While Donald Trump was chilling at Mar-a-Lago eating chocolate cake out of that nasty-ass kitchen and listening to the Gap Band’s “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” on an endless loop, Betsy DeVos put an anti-affirmative-action, feminist-hating troll who once claimed to be a victim of reverse racism in charge of civil rights in your children’s schools.
DeVos, the Becky who bought herself a Cabinet position as secretary of education, on Wednesday named Candice Jackson the new acting head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The Office for Civil Rights, under the Education Department, is supposed to “ensure equal access to education and to promote educational excellence throughout the nation through vigorous enforcement of civil rights.”
To achieve these goals, the Trump administration gave the position to a woman whose name is the only black-friendly thing about her. In 2005, Jackson wrote the book Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine and teamed up with Trump supporter Roger Stone to bring those women to a Hillary Clinton-Trump presidential debate. “I talked with Roger all summer about this project,” Jackson told New York magazine. “We strategized about how we could strategically bring their message out.”
But that might be the least offensive thing from Jackson’s past. According to ProPublica, the lawyer who hails from a family of country music singers has a troubling civil-rights-averse résumé that includes the following:
- As a student at Stanford, Jackson said that the section of a calculus class that helped minority students was one of the college’s “discriminatory programs.”
- She seems to be a fan of Murray N. Rothbard, an economist who advocated against compulsory public education and called the 1964 Civil Rights Act “monstrous.”
- Although she is a lawyer, she has little to no experience in either education or civil rights.
- She has repeatedly written against affirmative action, once writing, “No one, least of all the minority student, is well served by receiving special treatment based on race or ethnicity.”
- She is outspokenly anti-feminist. “In today’s society, women have the same opportunities as men to advance their careers, raise families, and pursue their personal goals,” she wrote in the Stanford Review. “College women who insist on banding together by gender to fight for their rights are moving backwards, not forwards.”
Jackson’s new position does not require a Senate confirmation but places her in charge of 550 workers responsible for investigating thousands of civil rights complaints. Under President Barack Obama, the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Division pressed colleges to investigate cases of rape and sexual misconduct and stressed minority enrollment at educational institutions.