Don't Disrupt the System and the System Wins: The SPLC Indictment and the Long Game of Whiteness

Let's start with what just happened.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

On April 21, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice — under the Trump administration — filed an 11-count criminal indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Wire fraud. Bank fraud. Money laundering. The charges focus on a now-defunct program the SPLC used to place paid informants inside white supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations — groups that have historically threatened, bombed, and killed people.

The SPLC says it used those informants to monitor extremist activity and share intelligence with law enforcement. Multiple legal scholars have called the indictment paper-thin and expressed serious skepticism about the charges. A Columbia Law School professor described it as failing to adequately allege any violation of the wire fraud statutes. A former DOJ fraud supervisor flagged what he called a "major, major omission" in the legal elements of the charges.

And yet — here we are.

A civil rights organization that spent 55 years helping to dismantle white supremacist groups is being criminally charged by the same administration that, on its very first day in office, granted blanket pardons to nearly 1,600 people who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 — including leaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, two groups widely documented as violent extremist organizations with deep ties to white nationalism.

The people who attacked our democracy: pardoned. The organization that spent decades tracking and fighting white supremacist groups: criminally indicted.

I'm asking you to please follow a pattern with me.

Because this isn't the beginning of the pattern. It's just the latest chapter.

To understand what's happening right now, I think we have to understand that Donald Trump's relationship with racism and whiteness isn't new. It's documented. It's decades long. And it matters because patterns matter — they often show us what values could actually be operating.

In 1973, the Department of Justice sued Trump and his company for housing discrimination — specifically for refusing to rent to Black tenants. Federal investigators found that Trump employees marked Black applicants' rental applications with a "C" for "colored." Trump settled, entering into a consent decree to end their discriminatory practices.

In 1989, when five Black and Latino teenagers were accused of a brutal crime in Central Park — later proven innocent and exonerated by DNA evidence — Trump took out full-page ads in four major New York newspapers calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty for those teenagers. He continued to assert their guilt as recently as the 2024 presidential debate — after their exoneration.

From 2011 to 2016, Trump was the most prominent public face of the birther movement — the false conspiracy theory claiming the first Black U.S. president was not a U.S. citizen. Research has consistently found a strong connection between birther beliefs and racial resentment.

After a white supremacist drove a car into a crowd of anti-racism protesters in Charlottesville in 2017, killing Heather Heyer, Trump said there were "very fine people on both sides."

These are not isolated moments. They are a documented through line — a pattern that spans more than fifty years.

And Trump’s "low IQ" pattern is one more thread in that same cloth. Just this week, Trump took to Truth Social and called Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — a double Harvard graduate and the first Black woman to serve on the nation's highest court — "that new, Low IQ person, that somehow found her way to the bench." But this is a documented habit, not a slip. He has directed this slur most consistently at Black women and people of color — Kamala Harris, Jasmine Crockett, Maxine Waters, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and this week, Hakeem Jeffries.

This language doesn't exist in a vacuum. The claim that Black people have inferior intelligence is one of the oldest tools of white supremacy — used for centuries to justify slavery, segregation, marginalization, and all kinds of violence. When a sitting president reaches for that language again and again, aiming it most consistently at Black women in positions of power, that is not a coincidence. That is a pattern. And patterns tell us a lot about what a system is actually doing.

So what does all of this have to do with the SPLC? With you? With us?

Everything.

Because whiteness isn't just about individual prejudice or explicit hate. Whiteness, as a system, was constructed in this country to establish and maintain racial hierarchy. That's our documented racial history.

Scholars like historian Nell Irvin Painter, whose The History of White People traces how whiteness was constructed as a racial category over centuries, Columbia historian Barbara Fields, who argued that race is an ideology — not a biological fact — invented specifically to justify slavery, bell hooks, whose work connected white supremacy to everyday culture and the violence embedded in it, and Ibram X. Kendi have all written about the same essential truth — whiteness wasn't discovered. It was made. Deliberately. To sort people.

To justify stealing land and labor and life. To create a hierarchy that would concentrate power at the top — with white people — and keep everyone else locked out of it. And once that hierarchy was built into law, into culture, into the architecture of our institutions, it didn't need to announce itself anymore. It just needed to keep moving. Unchallenged. Uninterrupted. That's how a system built for harm sustains itself — not only through overt violence, but through the quiet agreement to leave it intact.

The SPLC was founded in 1971 — just years after the explicit laws of Jim Crow fell — specifically to address the echoes and lasting effects of that era. They brought lawsuits that drove white supremacist groups into bankruptcy. They monitored the planning of the Charlottesville rally. They tracked and exposed hate. And because of that work — because they named the thing clearly, resisted it directly, and kept receipts — they have long been a target of the political right.

Now they're facing federal criminal charges. And I want to invite us to sit with what that communicates.

Whiteness doesn't always announce itself. Sometimes it just removes what's in its way. It doesn't need a declaration or a manifesto or even a policy that says the quiet part out loud. What it needs is seemingly simpler — and far more insidious. It needs the people in power to keep doing what benefits whiteness, and to keep undoing what challenges it.

That's the pattern I keep coming back to when I look at this administration. Not just one moment. Not just one decision. The whole picture — step by step, action by action — of a leader who has spent decades demonstrating, in documented and verifiable ways, whose comfort and safety and power he is most committed to protecting.

The Trump administration has dismantled DEI programs across federal agencies. Removed or archived records honoring the Tuskegee Airmen and Navajo Code Talkers from federal spaces. Expanded immigration enforcement in ways that involve racial profiling. Used the term "remigrate" — a term with documented ties to far-right mass deportation movements — in official government messaging.

And then there’s the imagery — posts from the Department of Education and Department of Labor showing only white children, only white workers, over and over. The pattern is hard for me to ignore. When government messaging keeps centering white faces while erasing others, it doubles down on the idea that whiteness is the norm.

None of these actions require someone to say out loud: this is about whiteness. That's not always how systems work. Systems can sustain themselves through what isn't interrupted. Through what's allowed to keep moving, unchallenged. Through the steady removal of anything that tried to get in the way.

When you remove the tools designed to address inequity — and then criminally indict the organizations doing that work — you don't have to say what you're doing. The pattern says it for you.

And this is where it becomes about all of us. The uncomfortable truth is this: whiteness doesn't survive only because of people who explicitly embrace it. It survives because many of us — at some point or another — don't actively resist it.

Don't interrupt it. Decide it's not our moment, not our fight, not the hill.

Racial inequity in the U.S. doesn't need everyone to be a white nationalist. It just needs enough of us to stay quiet. To do nothing.

I think the question the SPLC indictment is really asking is the same question this administration keeps posing, in one form or another: Will we look away? Will we tell ourselves this isn't connected? Will we accept a framing of justice that says the organization fighting white supremacists is the threat?

I hope we won’t. And I also know that not looking away asks something from us. It asks us to be willing to follow the pattern. To name what we're seeing even when there's pressure not to. To resist — collectively, relationally, politically — the systems that are being reinforced right now.

The SPLC will fight this in court. That fight matters.

But so does ours — in our families, our communities, our organizations, our conversations, and our choices about what we interrupt and what we let pass.

Because that's how whiteness continues to exist. And that's how we can begin to take it apart.