With the gun in his hands, the scruffy Latino man was seconds from killing the pretty, white girl. What the brown-skinned man didn’t know was that he was also a target. He was on the verge of being forced into the storm of the Second Civil Rights Movement.
The fifty-six-year-old Mexican national, Jose Garcia Zarate, was just out of the San Francisco County jail, where he had arrived immediately after serving four years in a federal prison for having illegally entered the United States. He had been deported five times previously. His criminal record showed seven nonviolent felony drug convictions. When his time in federal prison ended, he was transferred to San Francisco to face a twenty-year-old charge for buying marijuana. The charge was so old it was immediately dismissed. Then he was released.
Zarate was scheduled to be deported again, but the San Francisco police failed to notify Immigration and Customs Enforcement, leaving him with nowhere to go, a homeless man, diagnosed as schizophrenic, wandering the city for several weeks.
On July 1, 2015, he swallowed some sleeping pills he’d dug out of a dumpster. By 6:30 p.m., he was groggy, sitting on a bench by the piers of San Francisco Bay. In front of him on that breezy summer evening were affluent tourists enjoying squawking seagulls, slow-moving tour boats, and honking sea lions.
While on the park bench, Zarate felt the back of his foot touch something. He looked down and saw a T-shirt wrapped around a bulky object. It turned out to be a hair-trigger gun stolen four days earlier from a parked car belonging to a ranger with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
As Zarate unwrapped the T-shirt, the gun went off. The bullet skipped off the ground and hit a young woman, Kate Steinle, who was about ninety feet away, tearing into her back and severing the artery leading to her heart. She fell to the ground and struggled to breathe. “Help me, Dad,” she said to her father, who moments before had been posing with her for photos on the waterfront. He began pumping her chest, giving CPR.
Along the beautiful, historic Embarcadero area of shops and restaurants, tourists screamed at the sound of the gunshot; some began running in panic. Camera surveillance showed Zarate jump up and run from the scene, tossing the gun in the bay. Within an hour the police identified him. They arrested him less than a mile away.
The killing of the thirty-two-year-old Steinle, who was beginning her career at one of the city’s glamourous high-tech companies, made the local news that Wednesday night in San Francisco. But days later it spread across the nation. Conservative talk radio hosts told the story of her murder as proof of the need to put more federal agents on the nation’s southern border. They lashed out at the rising number of immigrants in the country, especially the “illegal” or undocumented immigrants coming from Mexico. More extreme voices even called for a wall to be built to stop the flow of drugs and criminals coming into the United States.
Two weeks earlier, Donald Trump had announced his candidacy for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. His opening appeal to voters was all about immigrants as criminals.
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said in his announcement, after he rode down a gold-plated escalator in his Fifth Avenue high-rise in New York City. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you,” he told his largely white audience, implying an influx of threatening people, non-English-speaking brown people.
“They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems [to] us,” Trump explained. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people… but I speak to border guards, and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense…. They’re sending us not the right people.”1
Trump’s loaded words were a brutish appeal to racial anxiety in a Republican Party that was 80 percent white.
His comments made front-page headlines. And he had supporters, including the country’s leading radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh (who told his audience he worked with “talent on loan from God”). Limbaugh said that the “illegal immigrant” who murdered Steinle was “exactly the kind of guy Donald Trump was talking about.”2
Trump was long known for the television reality show The Apprentice, where he played the show’s big boss, the insolent honcho who famously told contestants, “You’re fired!” And for decades before the television show, he was a regular in New York’s fiery tabloid newspapers, famed for his playboy lifestyle and for never holding his tongue about any suspected wrong done by Black people.
Before running for president, he created controversy by questioning whether President Barack Obama was really an American. Trump held news conferences and appeared on conservative radio and television shows to argue that Obama had lied about being born in the United States, making him ineligible to serve as president. The “birther” claim led Obama to produce his long-form birth certificate. Trump then demanded to see Obama’s college transcripts, questioning how he got into Harvard Law School, calling him an “affirmative action” president.
Trump also stoked racial anger on Twitter. He used social media in much the same way that social justice activists, including Black Lives Matter, had used Twitter and Facebook to provoke public outrage. Trump used his celebrity on social media to champion the police and oppose calls for racial justice. In other words, he positioned himself in direct opposition to the ideas animating the Second Civil Rights Movement.
