Students in a combined fourth- and fifth-grade class work together on a poster about the Lunar New Year.
Credit: Photo by Allison Shelley for EDUimages
A new lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is not about protecting or upholding equality; to the contrary, it is about rewriting who counts as a victim of racism in the United States.
Days before the nation honored the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, President Donald Trump told The New York Times that civil rights policies from the 1960s left white people “very badly treated,” describing long-fought remedies for exclusion as “reverse racism.” That same narrative now anchors a federal lawsuit filed by the 1776 Project Foundation, which claims that a decades-old desegregation policy at LAUSD discriminates against white students.
The 1776 Project Foundation, a conservative organization that says it advocates “equal rights for all,” is suing LAUSD over policies originally designed to dismantle segregation. The suit states that smaller class sizes, extra resources and enrollment preferences to prestigious magnet schools are provided to schools where at least 70% of students are Black, Latino, Asian or otherwise nonwhite.
The plaintiffs argue that this support amounts to “overt discrimination” against white students and even call the policy a modern form of racial favoritism. In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs contend that giving historically marginalized students additional help is not a belated effort at repair, but an unconstitutional assault on those who have long sat closest to power.
To understand how upside-down this claim is, start with the basic demographics of the LAUSD. The district educates a little over 500,000 students, about three-quarters of whom are Latino, with around 10% white, 7% Black and 5% Asian. There are essentially no majority-white schools in the system; white students are a numerical minority at nearly every campus and are concentrated in a small set of more affluent, often Westside neighborhoods. This is largely due to decades of white flight, residential segregation and redistricting.
The lawsuit maintains that at schools where white students are in the minority, children endure notable disadvantage and harm. But in these very schools, students of color are the overwhelming majority, meaning any resource shortfalls or competitive barriers fall hardest on them as well — something the complaint largely ignores. As someone who spends lots of time in LAUSD schools, I have failed to see a small or large number of white students suffering in schools in ways that their peers of color were not.
The case also erases LAUSD’s history, which is not one of lavish favoritism toward Black and brown children, but of entrenched segregation and underinvestment. In Crawford v. Board of Education, California courts found in the 1970s that Los Angeles schools were “substantially segregated” and that district leaders had taken affirmative steps that created and perpetuated racial separation.
The resource formula that 1776 Project now attacks was crafted within this context: It channels smaller class sizes, additional funding, and programmatic support to campuses serving overwhelmingly nonwhite enrollments, where generations of students have felt the brunt of segregation, harm and neglect.
What is striking is that organizations like the 1776 Project were nowhere to be found when Black and brown students spent decades in overcrowded, crumbling schools, or when their neighborhoods bore the cost of the district’s failures.
This selective concern extends beyond facilities and funding. Across Los Angeles and the country, Black and brown students are disproportionately assigned to special education, suspended, expelled, and disproportionately funneled into juvenile and criminal justice systems — patterns well documented in civil rights investigations and education research. Yet these pipelines into carceral systems have not spurred the 1776 Project to demand sweeping remedies in the name of “equal rights for all.”
Author Heather McGhee in the book “The Sum of Us,” argues that racism thrives on an us-versus-them story that treats any investment in historically excluded communities as a threat to those long at the top. Under this logic, if LAUSD launches initiatives for Black students, multilingual learners, foster youth, unhoused students or students with disabilities — groups that consistently face worse outcomes — it must necessarily be hurting white children, even when their numbers are comparatively small and their poverty rates significantly lower.
The district must continue to be held accountable for improving conditions for every child, including the white students who attend predominantly nonwhite schools.
But accountability is different from weaponizing civil rights law to strip away targeted support for communities whose segregation and marginalization are matters of public record. The Trump administration’s broader effort to frame civil rights remedies as “reverse discrimination” invites the public to ignore what their own eyes can see: a system where racial inequities persist, even when white students are no longer the numerical majority.
When conservatives insist that helping students of color automatically harms white students, they are echoing an old question: “Who are you going to believe—me, or your lying eyes?”
The answer in Los Angeles should be clear. Districts like LAUSD must resist these dog-whistle politics, continue to support all students, and remain especially vigilant in serving those who have borne the heaviest costs of segregation for generations.
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Tyrone C. Howard is a professor at the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at UCLA. He is also the Pritzker Family endowed chair in Education to Strengthen Children & Families and director of the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools.
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