The backlash against Donald Trump went beyond votes against him. It led to big victories for congressional Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections. New voices were emerging to escalate the backlash to Trump’s right-wing, white supremacist extremism.
The leaders of this political backlash came from a new generation. They went beyond traditional media into heated online brawls with the far right. That drew far more attention from a wider, younger audience than had ever paid attention to the older, established congressional Democrats. The newcomers were twenty years younger than the average member of Congress. The youngest, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had defeated a ten-term Democratic incumbent who had been in the congressional leadership. She became known simply as “AOC”—an instant media sensation.
The child of Puerto Rican parents, Ocasio-Cortez was elected from a liberal, working-class congressional district in New York City, covering parts of the Bronx and Queens. Before she was in Congress, she worked as a bartender and was an organizer for Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. She soon became the most frequently targeted Democrat on Fox News, even more than the new speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.
Ocasio-Cortez and the other members of “the Squad” came to represent, in the words of The New York Times, a “disruptive relationship to the status quo in Washington.”1 Their agenda spoke for young and minority Americans and provided a channel into national politics for the priorities of the Second Civil Rights Movement.
Though Black Lives Matter remained absent as an organizing political force for any of these campaigns, it did change the political discourse. Capitalizing on the sense of injustice and the passion whipped up by BLM, progressive candidates drew attention in the press and online to a left-wing political agenda. In this new world, the Squad celebrated expanding health care, canceling student debt, and rebutting the conservative denial of climate change. They branded their environmental agenda with the catchy phrase the Green New Deal. It called for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and creating jobs in “green” renewable energy. Picking up on BLM’s primary issue, they echoed the movement’s calls for reining in police tactics. They also opened the door to debate about allowing lawsuits against wrongdoing by individual police officers.
This agenda was the polar opposite of Trump’s. He was soon tweeting that they should “go back”2 to their countries, as if they were not real Americans and did not belong in Congress as part of the mainstream national political dialogue. He called them “hate-filled extremists who are constantly trying to tear our country down.”3 He wrote: “The ‘Squad’ is a very Racist group of troublemakers who are young, inexperienced, and not very smart. They are pulling the once great Democrat Party far left…. And are now against ICE and Homeland Security. So bad for our Country!”4
Ocasio-Cortez immediately fired back on Twitter: “You are angry because you can’t conceive of an America that includes us.”5 Pressley tweeted: “THIS is what racism looks like.”6 Speaker Pelosi, who was not always in support of the Squad’s agenda, immediately defended them. She remarked that Trump’s “xenophobic comments” were intended to “divide our nation” and reaffirm the fact that “his plan to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always been about making America white again.”7
But Trump’s comments hit their mark among the president’s supporters; soon people at Trump rallies regularly began to berate the New York congresswoman with crass chants of “AOC sucks.” Ocasio-Cortez again countered: “He doesn’t have another woman—Hillary Clinton or whoever else—to vilify anymore, so they need to find another woman to kind of prop up and become a lightning rod.”8
Though Trump portrayed the four young congresswomen as “foreign,” in fact only one member of the Squad, Ilhan Omar, had been born outside the United States. She was a refugee who had fled Somalia’s civil war as an eight-year-old child and arrived in the U.S. at age twelve, after years in a refugee camp. She became an American citizen at seventeen and was known as a strident advocate on the issues of poverty and health care for the Somali community in Minneapolis. When she was thirty-four, she won a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives, and at age thirty-six she was elected to Congress.
