The Trump administration is continuing its quest to make it harder to challenge discrimination in court. Up now: the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which plans to roll back Obama-era guidelines that allowed legal claims against mortgage lenders, developers, and insurers based on statistical evidence of disparate impact.
Under the Obama policy, if a group could show that a bank gave fewer loans to black people with the same credit scores as white people it would lend to, or that it charged higher interest rates to people of color, it could pursue a discrimination claim and the defendant would have to prove that the differences were for some legitimate business reason. This is important because 1) it’s really hard to prove that people have racism in their hearts, when most businesses these days know they can’t straight-up admit to racism; and 2) because it really doesn’t matter if intentional racism is the cause of people of color being denied loans that would have gone to white people with the same financial position, or paying higher interest rates. It’s still wrong and needs to be fixed. It’s not just about racial discrimination, though. This could affect people with disabilities, women, families, LGBT people
But under the Trump administration plan, plaintiffs will have to meet a much higher bar to bring a case at all. The proposal “basically is saying that you have to prove your entire case when you file it. This is unheard of,” the National Fair Housing Alliance’s Lisa Rice said. “This is just another attempt by the Trump administration to take away yet another civil-rights protection.”
It’s not just HUD—this move is part of a broader policy of blocking anti-discrimination efforts and echoes an Education Department policy change to stop preventing schools from disciplining black and brown kids more harshly than white kids. This is the Trump administration: giving license to discriminate in housing and education and anywhere else they can find a way.