“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 Does Not Include Whites”

"...the subverters bastardized the law while claiming to be on the 'right side of history.'"

“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 Does Not Include Whites”

I saw an X post by New York Magazine that featured the headline, “The White Man Suing the New York Times for Discriminating Against White Men.” The piece described how the plaintiff, a longtime Times editor, claims that he was passed over for a deputy editor job so the paper could meet its diversity and leadership targets. He alleges that, despite his experience, he was excluded from final‑round interviews because he is a white man and the role went to a less qualified candidate.

I thought, good for him. Discrimination is discrimination. Whether the case has merit or not, he should be allowed to exercise his American rights and have his day in court. Then I thought about why this was a story at all. The headline made news for one reason only: the plaintiff is white. A black man suing for racial discrimination today would not be treated with the same level of curiosity. His case would be seen as routine, not remarkable.

A little over two weeks ago, I had been at Cornell University screening my documentary, “White Guilt.” Over dinner afterward, the civil rights movement came up in conversation. A Cornell professor, a very nice man, told me that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not include whites. I responded without hesitation that it did. The law says that employers may not discriminate against any individual because of that individual’s race. He said he was surprised and would have to research it. For a moment I even doubted myself. Maybe I was the one missing something here.

But I shouldn’t have been surprised. For years, we Americans have been told in diversity training seminars and antiracist books that whites cannot be victims of racism or racial discrimination. They can only be the perpetrators. Antiracist author Robin DiAngelo defines racism as “white racial and cultural prejudice and discrimination” and argues that only whites can be racist because only they possess institutional power. By this logic, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not truly include whites, except as the permanent guilty party.

This profoundly flawed notion has seeped into our institutions. When Jodi Shaw, an interview subject in “White Guilt,” was at Smith College, she complained to an administrator that she was being treated unfairly because she was white. The administrator told her that, as a white woman, she was not protected under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Her whiteness supposedly placed her outside the circle of protection.

I thought of her as I read the New York Magazine post. I decided to write my own response on X: “There are actually people out there who believe white folks aren’t covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I can’t believe how many people have told me that this is not the case… They’re wrong.”

I then quoted the Act itself: “It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer, to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

It says “any individual” and “such individual’s race.” There’s not one mention of including or excluding any race. No mention of protected classes or disparate impact. All Americans are included. That’s the law. It is race neutral and has no DEI carve outs.

What surprised me was the attention my X post attracted. Wasn’t I stating the obvious? Apparently not. The replies fell into three general categories. Some people said they genuinely had no idea whites were included under the Civil Rights Act. Others insisted I was wrong, that whites were not included, that civil rights law was never meant for them. A third group went further and argued that the Act itself had been corrupted beyond repair and should be scrapped.

I understand the anger behind that last argument. But I disagree. The problem is not the Act. The problem is the Americans who subverted it, who buried its meaning and led us, over six decades, to believe that this country is so systemically racist that equal‑treatment law is obsolete. They wanted new civil‑rights tools that the Act would not give them. So they built a new body of legal precedents and a diversity bureaucracy across America, and we came to believe in “diversity” over law.

They didn’t just misread the Act. They knew that if they wanted the kind of racial “diversity” they had in mind, they would have to engineer it. But how do you racially engineer hiring, promotions, and leadership teams when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 explicitly forbids using race against any individual? You don’t change the words. You change what people think the words mean. You build a new language around “power,” and you tell what my father would call the poetic truth: only those with power can be racist, and those with power are always the whites. Instead of changing “any individual” in the Act, you bury those two words under legal theories and bureaucratic practices that say some people are covered and others are not.

What followed was a string of legal cases. In 1971, the Supreme Court’s decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. created the “disparate impact” doctrine, holding that even neutral requirements like diplomas or tests could violate Title VII if they disproportionately screened out black applicants. The Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 expanded the EEOC’s enforcement powers, giving the new disparate‑impact logic a stronger footing. A few years later, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court opened the door to race‑conscious admissions in higher education, justifying “diversity” as a reason for treating applicants differently by race. The Civil Rights Act of 1991 then codified disparate impact into Title VII itself and increased the pressure on employers to engineer the “right” racial outcomes.

To be fair, there were decisions that reminded the country what the Civil Rights Act actually says. In 1976, McDonald v. Santa Fe Trail declared that Title VII “prohibits racial discrimination in private employment against white persons upon the same standards as racial discrimination against nonwhites.” Earlier this year, the Supreme Court in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services struck down the idea that reverse‑discrimination claims require a higher burden of proof. It said plainly what the original law already said: the individual over the group.

The irony of the New York Times case is hard to miss. A white man is suing one of the country’s most enthusiastic corrupters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for racial discrimination. The very people who have spent years smiling “diversity” into our faces are now being accused of doing the very thing that the Act forbids: using race to decide who rises and who falls. In their false nobility to manufacture the right mix of faces in the masthead, they counted on the Civil Rights Act being safely buried.

That is what this lawsuit really exposes. To pursue a racially engineered vision of diversity, the diversity establishment had to turn its back on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which had been fought for in blood, sweat, and tears. These brave men and women, including my grandparents, were met with dogs, firehoses, fists, bombs, and bullets. Instead of honoring them, the subverters bastardized the law while claiming to be on the “right side of history.”

That Cornell professor had not known most of this. Neither had most of the people who replied to my post. That is what troubles me most. It isn’t just that discrimination persists. It’s that we have been systematically taught to misread the very law that was supposed to stop it. So now a white man has to sue the New York Times to remind America of what the Civil Rights Act actually says.

The law hasn’t failed us. We have failed to read it. We have failed to have the courage to uphold it. And for far too long, we have let our elites get away with it, pretending it says the opposite of what is on the page.

All my best,

Eli