On Feb. 14, the acting assistant secretary in the Civil Rights Office of the U.S. Department of Education sent out a missive to universities and schools nationwide, including the University of Hawaii. Craig Trainor styles himself a “civil rights lawyer,” and belongs to the Federalist Society, which helped create the current conservative U.S. Supreme Court.

Racial discrimination is illegal, he argued, and yet, “pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination have emanated throughout every facet of academia.” Our universities are so far gone, he claimed, that “in a shameful echo of a darker period in this country’s history, many American schools and universities even encourage segregation by race at graduation ceremonies and in dormitories and other facilities.”

In other words, our universities have revived the racial practices of the Jim Crow era, when African Americans and other minority groups, including Asians, were subject to systematic legal segregation and exclusion from our universities and many other areas of American life. The U.S. Department of Education, declared Trainor, will no longer tolerate such blatant racial discrimination. Policies that advance diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), were illegal, he stated, and if they weren’t terminated in the next 14 days, UH would lose its federal funding — at least $386 million a year, according to UH President Wendy Hensel.

But Trainor’s Orwellian language bears no relationship to the world that exists today at UH or any other American school or university.

The facts: In 1954, American education was profoundly segregated and the doctrine of “separate but equal” was the law of the land. That year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned this doctrine in Brown v. Board of Education, and some progress was made toward the desegregation of education. By the 1980s, though, advances had been reversed by white political backlash and “race blind” judicial conservatism. In many parts of the country, elementary and secondary schools are more segregated now than they were in 1954.

But American universities have made real progress. And while campuses are not yet a perfect reflection of our own society, they are no longer the bastions of white male privilege they were in the past — and today’s situation is what Trainor wants to reverse. At UH this will surely include a full-scale assault on the “racial privileges” of Native Hawaiians. Women and LGBTQ+ people will be next. Trainor’s ideas, and the Trump administration’s policies, would transform the landscape of higher education, once again making it wealthy, white and male.

And these attacks on civil rights policies will not be confined to DEI programs — which Trainor says is part of a policy of indoctrination based on “the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism.’” His statement is absurd. From 1789 to 1865, racial slavery was a legal and constitutionally protected institution in the U.S., and between 1896 and 1954, so was racial segregation. If that isn’t “systemic and structural racism,” I don’t know what is.

People must understand our collective history, to understand how hard many Americans have struggled to expand democracy and racial equality over the past 250 years.

It’s shameful to see the ghost of Jim Crow resurrected to undermine this struggle, and the language of civil rights used to undermine racial equality. “Color-blindness” and “meritocracy” are merely the convenient terms hijacked by those, like Trainor, who have no desire to understand the injustice and inequality of the past, and no desire to change it.

But if we can’t confront that “darker period” and address it honestly, if we can’t admit that correcting past injustices is not “discrimination” but its opposite, if we can’t see that we have a long and difficult road to travel before we can dismiss “race” as an irrelevant fiction, and if we can’t detect the hypocrisy of men like Trainor, then we will be condemned to repeat our past mistakes. Brave people confront the past; cowards flee from it, and history whistles past their ears.

Marcus Daniel is an associate professor of U.S. history at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.