The Washington Post described Trump as turning American race relations on its head by charging Blacks with racism against whites. “Trump’s use of words like ‘racist’ and ‘racism,’ ” the paper reported, “is perhaps best understood in the context of a modern conservative movement that has come to believe, against all evidence, that whites face more discrimination than Blacks.” The Post cited several targets of Trump’s rants, including fury at affirmative action in college admissions and disgust with preferential hiring by large corporations that sought to diversify their workforces.3
A lot of people dismissed Trump as a shameless, race-baiting self-promoter, but his message on race relations was heard steadily on conservative media. He succeeded by promoting the stereotype that Black people, with disproportionate arrests for crime and reliance on government assistance programs, were taking advantage of white people.
Trump’s racism extended beyond Blacks. Having opened his presidential campaign by calling Mexicans criminals, drug dealers, and rapists, he saw a golden opportunity in stoking outrage over Kate Steinle’s tragic death. According to Trump, Steinle’s killing was prime evidence of how the rising number of illegal immigrants was damaging a once great country. Calling Zarate an “animal that shot this beautiful woman in San Francisco,”4 Trump called the incident “yet another example of why we must secure our border immediately…. I am the only one who can fix it. Nobody else has the guts to even talk about it.”5
Trump’s telling of the story quickly went beyond the facts. Without any evidence he argued that the government of Mexico “pushes back people across the border that are criminals, that are drug dealers.”6 At a gathering of conservatives at Iowa’s Family Leadership Summit, Trump noted that Zarate had been deported five times, adding: “Believe me, Mexico kept pushing him back because they didn’t want him. Believe me, that’s true.”7
Trump’s lies had impact, resonating with the older white audience for conservative talk shows. Those programs saw their ratings go up when they focused attention on Trump’s anti-immigrant rage. The top-rated cable television program in the country, The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News, joined Trump’s choir. Bill O’Reilly presented Trump as a truth-teller daring to speak about murderous illegal immigrants from Mexico and told his audience that most politicians had their tongues tied in knots for fear of being called racists.
“Mexican criminals,” said O’Reilly, “represent a whopping 16 percent of all convicts serving time in federal penitentiaries. That’s a huge burden on the American taxpayer and a dangerous situation for we the people, like thirty-two-year-old Kate Steinle.”8
The statistics were misleading. Most of the Mexicans in jail were being held for illegally crossing the border, not for violent crime. But that truth was a minor distraction, unimportant to commentators attuned to the depth of white grievance against immigrants. Tapping into that discontent proved successful in driving up O’Reilly’s audience. It also boosted Trump.
O’Reilly went on to blame Steinle’s death on liberal politicians. The Democrats in San Francisco’s city government, he noted, had established a “Sanctuary City” policy of not cooperating with federal agents to deport undocumented immigrants. In practice that meant they had no obligation to notify federal authorities when releasing prisoners lacking legal citizenship unless there was a warrant. There was no warrant for Zarate, and that’s why he wound up homeless on the street and not in federal custody.
O’Reilly charged that President Obama neglected to deal with criminal immigrants “because racial politics drives the law these days, which is why Trump caught so much hell.”9 O’Reilly proposed “Kate’s Law,” a new federal bill to require a five-year jail sentence for anyone caught illegally crossing the border after having previously been deported. Within days, an online petition collected 400,000 signatures and Trump’s support.10
The fevered anger following Steinle’s death drowned out a key fact. Immigrants, both documented and undocumented, were less likely to commit crimes or to be jailed than people born in the United States.
The facts didn’t matter to Trump, Limbaugh, or O’Reilly. With the Steinle story as their hook, they began telling other scary tales about the evil done by “illegal immigrants.” They sensationalized stories of undocumented people driving while drunk and cheating to get government money that was intended for people legally in the country. The stream of stories made immigration into a central political fight defining the 2016 Republican primary.
“Something happened in July to send Trump’s numbers soaring,” wrote David Frum in The Atlantic. “That something may have been the murder of Kathryn Steinle.”11 At the time of his campaign announcement, polling showed Trump in seventh place among Republican candidates. By the end of July, he led the contest.
Trump embodied the backlash to the Second Civil Rights Movement. From his early opposition to Obama’s rise and disparaging Blacks as criminals, it now extended to the idea that dangerous, brown-skinned immigrants were flooding the United States and wrecking his nostalgic vision of a mostly white nation.
