Since I’m white, the Left will holler and lecture that I’m not allowed to speak the sacred words of Martin Luther King Jr. Still, since they’re wrong, and I don’t care what they say or think, here is what he said in 1963: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

What followed was in complete opposition to his dream.

After the Civil Rights Act was signed into law in 1964, which was intended to prohibit discrimination based on “race, color, or national origin," the Department of Justice adopted a standard known as "disparate impact.” This policy prohibited local governments and organizations that receive federal funding from maintaining policies that disproportionately harm people of color. Using this data analysis tool called “disparate impact,” government and private-sector policies could be deemed discriminatory if they affected people of different races differently, even if that was not the goal.

This laid the groundwork for cases such as Griggs v. Duke Power that came before the Supreme Court in 1971, which banned IQ tests for jobs on the basis that they were racist. This precedent not only harmed the hiring process, making degrees (credentialism) the only way businesses could reliably find qualified candidates, but also opened the door for minorities to sue if a law or policy disproportionately affected them, even if that law was meant to be neutral. In 1973, the DOJ began requiring recipients of federal funding to consider disparate impacts — for example, whether a new industrial facility would disproportionately harm a nearby majority-black community. This was an obvious one-way street; none of this was required for white communities.

As of December 9, 2025, the DOJ has eliminated disparate-impact liability from its Title VI regulations.

“For decades, the Justice Department has used disparate-impact liability to undermine the constitutional principle that all Americans must be treated equally under the law,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “No longer. This Department of Justice is eliminating its regulations that for far too long required recipients of federal funding to make decisions based on race.”

While they apply only to Justice Department programs, the administration has made clear that it plans similar regulatory rollbacks across the government.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division added, “The prior ‘disparate impact’ regulations encouraged people to file lawsuits challenging racially neutral policies, without evidence of intentional discrimination. Our rejection of this theory will restore true equality under the law by requiring proof of actual discrimination, rather than enforcing race- or sex-based quotas or assumptions.” Though long overdue, it’s good that we are finally correcting course.

As expected, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and others are up in arms over the new repeal rule, calling it “an unprecedented and dangerous step.” “The Trump administration cannot claim to value equality by undermining the very laws that keep people protected from discrimination,” commented Amalea Smirniotopoulos, NAACP-LDF senior policy counsel. Christine Stoneman, former chief of the Justice Department’s Federal Coordination and Compliance section in the Civil Rights Division, labeled](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/12/09/trump-disparate-impact-justice-discrimination/) the move “unnecessary” and “harmful.” She is one of 200 former Justice Department civil rights attorneys who signed an open letter Tuesday, accusing Trump and his administration of destroying the division’s work.

Michael Pillera, another veteran federal civil rights attorney, expressed his dismay: “I think this is another example of the administration’s lawless approach to disregarding precedent and just decreeing what they want to exist.”

Conservatives, on the other hand, have long argued that proving discrimination should require proof that someone intended to treat people differently. When people are being judged by data, they feel pressure to make decisions based on racial quotas. This is how a policy meant to fight discrimination is actually fostering it, and why labeling it an “anti-discrimination” rule is false. The DOJ concluded, “Title VI has and will continue to prohibit intentional discrimination. The Department’s new rule ensures that recipients of federal funding will be judged on their actual conduct, not on statistical outcomes or circumstances beyond their control.”

Some are pointing out that there is a disparate impact on Americans through colleges implementing affirmative action, which disproportionately affects whites and Asians. Also, American workers are being disparately hurt by allowing H-1Bs from India. But I would argue that those issues can be addressed in other, more appropriate ways, such as eliminating affirmative action and honing the H-1B program to prevent abuses. An unjust rule is an unjust rule regardless of the cause.

Kenneth L. Marcus, CEO of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, praised the “sweeping elimination,” stating, “This new rule is the most forceful push for color-blind justice since the Supreme Court’s Harvard decision.”

It may be 60 years past the civil rights era, but as the saying goes, “better late than never.”