2008: “Color-Blind” Nation
Despite the election of a Black man to the presidency, racist ideas continued to pervade American society.
With the election of the first African American president in 2008, Barack Hussein Obama, many people believed that the United States had moved past its racist history. However, the “birther” argument during Obama’s election campaign and throughout his presidency revealed that racism had not died. Rather, new tools and new approaches emerged to spread its ideas.
Obama takes the oath of office administered by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. at the Capitol, January 20, 2009.
Source: Wikipedia
For example, a survey published by the Associated Press in 2012 revealed that “whites demonstrated more racism than in 2008 when Obama was elected” (Bonilla-Silva, 2018, p. 212). Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2018) has argued that we live in an age of color-blind racism and that the presidential election of 2016 “prove[d] the significance of color-blind racism” (p. 222). Bonilla-Silva defines color-blind racism as a new white supremacy that continues the racial hierarchy in America by using different, more subtle and sophisticated methods than the overt racism of the Jim Crow era. Qualities of this new racial structure are
[T]he increasingly covert nature of racial discourse and racial practices; the avoidance of racial terminology and the ever-growing claim by whites that they experience ‘reverse racism’; the elaboration of a racial agenda over political matters that eschews direct racial references; the invisibility of most mechanisms to reproduce racial inequality; and finally, the rearticulation of some racial practices characteristic of the Jim Crow period of race relations. (p. 17-18)
In the 2016 presidential election, the resurgence of white supremacy was on full display within the rhetoric of the candidates as well as throughout the policies and narratives that vilified non-white individuals.
The toxic political rhetoric, and the rise of the “alt-right” all demonstrate blatant racism. An obvious example of racism at the highest level is when then presidential candidate Donald Trump said of Mexican immigrants, “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Similar statements appeared throughout the 45th President’s term of office, and those racist statements stood in direct contrast to some of the awareness-building protests and public outrage at the deaths of Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and others.
In Charlottesville, Virginia (2017), alt-right members prepare to enter Emancipation Park holding Nazi, Confederate, and Gadsden "Don't Tread on Me" flags.
Source: Wikipedia
Part of white nationalism’s appeal has come in the face of downward economic trends among struggling white families.
The alt-right has tapped into what many whites expressed as feeling oppressed by “reverse racism.” Despite the articulation of a number of reasons outside of race that explain the economic downturn, white Americans experiencing poverty continue to support racist immigration policies and mimic racist rhetoric used by elected officials and their political appointees. Supporters eagerly repeat racist taunts such as “Send them back,” at political rallies in response to three women of color in the United States Congress who have criticized certain political policies. Analyzing this phenomenon, researcher Frantz Fanon
[C]oncludes that feelings had a unique ability to trump facts. … That is, people who experienced phobic emotional responses to Black people were likely to disregard conspicuously available “reasonable evidence” that people of color posed no threat to them in actuality…. The widespread social panics over the perceived threats of criminality, terrorism, welfare dependence, and undocumented immigration in the post-civil rights era are similarly dismissive of facts and evidence. (Bonilla-Silva, 2018, p. 223)
While the recent partisan rhetoric may be stirring up color-blind racism, as well as giving new life to old-fashioned racial animosity, the systemic nature of this reality keeps America pro-white and anti-Black.
Recent studies conducted by sociologists comparing the views of fringe white supremacist groups with mainstream attitudes found that “their [white supremacist] ideologies on race are remarkably similar to mainstream discourses” (Bonilla-Silva, 2018, p. 225). Even after four hundred years (1619 – 2023) racism remains with us.