Adam Serwer: “If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy.”

“Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly.”

Jerel Ezell: “The 2024 presidential election left the Democrats’ multiracial coalition in tatters. Nonwhite people voted in higher percentages for Trump in 2024 than they did in 2020, in some cases by double-digit increases.”

“Democrats are now in the thick of a come-to-Jesus reckoning over these losses, and it should begin with this obvious truth: There is no deep cultural, social, economic or political linkage between Black, Latino, Indigenous and Asian Americans — at least not one that can be leveraged by the party for votes.”

Jamelle Bouie: “Trump’s war on DEI is a war on the civil rights era itself, an attempt to turn back the clock on equal rights. Working under the guise of fairness and meritocracy, Trump and his allies want to restore a world where the first and most important qualification for any job of note was whether you were white and male, where merit is a product of your identity and not of your ability.”

“As is true in so many other areas, the right’s accusation that diversity means unfair preferences masks a confession of its own intentions.”

“At his annual Super Bowl news conference Monday, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell strongly supported the league’s policies designed to promote diversity at the club-employment level and said they would continue,” the New York Times reports.

“But during Super Bowl LIX, and with President Donald Trump apparently planning to attend on Sunday, the NFL might be making another kind of statement on the Caesars Superdome field itself. According to two league sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions, league officials recently changed one of the slogans expected to be stenciled in the back of an end zone from ‘End Racism’ to ‘Choose Love.’”

Seth Masket: “A substantial chunk — let’s say 90% — of the story about the working class leaving the Democratic Party over the past 50 years is a story about race. To simplify, it’s about working class whites starting in the 1970s, and Latinos more recently, being mobilized against the Democratic Party due to resentment toward Blacks.”

Also: “We have never had a consensus definition of ‘working class.’ It could mean people without a college education, or lower-income people, or people in specific types of jobs like manufacture or service, or something else. It is also a populist cultural designation — one that Donald Trump has exploited well — signifying the tastes of “regular” people (often somehow rural whites) who might have money but still want to stick it to elites. Just who has left the Democratic Party and when is highly contingent on one’s conception of ‘working class.’”

New York Times: “Flash displays of hate and white power are happening more frequently in the United States, a trend that experts say is a reaction to changing demographics, political turmoil and social catalysts. More than 750 such incidents have taken place since 2020, according to the Anti-Defamation League, with more than half of them occurring in the last 18 months.”

“National experts describe a familiar pattern: Small groups of mostly masked men chant and wave swastika or white power flags in public and yell racial slurs at targets as varied as immigrants, Black people, Jews and L.G.B.T.Q. people. They unfurl offensive banners over highways or post racist fliers in communities. The demonstrations are typically captured on video and ricochet across social media to large audiences.”

President Biden declared on Tuesday that hatred of Jews “continues to lie deep in the hearts of too many people,” saying there has been a “ferocious surge of antisemitism” in the United States following the attacks by Hamas that killed 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, the New York Times reports.

Interestingly, Biden did not mention the plight of Palestinians killed in Gaza since Israel began the war in response to the Hamas attack.

“New data shows that Democrats’ longtime advantage with Black, Latino and Asian American voters has shrunk to its lowest point in more than 60 years — creating a massive vulnerability for President Biden and congressional Democrats,” Axios reports.

“One of the most loyal parts of the Democratic coalition is suddenly in danger. Black and Hispanic men could vote Republican in numbers not seen since President Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected in the 1950s.”

New York Times: “The racist discourse by Republican members of Congress, both in casual comments and in official statements, has become so commonplace that it now often slips by without any real condemnation from the GOP. Democrats frequently call for apologies but no longer expect any response, and those futile denunciations quickly disappear into a morass of polarized content on social media.”

“The pattern is playing out as the Republican Party once again coalesces behind former President Donald Trump, who routinely made bigoted statements during his first campaign for the White House and his presidency. His approach has encouraged some Republicans to freely use rhetoric that denigrates people based on ethnicity, religion or nationality.”