TWO WEEKS AFTER his exhilarating keynote address, Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, was republished. It rushed up the charts and snatched rave reviews in the final months of 2004. Toni Morrison, the queen of American letters, and the editor of Angela Davis’s iconic memoir three decades earlier, deemed Dreams from My Father “quite extraordinary.” Obama had written the memoir in the racially packed year of 1995 as he prepared to begin his political career in the Illinois Senate. In his most antiracist passage, Obama reflected on assimilated biracial Blacks like “poor Joyce,” his friend at Occidental College. In Joyce and other Black students, he “kept recognizing pieces of myself,” he wrote. People “like Joyce” spoke about “the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. It wasn’t a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be ‘neutral’ and ‘objective.’ Only white culture could be ‘nonracial.’ . . . Only white culture had ‘individuals.’”
Obama’s antiracist litany continued in his critical revelation of the “extraordinary Negro” complex. “We, the half-breeds and the college-degreed, . . . [are] never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives—although that’s what we tell ourselves—but because [we] . . . have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger. Don’t you know who I am? I’m an individual!”1
Ironically, racist Americans of all colors would in 2004 begin hailing Barack Obama, with all his public intelligence, morality, speaking ability, and political success, as the extraordinary Negro. The extraordinary-Negro hallmark had come a mighty long way from Phillis Wheatley to Barack Obama, who became the nation’s only African American in the US Senate in 2005. Since Wheatley, segregationists had despised these extraordinary-Negro exhibits of Black capability and had done everything to take them down. But Obama—or rather Obama’s era—was different. Segregationists turned their backs on their predecessors and adored the Obama exhibit as a proclamation of the end of racism. They wanted to end the discourse on discrimination.
But, to their dismay, the discourse would not quiet down. Segregationists hardly minded the animalistic Black Savior flicks, featuring physically supernatural Blacks saving Whites (The Green Mile, 1999); or the paternalistic White Savior flicks, featuring morally supernatural Whites saving Blacks (The Blind Side, 2009); or the flicks depicting amazing real-life stories of personal responsibility overcoming extreme adversity (The Pursuit of Happyness, 2006). But segregationists did mind Paul Haggis’s 2005 Academy Award–winning Best Picture, Crash, a film that intertwined the racial experiences over a two-day period of characters from every racial group except Native Americans. Each character is shown as both prejudiced and the victim of prejudice, and the characters’ prejudiced ideas and actions are depicted as stemming from both ignorance and hate. While segregationists over the years rebuked Crash’s explicit racial discourse, and assimilationists hailed the film’s masterful portrayal of the pervasive, illogical, and oppressive effects of individual bigotry, antiracists argued that the film left much to be desired. They critiqued especially the lack of complexity on race relations in the film and the absence of any exploration of institutional racism. In The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates did not temper his antiracist review, calling it the “worst film of the decade.” And for the color-blind segregationists, John McWhorter described Crash as “a melodrama, not a reflection of The Real America.”2
But it was a devastating natural and racial disaster that summer that forced a tense debate about institutional and individual racism. During the final days of August 2005, Hurricane Katrina took more than 1,800 lives, forced millions to migrate, flooded the beautiful Gulf Coast, and caused billions in property damage. Hurricane Katrina blew the color-blind roof off America and allowed all to see—if they dared to look—the dreadful progression of racism.
