[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
A lawsuit recently filed by the U.S. Department of Justice alleges that the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) and Providence Public School District (PPSD) violated federal law by establishing a loan forgiveness program that is open to every ethnicity—except whites.
Perhaps the name of the program—“Educators of Color Loan Forgiveness Program”— ought to have been a clue that it was incentivizing illegal discrimination.
“Through PPSD’s ‘Educators of Color Loan Forgiveness Program’ (Program), new teachers can receive student-loan repayments up to $25,000,” describes the lawsuit. “The catch: white teachers are not eligible.”
The program was established in 2021, coinciding with the era of peak wokeness in American culture, and following the ‘Summer of George Floyd.’ A press release by the Justice Department explains how the program was supposed to work:
RIDE and PPSD established the Program in 2021, in partnership with the Rhode Island Foundation (RIF), a publicly supported non-profit organization, to provide $3,175,000 in student loan forgiveness to “teachers of color” over at least five years. The Program is described as an “incentive” to “encourage teachers of color” to teach at PPSD and obliges PPSD to “recruit and retain up to 127 teachers of color” during that period. Under the Program, “Teachers of color” includes teachers “who identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian, and/or 2 or more races” and excludes only white teachers.
Those individuals who met the program’s racial criteria received substantial financial rewards. “Newly hired teachers of color accepted into the Program receive student loan repayment of up to $25,000 in their first three years teaching in PPSD,” states the Justice Department’s lawsuit. Only “‘New teachers of color’ with a minimum of $5,000 in student loans were eligible for the loan repayment program.”
The racially discriminatory program raised red flags from the start. The Biden administration just refused to heed them.
Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson founded the Equal Protection Project (EPP), a project of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, to take on precisely these sorts of cases. The project “is devoted to the fair treatment of all persons without regard to race or ethnicity,” states its website. “Our guiding principle is that there is no ‘good’ form of racism. The remedy for racism never is more racism.”
EPP filed a civil rights complaint about the program way back in 2022, but with the Biden administration’s DEI circus calling the shots, the program’s obvious and illegal discrimination went unchallenged until this year when the Trump Justice Department took up the case.
“By its own terms, the purpose of the Program is to aid PPSD’s efforts to recruit a more ‘diverse’ faculty,” the Justice Department’s suit states. “But in doing so, RIDE and PPSD engage in blatant race discrimination, which federal law has long prohibited.”
Speaking with The College Fix, Jacobson expressed that he was “thrilled that the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit in federal court for race, color, and national origin discrimination at the Providence Public School District (PPSD).” He added that the program was “plainly racist,” and that he can’t imagine “any legal defense the school district and State have” to continue it.
“While assisting new teachers in paying off their student loans may be a worthy cause, such a benefit of employment simply cannot be granted or withheld on the basis of the teachers’ race,” commented Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “We will not tolerate such plainly prohibited discrimination in employment.”
Meanwhile, Providence Public School District is refusing to comment, citing “active litigation” and the webpage detailing the program has been removed (an archive may be found here).
Now that the Trump administration is in charge, the magnitude of the illegal DEI programs and racially discriminatory scholarships allowed to proliferate during the Biden years is becoming apparent. And it is massive indeed. The Equal Protection Project cites numerous such cases on its website, and it’s not hard to see what they have in common.
“Girl Boss Business Programs” at Fordham University operates initiatives that “by design and promotion, are intended for women and signal that men are not welcome as full and equal participants.”
The Claremont Colleges in California are cited “for offering, promoting, and administering one or more discriminatory scholarships and programs based on race, color, national origin, sex, or both, in violation of Title VI and Title IX, respectively.”
The University of Michigan offers a “Dreamer Scholarship” that is “open only to DACA/undocumented students in violation of Title VI”—legal U.S. citizens need not apply.
The Ithaca City School District (ICSD) desegregated its “Student of Color United (SOCU) Summit 2024” only after an EPP complaint “detailed substantial evidence that for 2021-2023, the SOCU Summits were limited to students and staff ‘of color’ and that the 2024 Summit promoted the same racial exclusion.”
For decades, programs and initiatives that violate federal civil rights law were allowed to flourish because they promoted the ‘right’ sort of discrimination. It is only now that Trump’s Justice Department is taking a principled stand against racism and sexism that we can see just how far this woke cancer has spread.