Trump even used Steinle’s death in political advertising aimed at his best-funded competitor, Jeb Bush, whose wife was Mexican. The advertisement featured a jailhouse mugshot of a disheveled Zarate. The ad was reminiscent of the notorious Willie Horton ad that George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign had used against Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, the Democratic presidential nominee that year. Horton, a Black man with a long criminal record, had been convicted of raping a white woman while on a prison furlough program in place during Dukakis’s time as governor. The ad was later described by CNN as “one of the most racially divisive in modern political history because it played into white fear and African American stereotypes.”12
Trump’s attack on Mexicans as rapists and criminals was as effective as the Horton ad. David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, told his followers to “call Donald Trump’s headquarters [and] volunteer.” He promised his audience that at Trump’s campaign they will “meet people who are going to have the same kind of mindset that you have.”
Duke dismissed every other Republican running for the nomination. He said voting for anyone but Trump “at this point is really treason to your heritage.”13 Other white supremacists also began endorsing Trump, including the American Freedom Party, which had been established by racist skinheads. Then, Jared Taylor, who ran the white supremacist magazine American Renaissance, added his endorsement. In taped robocalls to potential voters, Taylor said: “We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture,” he said. “Vote Trump.”14
When Trump was asked by CNN to disavow the KKK’s explicit endorsement, he responded, “I don’t know what group you are talking about. You wouldn’t want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about.”15 Later, confronted with his evasive answer, Trump said he had trouble hearing the question because of a broken earpiece. As difficult as it was to believe that a sixty-nine-year-old American wouldn’t know who the KKK was, it was even more so in Trump’s case, given his family history. His father, Fred Trump, had been arrested at a Klan rally in 1927 when the KKK was protesting the presence of Roman Catholics in the New York Police Department.16
With Trump on a path to win the Republican nomination in the spring of 2016, the nation’s racial climate was rapidly fraying. This was different from any time in American history because of the historic demographic shifts taking place in America. Many Americans’ frame of reference on immigration had been established in the early twentieth century, when immigrants were primarily European and white-skinned. Since the 1960s, there had been a growth of brown-skinned people, adding to the racial divide and shifting the racial composition of the country.
The changing population was especially apparent in California. In 2014, the year before Steinle was killed, Latinos became the state’s largest ethnic group. Also in 2014, a surge of Central American immigrants crossed the U.S. border with Mexico. Gang violence was spiking in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador as well as parts of Mexico, as a result of failing economies and public corruption linked to powerful drug cartels. Even though the immigrants were fleeing such social ills, they nonetheless were maligned by Trump and Limbaugh to their conservative supporters as a burden on American society and distorting the culture.
The “border crisis” became an explosive political fight. The growth of the Latino immigrant population was now an emotionally gripping story for white conservatives fearing a loss of country and culture. For others, it was a harrowing story about desperate people willing to risk it all to seek asylum. In 2014, nearly seventy thousand migrant children without parents, including infants and toddlers, tried to cross the border. The government reported a nearly 80 percent increase in one year’s time in unaccompanied children seeking asylum.17
The immigrant population in the United States in the 1960s, prior to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and following four decades of severely restricted immigration, totaled less than 10 million people. Thirty-five years later, more than 31 million people living in the United States had been born in another country. Most of those immigrants were Hispanic.18
At the start of the twenty-first century, the Hispanic population had grown to the point that many small towns and rural areas had come to depend on migrant farm and factory laborers. They created ethnic neighborhoods in towns, cities, and rural areas that for generations had been nearly all-white. Suddenly, in addition to a few Black people around town, there were Latino churches, food markets, and taco trucks. Schools had to develop classes for children who spoke Spanish at home. Hospitals saw an increase in uninsured patients, many of them immigrants.
In a nation that had seen slow demographic change for much of the previous century, there was obvious discomfort with the racial, ethnic, and linguistic upheaval. For younger, non-college-educated whites, conservative voices portrayed these newcomers as posing a threat to take their jobs. Older whites were put off by even minor changes like pressing “two” on the phone to hear Spanish.
For decades, the conversation on race had been focused largely on relations between white and Black Americans. Suddenly it involved a cacophony of voices from different races, including Latinos, Asians, Africans, and more. Blacks and whites had volatile arguments over race stretching back to the founding of America, but at least they shared a common framework, which began with a shared history involving slavery, followed by Civil War and segregation.