For years, scientists and journalists had warned that if southern Louisiana took “a direct hit from a major hurricane,” the levees could fail and the region would be flooded and destroyed, as the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported in 2002. Ignoring the warnings, it was almost as if politicians were hoping for a destructive hurricane to occur so that what Naomi Klein termed “disaster capitalism” could follow it. Politicians could award multimillion-dollar reconstruction contracts to corporations filling their campaign coffers, and New Orleans’s Black residents locked on prime real estate could be cleared away to make room for gentrification. Whether they actually hoped for something like Hurricane Katrina hardly mattered, because politicos and disaster capitalists (Vice President Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, for example) capitalized on the destruction. Even Klansmen got rich off their fake donation websites.3
It was rumored that the Bush administration directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to delay its response in order to amplify the destructive reward for those who would benefit. Whether he actually did that is unknown, but it hardly mattered because FEMA did delay, and millions suffered because of it. While national reporters quickly reached the city and captured for their cameras thousands of residents of the predominantly Black Ninth Ward trapped on roofs and in the Superdome, federal officials made excuses for their delays. It took three days to deploy rescue troops to the Gulf Coast region, more time than it took to get troops on the ground to quell the 1992 Rodney King rebellion, and the result was deadly. “I believe it was racism,” said a paramedic who witnessed the death spiral in New Orleans.4
But even this was not the full story of Hurricane Katrina. The extreme disaster story of racism became an extremely racist disaster story. The Associated Press dispatched a photograph of White people carrying “bread and soda from a local grocery store,” and another photograph of a Black man who “loot[ed] a grocery store.” As babies died of infections and hurt people waited for ambulances, reporters broadcasted sensational stories of “babies in the Convention Center who got their throats cut” in a crime-saturated city of “armed hordes” hijacking ambulances and “refugees” seeking shelter. Libertarian journalist Matt Welch did not mince words or the truth when he declared that the “deadly bigotry” of the media probably helped “kill Katrina victims.” Federal officials and nearby emergency personnel used these media reports to justify their delays—citing the dangers of sending aid and personnel with so many people looting “gun stores” and shooting “at police, rescue officials and helicopters.” Racist Americans actually reported, circulated, and believed the outrageous lies of those who were saying that Black people in a disaster zone would shoot at the very people coming to help them.
No one summed up the class racism of the government and media response to Hurricane Katrina victims better than Lani Guinier of Harvard Law School. “Poor Black people are the throw-away people. And we pathologize them in order to justify our disregard,” she said. And no one summoned up the raw feelings of antiracist Blacks better than the superstar rapper who had just released his second studio album, Late Registration. “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” Kanye West boldly stated, deviating from his script during a live hurricane relief concert on NBC on September 2, 2005. By mid-September 2005, the pollsters were rushing out to check the pulse of American racism. In one national poll, only 12 percent of White Americans—but 60 percent of African Americans—agreed that “the federal government’s delay in helping the victims in New Orleans was because the victims were black.” Presumably, the minds of 88 percent of White Americans and 40 percent of Black Americans—if the poll was representative—had been flooded by racist ideas.
In the era of color-blind racism, no matter how gruesome the racial crime, no matter how much evidence was stacked against them, racists were standing up before the judge and claiming “not guilty.” But how many criminals actually confess when they don’t have to? From “civilizers” to standardized testers, assimilationists have rarely confessed to racism. Enslavers and Jim Crow segregationists went to their graves claiming innocence. George W. Bush will likely do the same. “I faced a lot of criticism as president,” Bush mused in his post-presidency memoir. “I didn’t like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all-time low.”5
Into the fall and winter of 2005, antiracist charges of racism in New Orleans were met with racist charges of “the irresponsible use of the race card,” to quote Black media personality Larry Elder. Into 2006, the producers of racist ideas were arguing that the charges of widespread discrimination in New Orleans, and in the United States, were fabricated or overblown. The United States was color blind, and the Black people charging discrimination were lying—they were playing their race cards.6
It was in this polarized post-Katrina racial climate that Crystal Mangum stripped at a party for Duke University’s White lacrosse team. After the party, in March 2006, the Black single mother and college student went to the Durham police. Team members had shouted racial epithets before forcing her into a room and gang-raping her, Mangum told police. Investigators then intercepted and released a post-party email. I wanted “to have some strippers over,” Ryan McFadyen told his teammates. “I plan on killing the bitches” and cutting “their skin off while cumming in my duke issue spandex.” As the Durham district attorney filed charges, the case became a national story. The national antiracist, anti-rape, and antisexist community rose up to support Crystal Mangum. “Regardless of the result of the police investigation,” eighty-eight Duke professors said in a full-page advertisement in the Duke Chronicle on April 6, 2006, “what is apparent every day now is the anger and fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism.”
