it. But we should not be taking sound bites, tweets, or hot takes without skepticism. It deteriorates our ability for critical thinking and destabilizes our ability to fact-check and do the work of being an informed person.

So from Thomas Jesse Jones, I learned how important it is to slow down. It’s a slippery slope into being tricked into and propagandized into pipelines. If Thomas Jesse Jones were here today, I promise you, he would have a huge TikTok page. He’d be putting out a lot of videos. He’d be on Twitter.

How will this new political landscape affect Black people looking to become educators?

Language is the grease that keeps the system of white supremacy going. One of the roles that this attack on DEI plays in the long game, in the larger strategy, is a fear tactic. Why do I describe it as a fear tactic? Because DEI is being uprooted from its original intention, from its institutionalized meaning and form, uprooted and politicized to mean nothing or any bogeyman that you want it to mean.

When you hear conservatives saying, “DEI must die,” a lot of times, that just means Black people, places, or things. Sometimes that means anything that’s not white, straight, Christian, or male. It can mean anything that the arbiter of that term wants it to mean, and they don’t have the responsibility or accountability of defining what they’re talking about. That stokes a lot of fear, because who’s to know what is DEI and what’s not? 

They are threatening violence toward our teachers. They are stoking distrust among educators, intellectuals, and the institutions of higher education. That’s very powerful. It does have teeth in this regime. But I want to make it clear: We saw this also in the past. 

One of my favorite portions of the book is the epilogue, where you listed the 10 lessons that we should learn from our ancestors. In these times, I know that I often find myself fighting off feelings of hopelessness. Can you speak about the importance of remaining hopeful when it comes to fighting for Black liberation?

I wrote the epilogue and the last chapter, “Small Acts,” the day after the election. I couldn’t write the end of the book until I knew what the result was going to be, and I wanted to bring the emotional weight of whatever I was feeling, no matter what the outcome, to the end of the book. 

So that’s what you see and that’s what you might feel in those last parts of the book. That was a very hard day for a lot of us, but I went back and read the whole rest of the book. I went back to all the other chapters and said, “What are the lessons? What lessons did they leave us?” And I didn’t find any evidence of nihilism or despair.

It’s CliffsNotes from Mary Smith Peake, who founded that school under an oak tree during the Civil War. Six million Americans are getting ripped to pieces all around you. Black people are still enslaved, and this war is going to decide whether your people are going to remain chattel or be humans under the law in the United States. And was she sitting there rolling around, crying, saying it’s never gonna happen? No, she starts a school, teaching Black people who are escaping and being considered contraband how to read and write, telling them to get ready. Freedom is coming. We’ve got to be prepared.