With the increase in immigration, common references for talking about race began to fade. This was a disconnect from the 1960s, when the white population was more than 88 percent of the country.19 By 2010, it was down to 72 percent.20
The Black population, while growing in absolute size, was also shrinking in terms of its share of the overall population. The 2010 U.S. census, the first done after Obama took office, also showed that there were more than 50 million Hispanics living in the United States, comprising about 16 percent of the population. In fact, by 2010 it had already been years since Hispanics overtook Blacks to become America’s largest minority group.21 That created some of the same cultural anxiety among Blacks that was troubling whites. They, too, feared losing political power, as well as jobs, to the newcomers, despite seeing a Black president.22
Even as their numbers grew, Latino immigrants were easy scapegoats. They lacked political influence because large numbers tended not to vote. Many also retained strong ties to their place of birth. And while most of them were properly documented, by 2010 there were almost 11 million people in the U.S. without proper legal authorization, living in fear of being deported if they were reported for breaking the law or angering a boss.23
There had been repeated efforts to gain control over the faulty immigration system. The last major immigration reform was enacted when Ronald Reagan was in the White House. George W. Bush and Barack Obama had tried and failed to get congressional support for an improved immigration system. The stumbling block was strong opposition from white conservatives to granting so-called amnesty to people who had already entered the country illegally, who were maligned on right-wing talk radio as criminals and “lawbreakers.” Conservative pundits painted them as people who should not be “rewarded” for violating the rules of immigration. This led to calls for more deportations, more walls, and impassioned opposition to President Obama’s 2012 executive action (called the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA) to allow children who had entered the country illegally years earlier to stay in the United States.24 These immigrant children, known as “Dreamers,” had spent nearly their entire lives in the United States, going to school and in some cases even serving in the U.S. military.
With no congressional reform to deal with the issue, anti-immigrant activists in border states took it upon themselves to confront the challenges of immigration. Republican politicians and sheriffs in Arizona, a direct neighbor of Mexico, jumped to participate in the crackdown. SB 1070, known as the “show me your papers” law, required that Arizona law enforcement officials demand evidence of legal status from anyone they deemed “suspicious.”25
As the 2016 presidential campaign heated up, polling showed that 71 percent of Republicans believed that immigrants were making the economy and crime worse. For Democrats it was exactly the opposite. Only 34 percent said immigrants were a problem.26
Donald Trump became the leading voice of opposition to any immigration reform. He called for more deportations and more guards on the border. He campaigned for building a two-thousand-mile wall to separate the United States from Mexico. Over three fourths of Republican voters favored the idea.27
The white backlash among Trump’s supporters wasn’t just a reaction to increasing immigration, there was also a growing sense of grievance among white conservatives in response to the Black Lives Matter protests over police violence. Following the death of Eric Garner in New York, some police around the nation reacted by promoting a new social media hashtag, #CopsLivesMatter. An Indiana cop even began selling T-shirts with the phrase “Breathe Easy. Don’t Break the Law” inscribed across the chest.28 Politically conservative talk shows dedicated days of coverage to Garner and the crime issue. They saw aggressive policing, even if it edged into brutality at times, as necessary to correct bad behavior, criminal acts, and “thug life” attitudes among Blacks and Latinos. They told their audiences that Black people were viewed as more threatening by the police for a good reason—they are more likely to be involved with crime.
This led to a deep divide on the issue of policing that was often portrayed as Black-versus-white. The reality was more nuanced. By 2015, an increasing number of whites, especially the college educated, were siding with Black people as a matter of social justice. According to Pew, the percentage among whites concerned about racism in American society had climbed from 17 to 44 percent.29 Even so, a majority of whites still believed that too many protesting Blacks were “seeking an excuse to engage in looting and violence,” according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.30
Bill Bratton, the New York police commissioner at the time of Garner’s death, emphasized that last point to the press and even when speaking to a group of Black police officers. He told the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives that his city’s Black and Hispanic population “commit 95 percent of our shootings—and Blacks and Hispanics represent 96 percent of our shooting victims.”
Bratton saw the online and activist movement against “racist police terror” as wrong. He opted not to confront racist attitudes within the police force, instead blaming the social and economic issues bedeviling “neighborhoods of color.” He saw crime as a problem affecting “neighborhoods where poverty bites deepest, where jobs are most scarce, where schools are most challenged.” Black communities needed more police protection, not less, he said, because most of the victims of crimes were Black people, and those crimes were committed by Blacks.31
The FBI director, James Comey, joined the debate when he made a speech that featured the line “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist,” from the Broadway show Avenue Q, a satirical musical about race and sexuality in modern America. He used the line to acknowledge that the police did treat Black and white people differently, but went on to say it “may be rational by some lights” to do so because of the higher rate at which Black men are arrested. Like Bratton, Comey refused to deal with racist police officers and their long history of violence against Black people.32
Bolstering Bratton and Comey’s claim, a report from a group of Black doctors found a “violence epidemic in the African American community.” The National Medical Association reported that homicide was “the leading manner of death for African American males ages 10–35.” The organization noted that African American men made up “only six percent of the population but make up greater than 50 percent of firearm related deaths.”33
In a survey of Black people, fear of violence, especially violent crime, ranked as the most important issue, despite concerns about police brutality. “When asked in an open-ended question to identify the most important issue in the community they live in, the top issue was violence or crime,” according to a later report by the Pew Research Center. “This includes Black Americans who listed specific issues such as drug activity, shootings, or theft; but also, those simply listed ‘violence’ or ‘crime’ as the most pressing issues in their communities.”34
Black people remained in favor of strong police presence in their neighborhoods; they just didn’t want police beating them up or harassing their children. As 2016 wore on, Black activists ramped up their protests against police violence. Black Lives Matter activists disrupted speeches by the leading Democratic candidates during the 2016 presidential primaries. Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza criticized Hillary Clinton in particular for her earlier support of the 1994 crime bill, passed under her husband’s administration, and for her language back then, particularly her reference to young gang members as “super predators.”