By 2007, the case against the lacrosse players had fallen apart. Physical and DNA evidence had exonerated them of misconduct, and revelations of drug use, promiscuous sex, and mental health problems had smeared Crystal Mangum. When it was revealed that she had lied about being raped, everything seemed to turn upside down. The Durham district attorney was fired and disbarred. The players sued the city. Racists and sexists used her case to try to silence the post-Katrina discussion of racism as well as the discussion of rape culture that flowed from her allegation. It was said that Duke’s antiracist, antisexist, antipoverty professors had exploited the case for propaganda.
Crystal Mangum’s lies were generalized to all Black people, all women, and especially all Black women. Racists started waving their race cards, explaining that Black people had been fabricating and exaggerating the amount of racial discrimination all along. Sexists started waving “rape” cards, charging that women had been fabricating and exaggerating the amount of sexual violence all along. Gender racists combined the race and rape cards to dismiss the integrity of Black women claiming to be victims of racialized sexual violence. It was as if all Black women had done something wrong in Durham, North Carolina. And then the race and rape reformers felt betrayed—especially the men—and they started to belittle Crystal Mangum for setting the anti-rape and antiracist movements back, by giving rapists and racists more of the rape and race cards they loved to play. Her lies would make it more difficult for them to persuade away rapist and racist ideas, to convince Whites to acknowledge their racism, and to convince men to acknowledge their rape culture. Ironically, as these reformers condemned Mangum for her folly, foolish tactics of trying to persuade (instead of force) offenders to stop their crimes against humanity were setting rape culture and racism back.7
OUTSIDE THE MARX HOTEL in Syracuse, New York, antiwar activists were demonstrating against the US occupation of Iraq. Freezing rain dropped on their heads as they carried on. “You are not fair-weather activists!” Angela Davis proclaimed on October 20, 2006. Davis invited the demonstrators to hear her plenary speech at Syracuse University’s “Feminism and War” conference. Many obliged. Davis lectured on how certain concepts had been “colonized” by the Bush administration, which had used “democracy,” for example, in speeches about the need to “liberate” the women of Iraq and Afghanistan. “Diversity” had been used by the government, the military, and the prisons to present themselves as the most “diverse” institutions in history. But the oppressors were hiding behind their “diversity” and keeping their institutional racism intact, Davis proclaimed. It was a “difference that doesn’t make a difference.” Democracy and diversity were becoming as caustic to the antiracist cause as “race card” and “personal responsibility.”8
Civil rights activists, however, remained fixated on the “N-word,” especially after an N-word-laced rant went viral of Seinfeld actor Michael Richards confronting Black audience members during a standup at Hollywood’s Laugh Factory on November 17, 2006. The outrage over Richards’s “He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger!” blended in the spring with the outrage over talk-show host Don Imus describing the dark-skinned members of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos.” The outrage did not just reflect on Richards and Imus. “It is us,” Fox Sports journalist Jason Whitlock wrote in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on April 16, 2007. “At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youth to buy into a culture”—by which he meant Hip Hop—that “is anti-black, anti-education, pro-drug dealing and violent.”9
At its annual convention in early July 2007, the NAACP held a public funeral and burial of the N-word. But “race card,” “personal responsibility,” “color blind,” “no excuses,” “achievement gap,” and “it is us” were all allowed to live on in the dictionary of racism. “This was the greatest child that racism ever birthed,” the Reverend Otis Moss III said in his eulogy for the N-word. All of the hurricane deaths in New Orleans from the womb of racism—and the N-word was the greatest child? Months earlier, on November 25, 2006, New York police officers had slaughtered the twenty-three-year-old Sean Bell on his wedding night. Shortly thereafter, the excessive criminal charges against six Black high school students in Jena, Louisiana, were announced for their alleged crime of beating up a noose-hanging, racial-epithet-throwing White classmate. Days before the N-word funeral, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had struck down the efforts of three communities to desegregate their schools, saying that the “way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” And the N-word was the greatest child of racism? “Die N-word,” Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick ordered at the funeral. But nothing was said about racism’s other, even more monstrous children.10
“HE’S THE FIRST mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Presidential hopeful and Delaware senator Joe Biden might as well have labeled Barack Obama the extraordinary Negro. Biden’s evaluations of his presidential rivals appeared in the New York Observer days before Obama stood in front of the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois, and formally announced his presidential candidacy on February 10, 2007. Obama stood on the spot where Abraham Lincoln had delivered his historic “House Divided” speech in 1858. Obama brimmed with words of American unity, hope, and change.
