Today, Sept. 3, Trump's Treasury and IRS proposed deleting a 51-year-old distinction between racial discrimination and race-conscious efforts to dismantle its effects.

Since 1975, IRS guidance has said that a private school could favor racial minorities in admissions, programs or financial aid without being deemed discriminatory when the purpose and effect were to establish and maintain a genuinely nondiscriminatory school.

Today's proposal would delete that exception.

That matters because this isn't happening in a country where segregation disappeared with Jim Crow.

In 2021, about 1 in 5 U.S. public schools were 90–100% nonwhite, nearly triple the share 30 years earlier. And 78% of students in those intensely segregated schools were poor.

America outlawed segregation by law.

It did not eliminate segregation in practice.

The old IRS rule recognized an important distinction:

excluding people because of race is not the same thing as deliberately trying to dismantle racial exclusion.

The new proposal moves toward treating both as racial discrimination.

And this is happening while DOJ is separately scrutinizing elite public high schools over whether even race-neutral tools—poverty, geography, hardship—can become unlawful racial proxies when officials use them intending to change racial outcomes.

The developments together and the direction is worth confronting:

You can't use race to exclude.
You increasingly can't use race to remedy exclusion.
And now the government is testing when intentionally using race-neutral remedies to reduce racial disparities becomes suspect too.

So what is the legal mechanism left for deliberately desegregating institutions that remain deeply segregated?

That is the question.

The Trump proposal doesn't merely prohibit racial discrimination. It begins erasing a civil-rights-era distinction between maintaining racial barriers and deliberately trying to dismantle their effects.