When Clinton was campaigning in New Hampshire, she agreed to meet with several Black Lives Matter activists to understand why they were there to protest. The young Black people insisted that she speak out more forcefully against racism. She said that her goal was not to change hearts, but to enact policies to help the Black community. “You can get lip service from as many white people as you can pack into Yankee Stadium and a million more like it, who are going to say, ‘Oh, we get it, we get it. We’re going to be nicer.’ That’s not enough—at least in my book. That’s not how I see politics,” she said.35
Clinton backtracked on her earlier language about “super predators,” in a strategic effort to appease Black Lives Matter. At the same time, she still needed to appeal to moderate white voters concerned about crime.
Former president Bill Clinton pushed back, too. He got angry at a Black Lives Matter protest during a rally for his wife’s presidential campaign. The protesters shouted that the 1994 crime bill signed by the former president had hurt Black people. Clinton fired back: “I don’t know how you would characterize gang leaders who got thirteen-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out on the street to murder other African American children,” he said, adding, “You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter.”36
Then, as both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were about to accept their parties’ nominations, a series of killings occurred that forced the whole country to dive deep into uncharted racial waters. On three consecutive days in July 2016, three Black men were killed by police in three different states—New York, Louisiana, and Minnesota. The last was the most famous of the cases. Thirty-two-year-old Philando Castile was driving his car when he was stopped just outside Minneapolis for a broken taillight. He informed the white policeman that he had a licensed gun in the car, and then, as he reached for his identification, the policeman fired seven shots, hitting him five times. Castile died in twenty minutes. For much of that time, his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, was on Facebook broadcasting live footage of her efforts to keep him alive while comforting her four-year-old daughter. “Stay with me,” she told Castile, as his white T-shirt turned red with blood and life faded from his body.37
The day before Castile was killed, an unarmed Black man named Alton Sterling was killed by police while selling CDs outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge. White police officers tased Sterling and pulled him to the ground before shooting him to death. And the day before that, a road rage incident led an off-duty New York police officer to kill Delrawn Small, another unarmed Black man.
But it was the bloody, heart-wrenching Facebook video of the Castile shooting that went viral around the world. There was a frenzy of attention, as demonstrations and statements from public officials tried to explain away what people could plainly see on their phones.
Hillary Clinton tweeted for the first time after Castile’s death with the term “Black Lives Matter.” In a dramatic online response, she wrote: “America woke up to yet another tragedy of a life cut down too soon. Black Lives Matter. #PhilandoCastile –H.”38 Ending on the H indicated that Clinton had personally written the tweet. She then traveled to meet with Castile’s family. “We cannot let this madness continue,” she said after meeting with grieving relatives. “This violence cannot stand.”39
Traveling in Poland at the time, President Obama broke away from international affairs to comment on the turmoil at home. Just as Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump found social media to be a direct line into the national debate, so did the president of the United States. Taking immediately to the White House Facebook page, Obama wrote that all Americans should be “deeply troubled,” adding that the Department of Justice planned to open a full civil rights investigation.
Obama’s post spoke about larger social issues that were “not isolated incidents” but “symptomatic of the broader challenges within our criminal justice system, the racial disparities that appear across the system year after year, and the resulting lack of trust that exist between law enforcement and too many of the communities they serve…. We’ve got a serious problem,” he continued, though he also stated that the vast majority of police officers deserve respect.40
A generation earlier, this racial debate would have taken place at dining room tables. The newspapers and television broadcasts would have featured statements from spokesmen with established civil rights groups and politicians. In the age of social media, though, any American could join the conversation with their own posts and tweets.