But Joe Biden’s comments—which he later “deeply” regretted—became a sign of things to come. What was to come over the course of the campaign was a reflection of the audacity of racist minds—from President Bush to radio mega-personality Rush Limbaugh to Democratic stalwarts—all to view Obama as an extraordinary Negro. In February 2007, Time magazine speculated that African Americans were expressing greater support for New York senator Hillary Clinton because of questions over whether Obama was “black enough.” It couldn’t be because they saw Obama as a long shot. It had to be that they did not see Obama as ordinarily Black like them, meaning inarticulate and ugly and unclean and unintelligent.11
Pundits were dubbing Hilary Clinton the “inevitable” nominee until Barack Obama upset her on January 3, 2008, in the Iowa primary. By Super Tuesday on February 5, 2008, Americans had been swept up in the Obama “Yes We Can” crusade of hope and change, themes he embodied and spoke about so eloquently in his stump speeches that people started to hunger. In mid-February, his perceptive and brilliant wife, Michelle Obama, told a Milwaukee rally, “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.” Suddenly, racist ridicule came down on her, smearing her “unpatriotic” statements, slave ancestry, and brown skin, and tagging her the ultimate “angry Black woman.” Later in the campaign, The New Yorker put an image of Michelle Obama on its cover. She was depicted in military gear and combat boots with an AK-47 across her back and a large Afro topping her head—it was the iconic, stereotypical image of the strong Black woman—and she was standing next to her husband in his Islamic apparel. Racist commentators became obsessed with Michelle Obama’s body, her near-six-foot, chiseled, and curvy frame simultaneously semi-masculine and hyper-feminine. They searched for problems in her Black marriage and family, calling them extraordinary when they did not find any.12
When the dirt on the Obamas could not be found, investigative reporters started checking their associates. In early March 2008, ABC News released snippets of sermons from one of Black America’s most revered liberation theologians, the recently retired pastor of Chicago’s large Trinity United Church of Christ. Jeremiah Wright had married the Obamas and had baptized their two daughters. In an ABC News release, Wright was quoted proclaiming, in a sermon, “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no . . . God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.” Wright had discarded the very old racist lesson that had first been taught to slaves: that African Americans were supposed to love the United States and consider it the world’s greatest country no matter how they were treated. On top of his rejection of American exceptionalism, Wright had the audacity to preach that American “terrorism” abroad had helped bring on the tragic events of 9/11. To put it lightly, Americans everywhere were livid.13
When Obama’s flippant characterizations of Wright as a fraught “old uncle” did not calm Americans down, Obama decided to address the controversy on March 18, 2008. He stepped into the spotlight and gave a “race speech,” entitled “A More Perfect Union,” from Philadelphia’s National Constitutional Center. Having taught constitutional law, worked in civil rights law, and overseen successful political campaigns (including his current campaign, which analysts were already regarding as masterful), Obama could easily be regarded as an expert on many things: constitutional law, civil rights law, Chicago politics, Illinois politics, campaigning, and race and politics. And just as racists presumed that all Black individuals represented the race, racists presumed that all articulate Black individuals were experts on Black people. They presumed, therefore, that Obama’s Blackness made him an expert on Black people. And media outlets routinely brought on eloquent Black voices to pontificate on all sorts of “Black” issues they had not been trained in, making the actual interracial cast of experts squirm as they listened.
