Trump’s Executive Order Could Make HBCUs Ineligible for Nearly All Federal Funding

In September, Donald Trump issued an executive order that prohibits federal funding from being awarded to any agencies or contractors that promote racial or sexual stereotyping.

According to HBCU Digest’s writer Jarret Carter Sr., the goal of Executive Order 13950 was to put an end to what the White House called a growing culture of blaming white people for much of America’s systemic racism and social tension in industry and governance.

The order outlined many items and guidelines for how it proposed to engage contractors and agencies in an effort on end what the administration called race blaming.

In Section 5, under the Requirements for Federal Grants, the outline explains that heads of agencies should review and identify programs for which the agency may, as a condition of receiving a grant, require the recipient to certify that it will not use Federal funds to promote any certain concepts.

Some of those concepts include; the idea that anyone’s race or sex is inherently superior. The idea that an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously. The concept that an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race or sex, and more.

The definition is written so dangerously broad that it “clears the way for the government to withhold federal funding from businesses if they venture too far into reverse sociopolitical engineering of systems and cultures that at their base were built by historical racism,” Carter wrote.

This order could also allow for an almost instantaneous and horrific reversal of programs created to support Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

The Higher Education Act of 1965, defined an HBCU as: “any historically black college or university that was established prior to 1964, whose principal mission was, and is, the education of black Americans.”

The wording of this new executive order highlights a disconnect between the two definitions that could allow policymakers to subversively reverse fragments of slavery and Jim Crow policy, and to now turn them into tools of discrimination against white students and professionals in higher education.

Trump has already attempted to attack HBCUs funding back in 2017 when he called it “unconstitutional.” It now seems that this thinking was the foundation for the executive order signed in September, which doesn’t namecheck HBCUs specifically but puts the funding programs, academic infrastructure, and culture squarely in his administration’s crosshairs as targets for political retribution.