The United States is only two generations removed from the stain of segregation enforced by law in higher education. Violent images like the ones of white rioters at Ole Miss going all out to prevent James Meredith from matriculating through the university in 1962 are like scars on a wound that has only begun to heal.

The concept of affirmative action – first devised not on campus, but in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 – was meant to assist in the healing process by mandating that businesses make up for patterns of discrimination by hiring black workers at a certain proportion of their workforce. The concept was eventually expanded into education.

It seems, however, that the Trump administration – and his Department of Justice in particular – are not interested in healing, equality or, perhaps ironically, justice. The latest news that a memo has circulated at the DoJ outlining a plan to investigate “intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions” – that is, policies deemed to “discriminate” against white applicants – is proof-positive of that.

The war on equity in education is not new. Affirmative action has always been a hot-button issue for those who see the opening of top-flight universities to students from marginalized backgrounds and communities as an aberration. Merit should be the guiding principle, they say, as they laugh at former president George W Bush’s jokes about being a C-student at Yale.

But the context that these changes in higher education are occurring within are frightening. Remember when the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, stated that her department’s office of civil rights had “all too often automatically handled individual complaints as evidence of systematic institutional violations” and that such systematic reviews should be avoided? It seems that this advice is being ignored just a short 15-minute walk across the mall at the justice department, where precisely such a review is about to take aim at programs that have helped colleges and universities to look more like the communities that they serve.

The irony is bitter for communities of color, given that this same justice department is easing its oversight of local police departments that have engaged in brutality against them. Apparently, what’s burdensome for institutions that have literally killed people without justification is just right for institutions that seek to expand the base of college-educated Americans beyond those with the ability to afford it.

You can bet, however, that there is one program that will not be a target of the investigation: legacy scholarships.

Such scholarships are held out for those whose parents or grandparents attended the same university as the prospective student in question. The aforementioned Bush was the beneficiary of such a scholarship at Yale. In fact, it is a safe bet, given the history of segregation in higher education, that a disproportionate amount of those who would qualify for such scholarships would be white, particularly if a student is required to show that multiple generations of their family attended their chosen university.

The likely omission of such scholarships from the scope of this memo – as well as the fact that this is going to be handled not by civil servants, but by the political appointees in the department’s front office – is the tell as to what this is really about: cordoning off educational opportunity from the American working class, and the working class of color in particular. Because make no mistake, there is both a racial and a class-based element to these maneuvers. For the Malia and Sasha Obamas of the world, these edicts will have little consequence. But for the first-generation college students and those students from areas that have been isolated from educational advancement due to the twin evils of racism and austerity, the impacts of this action could be devastating.

For a vision of what could be, one needs to only look at Alabama. In the state that the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, once represented in the US Senate, the proportion of black students at its flagship university is less than half the proportion of black residents in the state. Debates about the segregated nature of the Greek system of fraternities and sororities – leaving the class position of those in said system aside – raged on campus in 2013. And the election of Elliot Spillers as president of the Student Government Association (only the second time that a black student has done so in the 100-plus year history of the SGA) was treated as an Obama-like marker of social progress on campus.

Now the man once deemed too racist to be a judge by a Reagan-era, Republican-controlled Senate wants to dismantle progress everywhere. Education is a human right, and institutions of higher education across this country should reject any cooperation with such an investigation.