Quickly, a stream of responses flowed on social media from thousands of Americans, directly engaging and judging Obama. “Mr. President, with the utmost respect for you… Americans should not be deeply troubled. We should be enraged,” commented one woman, Lauren Onkeles-Klein. “The time for puzzlement, for furrowed brows, for sadness and comfort has passed…. [Action] comes from pain. From a roiling, earth-shattering sense of injustice. It comes from the kind of affront to our humanity that shifts the heavens and earth, rending our collective souls with a singular cry. ‘This must change.’ ”41
Immigration, which had been at the forefront of the 2016 presidential race and debates over social activism, was now competing for attention with the social media response to fatal shootings of Blacks by police. The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter became the vehicle for organizing those protests as well as an outpouring of rage.
As the vitriol went up, so did the violence. This time it was Black men killing white police officers. The worst took place the day after Philando Castile’s death.
In Dallas, a twenty-five-year-old Black Army reservist, Micah Johnson, drove downtown and used a high-powered rifle to assassinate police officers. His shooting spree took place over several hours and was televised live to the nation; Johnson killed five white officers before police sent out a robot to shoot him. Johnson’s motives were the earlier shootings of Black men at the hands of police. He had repeatedly watched the video of the Rodney King beating and regularly followed Black nationalist and Black separatist social media sites. A friend told CNN that Johnson “wanted justice and equality for Blacks.”42
Ten days later more police were killed, this time in Baton Rouge, where Alton Sterling had been killed. Gavin Long, another Black veteran, ambushed police in a shopping center. He killed four, including Black police officers, before he was shot to death. Like Johnson, Long followed Black separatists on social media. He expressed anger at the police killing of Sterling and praised Johnson’s Dallas shooting spree as an act of “justice.”
Hillary Clinton now expressed sympathy for the policemen who had been murdered in Dallas and Baton Rouge. “Killing police officers is a crime against us all,” she said at a teachers conference. “It can be true, both that we need law enforcement and that we need to improve law enforcement.”43 But her effort to be evenhanded failed to quiet protests, even among her supporters. Several people marched to the stage, interrupting her and chanting the words of Michael Brown: “Hands up, don’t shoot!”
As the violence exploded, President Obama cut short his trip to Europe, finding himself once again caught in the quicksand of anger that had surrounded the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and others. He delivered half a dozen speeches, held news conferences, and appeared at a televised town hall, as well as speaking at a memorial in Dallas for the slain officers.
In Dallas, he was joined by former president George W. Bush, creating an image of national unity between a white man and a Black man, a Republican and a Democrat. At one point Michelle Obama, amid the grief, was seen holding hands with Bush. The former president, in brief remarks, offered powerful words of reconciliation. “Too often we judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions,” he said to the packed hall in Dallas.44
Speaking about the tumultuous events of the past week, Obama said: “It’s as if the deepest fault lines of our democracy have suddenly been exposed…. Faced with this violence, we wonder if the divides of race in America can ever be bridged…. We turn on the TV or surf the internet, and we can watch positions harden and lines drawn, and people retreat to their respective corners, and politicians calculate how to grab attention… and it’s hard not to think sometimes that the center won’t hold and that things might get worse.”45
Donald Trump had not bothered to respond immediately after Castile and Sterling were killed. However, he quickly called the shooting of the Dallas police officers “an attack on our country.” In a video statement he said, “We must stand in solidarity with law enforcement, which we must remember is the force between civilization and total chaos.”
Trump crowned himself the “law and order” candidate for president. He changed the topic of the political conversation from systemic racism against minorities to victimization of the white majority and their mostly white police, saying that cops were “the most mistreated people in this country.” After all the killing of Black men at the hands of police, Trump boldly announced that police violence was not a major issue, and that Black Lives Matter was a misguided slogan: “It’s a very divisive term, because all lives matter.”46
There was no way to resolve the political divide with data. The FBI did not keep track of police killings and many police departments did not publicly report them. That meant there was no way to see if law-abiding Black people were disproportionately victimized by the police.
The Washington Post stepped in by creating a database of police shootings. It found that Castile was at least the 506th person and 123rd Black American shot by the police in 2016. The Post found that more than 24 percent of the people who had died at the hands of the police were Black, close to twice their percentage in the population.47
Still, no amount of fact-finding could quiet the rage from conservative media and the daily fire coming from the Trump campaign. Clinton was caught off guard. As a white woman, she expected to capture the votes of white women with relative ease, but polls now showed her losing white women, who were responding to Trump’s focus on crime. Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter activists, pointing to Black Americans as Clinton’s most reliable voting base, pushed her to take a stronger stand against racist cops.
