Why is the EEOC Is Using Civil Rights Law to "Protect" White People?

We have fully entered Orwellian territory.

Last week, the EEOC — the federal agency created to protect workers from discrimination — forced Planned Parenthood of Illinois to pay $500,000 to white employees who were required to attend diversity training. Training that included the statement that “white supremacy is exerted at every level of oppression.”

Which is, for the record, factually true.

Meet the White Woman Enforcer

Andrea Lucas is the latest in a now-familiar line of white women in Trump’s orbit who have made themselves useful by advancing white supremacy. As EEOC Chair, she has declared war on DEI, warned employers that diversity initiatives put them at legal risk, and invoked the language of civil rights to protect white employees from sitting through an uncomfortable training.

What Black People Fought For

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was born in the deep south land of Jim Crow. In the decades of organizing, marching, bleeding, and dying that Black Americans endured just to be recognized as full human beings in their own country. In Birmingham, where during the 1963 Children's Crusade, police commissioner Bull Connor ordered fire hoses and police dogs turned on child protesters.

In Selma, where in 1965, state troopers advanced on hundreds of peaceful marchers with clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. John Lewis suffered a skull fracture and was one of fifty-eight people treated for injuries after trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on a day that became known as “Bloody Sunday".

They fought so that Black workers (and other marginalized groups) could not be turned away from jobs because of their race. So that Black women could not be passed over, underpaid, harassed, and pushed out of workplaces with no legal recourse. So that the government would stand behind them when institutions failed them.

Taking those laws and deploying them to compensate white employees for the discomfort of learning that racism exists is an obscenity. A deliberate, calculated desecration of everything those laws stand for and everyone who died for them. This is the message Lucas’ EEOC is sending: those laws belong to us now. We will use them however we want. And there is nothing you can do about it.

Why Planned Parenthood

This target was chosen deliberately. Planned Parenthood has already been federally defunded, its Medicaid reimbursements stripped, its clinics closing across the country. These are women who cannot afford private gynecologists, who rely on Planned Parenthood’s Illinois health centers for abortion, birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing, and gender-affirming care. Many of those women are Black and brown. Many have nowhere else to go. That a woman is behind punishing an organization that helps other women makes it all the more devastating.

Hitting Planned Parenthood with an EEOC action while it is already on its knees sends a message to every organization Trump’s people have decided to target: your politics make you vulnerable. Your mission makes you a mark. Step out of line and we will find a way to come for you, and we will weaponize any law to do it.

The $500,000 extracted from an organization serving women in crisis will go to people who were offended by a training. This is white fragility turned into white supremacy.

The Real Discrimination Happening Right Now

While white employees are being “compensated” for learning that racism is structural, Black women’s unemployment has risen to 7.3%, nearly double the rate of white women. Up to 600,000 Black women are currently economically sidelined. They are losing jobs at more than three times the rate of all other women. College-educated Black women have been hit hardest, the very women who did everything right, earned the degrees, built the careers, and are watching the floor give way beneath them.

The EEOC is conveniently silent on the hemorrhaging of Black women from the American workforce. Instead, the priority is a few white folks who got their feelings hurt.

The strategy centers whiteness, compensates white discomfort, and pushes Black and brown workers back to the margins. EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas is the architect. A white woman is wielding civil rights law as a weapon against the people it was written to protect, and she is just getting started.

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