And so, in Philadelphia, many Americans did not see Obama as merely a politician saying what he needed to say to save his campaign. They listened to him—as his campaign aides had hoped they would—as an esteemed, knowledgeable, and sincere expert lecturer on race—as someone more credible on race relations than the supposedly angry and old Jeremiah Wright. Obama skillfully took advantage of this platform given to him by racist Americans—and who knows whether he expressed his actual beliefs or calculated that his most comfortable political space was to stand with assimilationists, the group that Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki named the “ambivalent majority.” These Americans believed that Blacks had some strikes against them, but sometimes used that as a crutch. And they were totally unaware that this viewpoint was not only racist, but hardly made much sense. It was like saying that the game was rigged, but Blacks should not let that stop them from winning, and that when they lost and complained about the game being rigged, they were “using that as a crutch.”14
Obama dismissed Jeremiah Wright’s “profoundly distorted view,” but courageously refused to totally “disown” Wright. And then he opened his general lecture on race, explaining that socioeconomic racial inequities stemmed from the history of discrimination. From this firm antiracist opening, he rotated to the consensus racist theory of the “pervasive achievement gap,” to the disproven racist theory of “the erosion of black families” that “welfare policies . . . may have worsened,” and to the unproven racist theory that racial discrimination had bequeathed Blacks a “legacy of defeat.”
According to Obama, this “legacy of defeat” explained why “young men and, increasingly, young women” were “standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons.” He ignored the fact that this population was facing some of the nation’s highest unemployment and policing rates. Obama added his “legacy of defeat” theory to the many racist folk theories circulating in classrooms and around dinner tables and in barbershops about slavery and discrimination—especially its trauma—making Black people biologically, psychologically, culturally, or morally inferior. Over the years, people had been using these folk theories—giving them names such as “post-traumatic slave syndrome,” or the “slavery-hypertension thesis,” or the “Hood Disease”—to walk away from the complete truth that discrimination had resulted in inferior opportunities and bank accounts for Black people, and not an inferior racial group.15
Those antiracist Jeremiah Wrights, their “anger is not always productive,” Obama continued. “Indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity within the African-American community in our condition.” It was a classic assimilationist retort: calling antiracists “angry” for truly believing in racial equality, for not seeing anything wrong with Black people, and for seeing everything wrong with discrimination when squarely facing the African American condition. Like W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. before him, Obama lumped these “angry” antiracists with angry anti-White cynics to discredit them and distinguish himself from them. But when Du Bois and King ultimately arrived at antiracism, they had had to ward off the same “angry” and anti-White labels they had helped to produce. And now, Obama was doing the same thing, unaware that he was reproducing a label that his opponents would stamp onto him whenever and wherever he uttered another antiracist word—after this speech.
Obama uttered quite a few antiracist words in the speech—most profoundly, his analysis of how for “at least a generation” politicians had used “resentments,” fears, and anger over welfare, affirmative action, and crime to distract White voters “from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze,” the nation’s “economic policies that favor the few over the many.” But then, ever the politician, he refused to classify White “resentments” as “misguided or even racist”; amazingly, he “grounded” them “in legitimate concerns.” Obama ended up following in the racist footsteps of every president since Richard Nixon: legitimizing racist resentments, saying those resentments were not racist, and redirecting those resentments toward political opponents.
The doubly conscious Obama encouraged African Americans to fight discrimination, take personal responsibility, be better parents, and end the “legacy of defeat.” Obama did not offer any childrearing or psychological lessons for the presumably parentally and psychologically superior White Americans. He merely asked them to join him on the “long march” against racial discrimination—“not just with words but with deeds”—in a chillingly antiracist conclusion. He left the Philadelphia platform on March 18, 2008, as he began, expressing the half-truthful analogy of continuous racial progression. “This union may never be perfect,” he said, “but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.”16
Segregationist and antiracist critiques were drowned out by the fawning eruption across the ideological isle. MSNBC political analyst Michelle Bernard framed it as “the best speech and most important speech on race that we have heard as a nation since Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.” And it was not just Democrats who were fawning. Prominent Republicans—everyone from presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and John McCain to the Bush administration’s Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell and to the Clintons’ old foe, Newt Gingrich—were also praising the speech. The Bell Curve’s author, Charles Murray, called it “flat out brilliant—rhetorically, but also in capturing a lot of nuance about race in America.”17
If Barack Obama hoped to transform ABC News’s roadblock into a springboard, then he succeeded, soaring into April and May away from Jeremiah Wright and Hillary Clinton and on to the Democratic nomination in early June. Meanwhile, Republican producers of racist ideas had gotten down to business, demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate, questioning whether Barack Hussein Obama was really an American, and suggesting that only real Americans, who were White like McCain, could live in the White House of the United States. No other major-party candidate for the US presidency had ever been put under such a searing nativity microscope. Then again, no other major-party candidate for US president had ever been anyone other than a White male. The Obama campaign released a scanned copy of his US birth certificate, but the rumors of Obama being born in Kenya or some Islamic anti-American nation did not suddenly go away. They were not started out of ignorance, so why would they go away out of knowledge?