As summer turned to fall, a new twist in racial protests emerged to further divide the country. It began in preseason National Football League games, when San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began protesting police brutality by sitting during the national anthem. His action went unnoticed for several games until TV cameras turned it into a national spectacle. “There’s a lot of things that need to change, one specifically is police brutality,” Kaepernick told reporters. “Cops are getting paid leave for killing people. That’s not right.”48
Kaepernick was maligned for disrespecting the American flag and, by extension, the soldiers who had died protecting the country. After consulting with a friend who was a Green Beret, he stopped sitting during the Anthem, taking a knee instead to register his protest.
Kaepernick’s support for Black Lives Matter fit with LeBron James’s protests following the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner. The difference was that the NFL had a bigger audience and Kaepernick’s protests came in the middle of a presidential campaign and led to a heavy response from Trump and the conservative media.
“I think it’s a terrible thing,” Trump said about Kaepernick. “And you know, maybe he should find a country that works better for him. Let him try, it won’t happen.”49
Even as he was attacked by Trump, Kaepernick went on offense, not only against him, but also against Hillary Clinton. “Both are proven liars,” he said. “It also seems like they are trying to debate who is less racist.”50
Kaepernick’s anger reflected far-left attitudes toward both presidential contenders. In fact, Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza refused to publicly endorse Clinton. In an interview with Elle magazine, she said, “Absolutely not. You know, I think one of the things that I have been struggling with in this electoral cycle is that our choices are not great.”
Garza tied Hillary to her husband’s years in the White House, specifically the 1994 crime bill: “Incarceration through the roof, the demonization of poor black women, the unraveling of the social safety [net]…. And I know sometimes people give a lot of criticism like, well, that was Hillary’s husband’s policies. And I am like no, no, it’s not like she was sipping tea! She was also campaigning on those policies.”
But when asked what would happen if Trump defeated Clinton, Garza said she believed it would make the Black Lives Matter movement “stronger, and it starts to get more strategic.”
“Here’s my last question,” asked the interviewer. “If Donald Trump wins the American presidency, what shoes are you going to wear for the inauguration?”
“Running shoes!” said Garza.51
Garza would later explain her refusal to endorse Clinton by speaking to her disappointment with President Obama. She wanted Obama as well as older civil rights leaders like Sharpton and Jackson to address the structural racism that was locked in the foundation of the American system. “Sometimes you have to put a wrench in the gears to get people to listen,” she said.52
For Black History Month in 2016, Obama’s last in the White House, he invited a group of civil rights leaders, including the young people involved with Black Lives Matter, to discuss the nation’s progress on racial issues. Even the framework put off some young activists. They felt the emphasis should not be on progress but on the work that remained to be done. Aislinn Pulley, a Black Lives Matter leader from Chicago, turned down the invitation. Instead, she wrote a critical article calling Obama’s civil rights meeting “a sham.”
She was unstinting in her disdain for the president’s gesture. “As a radical, Black organizer, living and working in a city that is now widely recognized as a symbol of corruption and police violence, I do not feel that a handshake with the president is the best way for me to honor Black History Month or the Black freedom fighters…. What was arranged was basically a photo opportunity…. I could not with any integrity participate in such a sham that would only serve to legitimize the false narrative that the government is working to end police brutality and the institutional racism that fuels it.”53
The prior generation of civil rights leaders continued to stand by Clinton and Obama. When Obama held meetings to deal with the shootings and racial tensions in the country, he had reliable support from the graying giants of the First Movement. Among the attendees to the White House meeting on race were Representative John Lewis and Cornell Brooks, the president of the NAACP. The most prominent civil rights leader of the moment, Al Sharpton, was also in the room.
Though many younger Black leaders were critical of the event, there were some Black Lives Matter members who saw an advantage in having access to the president. And the White House was careful to select those with less critical views for meetings. Brittany Packnett, a leading activist tied to Black Lives Matter in Ferguson, attended, as did DeRay Mckesson, who had been active nationally for the organization.
“The value of social movements and activism,” the president later said, “is to get you at the table, get you in the room, and then start trying to figure out how is this problem going to be solved. You then have a responsibility to prepare an agenda that is achievable, that can institutionalize the changes you seek.”54 His perspective was not shared by a growing number of activists who did not want meetings and compromise—they wanted immediate action.