The other Muslim member of the Squad, Rashida Tlaib, was born in Detroit to Palestinian immigrant parents, the oldest of fourteen children. She won a seat in the Michigan legislature in 2008, becoming the first Muslim woman to serve in the statehouse. In 2018, she won a mostly Black and Hispanic congressional district, replacing the retiring John Conyers, the longest-serving Black member of Congress, who arrived on Capitol Hill in 1965, during the heart of the First Civil Rights Movement. On her first day in office, Tlaib made national news by telling an audience of progressive activists that she was not going to be bullied by Trump: “We’re going to go in there, impeach the motherfucker.”9
The final member of the Squad was Ayanna Pressley, who defeated a ten-term Democratic incumbent in Massachusetts. Pressley had been the first Black woman to serve on the Boston City Council and would now become the first Black woman to represent the state in Congress. Her campaign had faced opposition from traditional Black Democrats. John Lewis, the civil rights legend from Georgia and longtime congressman, campaigned for her white opponent, the incumbent Michael Capuano. Pressley said that the liberal district needed not just someone to vote against Trump policies, but a stronger voice to take on the president. The New York Times described her victory as being “in sync with a restless political climate that has fueled victories for underdogs, women and minorities.”10
The Squad’s rise was also fueled by a feminist backlash to Trump that had begun the day after his inauguration in 2017, when the Women’s March saw half a million protesters fill the streets of Washington, D.C., supported by six hundred smaller marches around the country. Ironically most white women voted for Trump. But the left-wing women, mostly white, who showed up that day wearing pink “pussy hats,” created what Time magazine called: “Perhaps the Largest Protest in U.S. History [and it] Was Brought to You by Trump.”11
The Squad’s political impact was just one reflection of the backlash to the rise of racial hate under Trump. It also extended to celebrity influencers and ordinary people on social media. It was felt in Hollywood, where the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite led to more Asian, Latino, and especially Black actors and directors being recognized in the motion picture industry. The superhero movie Black Panther broke barriers, becoming the number-one movie in America by the time of the 2018 midterms. With a heavily Black cast and a Black director, the film grossed $1.3 billion.
In the face of unleashed white supremacy, here was a popular culture counteroffensive featuring Black characters with superpowers, originating in a mythical African nation filled with wealth, technology, and highly educated people. The Electoral Justice Project, a small offshoot of Black Lives Matter, used the movie’s unprecedented success, especially with young Black moviegoers, to begin a 2018 midterm voter registration effort called #WakandaTheVote.12
Another counter to Trump’s embrace of white rage was found in women’s magazines. The New York Times reported that Black women appeared on the majority of fashion covers in September of 2018, the critical start to the fall fashion season.13 This represented a significant break with a long history of top magazines largely promoting white beauty standards. A Nielsen study concluded that Black consumers now constituted an important role in shaping American style. This wasn’t just a result of the rising purchasing power of Black women, however; Black taste in fashion created a “cool factor.” Nielsen wrote that the result was a “halo effect, influencing not just consumers of color, but the mainstream as well.”14
The cultural backlash to Trump went further. The New York Times’s list of best-selling books was filled with explorations of the nation’s struggles with race, including White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, and The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, which also became a popular movie.
One high cathedral of American culture, the Pulitzer Prizes, embraced Black popular music by recognizing the work of the Black rapper Kendrick Lamar. Previously the award had only gone to classical musicians and, on rare occasions, jazz artists. This recognition seemed more about the Pulitzer committee making a statement than about Lamar’s virtuosity. The award “shines a light on hip-hop in a completely different way. This is a big moment for hip-hop music and a big moment for the Pulitzers,” said Dana Canedy, the administrator of the prize.15
Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter as an organization continued to struggle in finding its footing. It had never been a powerhouse in Washington, and now the organization’s founders seemed burned out. Their magic had faded in the face of questions about a lack of achievable goals and about the organization’s ineffectiveness. Where once they had been the chic newcomers to the scene noted for raising the issue of police violence, now there were more questions about their effectiveness and goals. This left them feeling more isolated.
Two of the founders left the group. Alicia Garza returned to the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which advocated for “dignity and fairness for the millions of domestic workers.”16 She also started the Black Futures Lab, launching a “Black Census,” a poll to determine the top priorities of Black Americans. She gave particular attention in the survey to the opinions of Black women, an essential element of the base of the Democratic Party ahead of the 2020 presidential election. This survey also put a heavy emphasis on Black members of the LGBTQ community, people that were rarely heard by politicians.17
Opal Tometi also left Black Lives Matter’s leadership. She put her energy into working as the executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, an organization fighting for immigrant rights. Tometi wrote that her responsibilities with Black Lives Matter “quickly became too much.” She realized that she was depressed and overwhelmed by the pressure falling on her “at the intersection of Black Women Lead and Black Girl Magic.”18
Patrisse Cullors co-wrote a best-selling book in 2018, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir. She was the only one to remain involved in the day-to-day activities as executive director of the organization.