But the son of a single mother turned to other matters, like a Father’s Day address on June 15, 2008. “If we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that too many fathers are missing—missing from too many lives and too many homes,” Obama said to a thunderous applause from Black hands at a Southside Chicago church. “They’re acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.” The next day in Time, sociologist Michael Eric Dyson should have buried once and for all the racist exaggeration that Obama—and many other Americans—kept repeating on this issue of missing Black fathers. Dyson cited a study by Boston College’s Rebekah Levine Coley finding that Black fathers not living in the home were more likely than fathers of every other racial group to keep in contact with their children. “Obama’s words may have been spoken to black folk, but they were aimed at those whites still on the fence about whom to send to the White House,” Dyson criticized.18
The legend of the “missing Black father” had become as popular as the legend that there are “no good Black men.” Back in May 2008, Tyra Banks had devoted an episode of her popular television talk show to the topic, calling it “Where Have All the Good Black Men Gone?” The nearly 1 million Black men in prison and the life expectancy of Black men being six years below White men did not make the discussion. Tyra Banks speculated, sounding the tune of racist Black women, that Black women were having trouble finding good Black men because so many were dogs or dating non-Black women or men. In no time, racist Black men were saying the same thing about Black women. The longest-running No. 1 R&B single of 2010, Alicia Keys’s “I’m Ready,” featured Hip Hop sensation Drake, who rapped: “Good women are rare too, none of them have come close.” Few good Black men plus few good Black women equals few good Black people, equals racist ideas.19
ON NOVEMBER 4, 2008, a sixty-four-year-old recently retired professor cast a vote for a major political party for the first time in her voting life. She had retired from academia, but not from her very public activism of four decades. She was still traveling the country trying to rouse an abolitionist movement against prisons. In casting her vote for Democrat Barack Obama, Angela Davis joined roughly 69.5 million Americans. But more than voting for the man, Davis voted for the grassroots efforts of the campaign organizers, those millions of people demanding change. When the networks started announcing that Obama had been elected the forty-fourth president of the United States, happiness exploded from coast to coast, and from the United States around the antiracist world. Davis was in the delirium of Oakland. People whom she did not know came up and hugged her as she walked the streets. She saw people singing to the heavens, and she saw people dancing in the streets. People, in fact, were dancing on streets around the world. And the people Angela Davis saw and all the others around the world who were celebrating were not enraptured from the election of an individual; they were enraptured by the pride of the victory for Black people, by the success of millions of grassroots organizers, and because they had shown all those disbelievers, who had said that electing a Black president was impossible, to be wrong. Most of all, they were enraptured by the antiracist potential of a Black president.20
Behind the scenes of the exploding happiness that November night and over the next few weeks was the exploding fury of hate attacks on Black people. The producers of racist ideas were working overtime to take down some of their color-blind rhetoric that had blinded consumers from seeing discrimination for a decade. They were working to put up something better: a portrait of America conveying that there was no longer any need for protective or affirmative civil rights laws and policies—and no longer any need to ever talk about race. “Are we now in a post-racial America? . . . Is America past racism against black people?” John McWhorter asked in Forbes weeks after the election. “I say the answer is yes.”21