Across the country racial tensions continued to rise. A Gallup poll found that the percentage of Americans who worried a “great deal” about race relations had risen from 17 percent to 35 percent between 2014 and 2016. The biggest jump in concern about race relations came from Black people, Obama’s political base and the people who had hoped that his election would signal a new era in race relations. According to the poll, 53 percent of Blacks, compared to only 27 percent of whites, were now worried about racial strife.55 White criticism of Obama, largely coming from Republican opponents, rested on the idea he had a “fundamental misreading of American society as irremediably racist” in viewing the country through the eyes of an “aggrieved Black activist.” But among actual Black activists, Obama was seen as an ineffective moderate.56
Through the racial crises during his presidency, Obama repeatedly called for calm, trying to be everyone’s president, floating above the violence, the hatred, and the politics of the moment. This approach would come to define Obama on race relations. He was not the Black president; he was a Black man trying to be America’s president. However, even eight years after his inauguration, he couldn’t escape the racial politics or the expectations that he would bring new light and healing on issues of race.
The 2016 Democratic National Convention took place in a racially tense atmosphere, with Trump having already been chosen as the Republican nominee. The tension came not just from the police shootings and Black Lives Matter protests, but also from Trump’s calls on the campaign trail to build a border wall, as a well his call for a ban on Muslims entering the country.
The tension came to a head at the convention when Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim U.S. soldier killed in Iraq, was invited by Hillary Clinton to speak to a prime-time audience about the threat posed by Trump’s racial hate. Khan told a hushed convention that Trump posed a danger to the country by inviting further racial division. With his wife standing next to him onstage, he warned, “Donald Trump consistently smears the character of Muslims. He disrespects other minorities—women, judges, even his own party leadership. He vows to build walls and ban us from this country. Donald Trump… Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery? Go look at the graves of the brave patriots who died defending America—you will see all faiths, genders, and ethnicities. You have sacrificed nothing and no one.”57
Trump immediately lambasted Khan and his wife. In a cynical statement, he asked if Clinton’s speechwriters had taken advantage of an emotional, grieving father. He also pointed out that Khan’s wife never spoke, suggesting that this was evidence of how Muslims treat women as inferior.58
Trump’s final message in the closing months of the campaign was to promise uncritical support for the police and to promote anger at immigrants. The slogan for his campaign called for a return to an America where the demographic shifts had not occurred and where Blacks and other minorities did not challenge their inferior social status. It was called “Make America Great Again”—MAGA. He also spoke angrily about President Obama’s policies as diminishing America at home by embracing Black Lives Matter and by turning America from its previous dominance into shrinking power on the world stage.
The message hit home with white working-class people without a college degree. Fear of lower wages and job losses caused by globalization was compounded by the rise in immigrants and the prominence of the Black Lives Matter protests.
Obama’s two elections, which were once heralded as historic evidence of a post-racial America, had in fact stirred a ferocious backlash among a sizable number of white voters.
The Democratic Party had suffered a loss of enthusiasm among Blacks and young people who had been disappointed in Obama. Such constituents were also disillusioned by Hillary Clinton’s past support for the war in Iraq and for tough criminal policies that had put record numbers of Black people in jail.
Trump would go on to win the white vote by 15 percentage points. He even outpolled Clinton among white women by 2 percentage points.59 There was another dynamic at work as well. Without Obama on the ticket, and with disillusionment tied to the increased racial tensions in the country, Black turnout slipped in 2016, enough to be a factor in an exceptionally close election.
Trump lost the popular vote to Clinton by 2.8 million votes but received a majority in the Electoral College. It was only the fifth time a candidate had won the presidency while losing the popular vote. It was also the most surprising upset of modern political history.
Two months later, in his inaugural address, Trump reiterated the white grievance that had gotten him elected. He said that the political elites in Washington had prospered during the Obama years, while middle-class “jobs left, and the factories closed.”
“The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs,” he indignantly thundered, as President Obama, President Bush, and Hillary Clinton sat behind him, looking stunned.
Speaking to his core supporters in the white working class, he said, “This is your day. This is your celebration, and this, the United States of America, is your country.” And in a racially loaded swipe, he vowed to get rid of “the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential…. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”60
The man endorsed by the Klan, the man who had said that President Obama was not really an American, the man who had demonized Mexicans by exploiting the death of Kate Steinle, was now president of the United States. And he made clear that unlike Obama, who had tried so hard to be racially neutral, his priorities as president would be the priorities of white Americans. That racial messaging went beyond Nixon’s southern strategy and Reagan’s dogwhistles. The backlash to the Second Civil Rights Movement had arrived in the Oval Office.