Even as the creative minds behind Black Lives Matter went in different directions, the police violence that had initially spurred their activism remained a major problem. According to the Washington Post’s “Police Shooting Database,” the rate of police killings kept slowly rising, with 999 Americans dying at the hands of the police in 2019, compared to 962 police killings in 2016, the last year of Obama’s presidency. Still, none of the steady stream of scattered incidents occurring during Trump’s first two years had generated the massive street protests that had taken place during the Obama administration.
The data made clear that Black Americans continued to die at the hands of the police at a disproportionately high rate. By contrast, whites lost their lives in police interactions at a much lower rate. They made up 76 percent of the nation but were only 42 percent of police victims.19
Black Lives Matter seemed rudderless in the face of this continuing police violence. Most of the time when their leaders appeared in the news, it was to embrace Black actors and musicians. Suddenly, BLM’s most notable public campaign was to rally support for a Grammy-nominated Black British musician, the rapper 21 Savage, when he was threatened with deportation.
21 Savage had been convicted in 2014 on a drug-possession charge. It was then discovered that he had overstayed a visa, and under President Trump there was a more aggressive attitude in favor of deporting people, even those who were not a major public threat.
The organization’s preoccupation with celebrity causes and unrealistic goals like abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency now overshadowed its groundbreaking work on police violence. “Black Lives Matter Global Network has been outspoken in the fight to abolish ICE. We started the #Free21Savage coalition to bring awareness to the struggles of the black immigrant community,” read one press release, in an attempt, apparently, to try to explain away this sprawling focus.20
While Black Lives Matter was distracted, Trump continued to sound off on crime, using it as a hot-button issue with his base by calling for more aggressive policing. He made headlines when he told a convention of police officers: “When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon… I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’ ” Trump again played on racial fears by calling out the Salvadoran street gang MS-13 as “animals” who “transformed peaceful parks and beautiful quiet neighborhoods into blood-stained killing fields.”21
The only one with the stature to match Trump was former president Obama. Traditionally, former presidents have refrained from criticizing their successors. But Obama broke his silence just before the 2018 midterm election by saying that the rise in hate “did not start with Donald Trump, he is a symptom, not the cause. He is just capitalizing on resentment that politicians have been fanning for years.” In a grave tone, he accused Trump of opening a Pandora’s Box of hate, scapegoating, and racial grievance. “This is not normal,” the former president told a group of students at the University of Illinois. “These are extraordinary times, and they are dangerous times.”22
Despite the rebuff, Trump pushed ahead with his divisive tactics. He lashed out by feeding the lie that minority voter fraud threatened his rightful power over Congress and the nation. He specifically expressed opposition to early and mail-in voting, and voter registration efforts, especially in minority communities.
Since election night in 2016, Trump had falsely claimed that he had won the popular vote. He said without evidence that he had been robbed because as many as five million votes had been illegally cast for Clinton. He pointed to the large minority turnout in big cities as evidence of supposed fraud. His favorite targets were Black-majority cities. At one point while attacking a Black congressman from Baltimore, Elijah Cummings, Trump denigrated the city as a “disgusting, rat-and-rodent-infested mess.”23 Within four months of taking office, he’d created an Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to try to substantiate his charges that Baltimore and other large, mostly minority cities were engaging in election fraud.
Multiple civil rights groups immediately filed lawsuits against the commission. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund said that the commission’s real work was to amplify “the false premise that Black and Latino voters are more likely to perpetrate voter fraud.”24 Within a year’s time, the commission failed to find any evidence of voter fraud and was dissolved. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer dismissed the panel as simply a “front to suppress the vote.”25
Meanwhile, Attorney General Jeff Sessions went further. He used the power of the Justice Department to limit federal scrutiny in how states conducted their local elections. For nearly fifty years, any changes in voting procedures in these mostly Southern states had to be reviewed under the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But that had changed in 2013 with the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder. The conservative majority on the court held that the Voting Rights Act was outdated and unfairly punished the South.
