by Sylvester Brown, Jr.
Examaning Race in the "Post-Racial Era" video by Sylvester Brown, Jr.
If you can, Google
“post-racial America.” It was a phrase echoed ad nauseum in 2008 that signified
the country’s transition beyond race. After all, a Black man, Barack Obama, was
elected president of the United States. It was a self-congratulatory signifier
that race no
longer mattered and racism no longer existed in America.
White pundits, politicians and people gleefully engaged in the great pretense that the country had finally put its biases aside and elected a Black man. Never mind that Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush, had mired the country in two unfunded wars and the most severe worldwide economic crisis since the Great Depression. No, in the minds of many, America had simply transcended racism.
Poppycock! Days after Obama’s coronation, and throughout his presidency, he faced the most bombastic, racially charged backlash from the media and the public ever recorded. It was anything but “post-racial.” In fact, it was a “predetermined America” complete with a collective rebuttal dictated by race.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of radical "anti-government" militia groups increased from 150 to 1,274 during the years of Obama’s presidency. Just three months before the 2016 presidential election, a whopping 72% of registered Republican voters doubted Obama’s citizenship, according to an NBC poll at the time. Donald Trump’s trajectory to the White house can be directly aligned with his leading the "birther movement,” where he publicly questioned Obama's birthplace and backed other outlandish conspiracy theories and racist tropes.
By election day 2016, a racially predetermined (not post racial) white America was conditioned, codified and masterfully prepped to vote for a candidate who would sooth their racial anxieties and “please, baby, baby, please…” “Make America Great Again.”
Trump was white America’s cue to act up and act out on their racial hangups and fears. Indeed, post-Obama, the time was ripe to stereotype all Mexican immigrants as criminals, drug dealers and rapists. White extremist’s behavior was so normalized by 2017 that, during a rally in Charlottesville, VA demonstrators with tiki torches boldly marched the streets chanting anti-Semitic sentiments like “Jews will not replace us.”
Under the Trump Administration, it was OK to label BLM protestors as “Black Identity Extremists” and “domestic terrorists” who posed a threat to the United States. This was the group, according to former Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, who Trump asked: "Can't we just shoot them in the legs or something?"
Ironically, it’s Trump, his cultish political allies and followers who are now labeling white extremists’ groups like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and others involved in the violent Jan. 6 insurrection as “political prisoners” and “hostages.”
Alternative nor mainstream media doesn’t discuss this much but everything regarding Trump and his third bid for presidency evolve from or revolves around race. As voting outcomes have revealed, it’s not just white extremists or poorly educated southern voters who slavishly support Trump and his ignorant, incoherent rhetoric. No, it’s so-called “good white people,” teachers and doctors and policemen and mailmen and... well, a huge segment of whites who are attracted to his subtle and not-so-subtle racially divisive messages.
In the upcoming presidential election, I don’t fear Black voters who are supposedly backing Trump. In 2016, Trump only received about eight percent of their vote. In 2020, Biden garnered 92% of the Black vote. No matter how many publicity stunts like the recent overwhelmingly white gathering of Trump supporters at his attempt to galvanize Black voters at a Black church; most Black voters will still reject Trump, no matter how many clownish mugshot T-shirts or garish tennis shoes he markets to urban voters.
No, I fear the un-polled; that quiet majority of “reasonable” white voters who ache for an America where Blacks were kept “in their place”; where Black history wasn’t taught in public schools or universities and no corporation, college or government institution was forced to abide by diversity, equity or inclusionary policies. I fear the voters who will gladly swap dictatorship for democracy, the Constitution for a career criminal.
I fear post-racial America.
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