Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s handbook that Republican Party candidate Donald Trump is expected to implement if elected, is predicted to have an outsized impact on Black Americans per legal analysis from the Legal Defense Fund.
As Karla McKanders, the director of the Legal Defense Fund’s Thurgood Marshall Institute, told The Guardian, the report was produced because the LDF wanted to bring attention to the “larger impact that Project 2025 will have on our democracy and undermining our democracy.”
McKanders continued, “The most important part of the report is how Project 2025 will have an impact on individual lives and how those individual lives will be upended through the policy proposals. We look at the proposals for dismantling the Department of Education, [which] might be an abstract concept that people hear, but we bring it to a more concrete level in terms of how it will impact individual lives.”
McKanders added, “If we look at pre-K, Project 2025 proposes to dismantle the Head Start program for pre-K. In the report, we have statistics that show that 28% of the enrollees in Head Start are Black children. While it will undermine education efforts for all children, in particular, it will disproportionately impact and widen achievement gaps for Black and Latinx students.”
According to LDF President and Director-Counsel Janai Nelson, “Our democracy stands at a crossroads: a path of infinite promise towards a more inclusive, equitable, and durable democracy on the one hand, and one of immeasurable and, potentially, irretrievable demise on the other. The assault on Black communities envisioned by Project 2025 will almost certainly condemn us to demise.”
According to the report, Project 2025 is considered a threat to Black communities across multiple areas. It presents risks to civil rights protections and equal opportunity, Black
students and their rights to a safe, inclusive, and quality education, voting rights, democracy and Black political power, public safety, equal access to housing, healthcare, and access to safe climates.RELATED CONTENT: Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley On the ‘Stop Project 2025’ Task Force and the Danger of a Trump Presidency