This ruling had an immediate impact on American politics. In the days after the Supreme Court decision, Texas made its voter ID laws more restrictive. Other states established laws to purge voter rolls more regularly or shift boundaries of legislative districts to prevent consolidation of minority political power. While traditional civil rights groups condemned these efforts, as did the Obama administration, Donald Trump and his Justice Department took the other side and defended states that sought to implement restrictive rules under the cover of concern about voter fraud.
Despite their proven ability to spark mass opposition, Black Lives Matter activists were notably absent in this major fight over voting rights. Instead, on the progressive side, the spotlight shifted to Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate running for governor of Georgia in 2018. She began organizing to get more voters registered, with an emphasis on minorities and women to turn out at the polls.
Abrams, a Yale Law School graduate, had been elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 2006 and made history when she became minority leader in 2011, a first for a Black woman. Her family story added to her political power. Her parents had been on the front lines in the First Civil Rights Movement, registering Black voters in Mississippi. This was the time of “Mississippi Burning,” of massive white resistance to school integration and Black voting. During this period the NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated. Mississippi became the primary battleground in the 1964 “Freedom Summer” which brought hundreds of mostly white civil rights volunteers to the state to register Black voters.
Three of the most famous individuals in the Freedom Summer voter registration campaign were Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, who were brutally murdered by the local police and Ku Klux Klan near the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi. That same summer, Stacey Abrams’s father, fifteen-year-old Robert Abrams, was arrested in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for trying to do the same thing.
A generation later, his daughter won enough votes to become the leader of the Democrats in the Georgia legislature and the party’s nominee for governor. Trying to make history as the nation’s first Black woman governor, she registered a record number of Black and female voters in a state that leaned white and Republican. Her New Georgia Project registered 200,000 new, mostly minority supporters for her 2018 campaign. Abrams wasn’t alone in her effort to knock down barriers to Black voters. Another Georgia group, Black Voters Matter, founded before the 2016 election by LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright, worked to dismantle voter suppression and increase the number of Black voters across the state.
This distinctive effort led by Black women in the South gained national attention as the counter to Trump’s work at suppressing minority voter turnout.
But Abrams and her allies ran into an ongoing purge of voter rolls by her white opponent, Secretary of State Brian Kemp. After the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act, Kemp was quick to act. In the years leading up to the 2018 election, his office imposed draconian new rules on voter registration.
Georgia became “ground zero” for limiting minority votes. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights identified Georgia as “the only state formerly under federal oversight to adopt all five of the most common voter suppression tactics: strict voter ID laws, proof of citizenship requirements, purges, cuts in early voting, and polling place closures.”26 The Brennan Center for Justice reported that between the 2012 and 2016 elections, about 1.5 million Georgia voters were purged from the rolls.
Kemp did not act alone. Across the nation, “between 2014 and 2016, [some] states removed almost 16 million voters from the rolls—a 33 percent increase over the period between 2006 and 2008. The increase was highest in states with a history of voting discrimination,” according to the Brennan Center.27
Oprah Winfrey, former president Obama, and former vice president Joe Biden campaigned for Abrams, and pre-election polls showed the race for governor in Georgia was a dead heat. However, on election day, with voters standing in lines, some poll workers were told to turn away voters who’d come to the wrong precinct or to have them file provisional ballots, which might not be counted. When other election officials found discrepancies in signatures for registration, they simply threw out votes.
Abrams raised the alarm, claiming that thousands of Black voters were being denied their constitutional right. This immediately struck a chord of memory going back to her father’s time in the First Civil Rights Movement.
When Abrams lost the race by just over 54,000 votes, her defeat was national news. So was her refusal to concede on the grounds that voter suppression had decided the election, making her a target for constant fury from the right wing. She was called a sore loser and a threat to the nation’s trust in “fair” elections. Still, her fight for voting rights made her a national political figure. Two months after her defeat, the Democrats chose her to deliver the party’s response, on national television, to President Trump’s 2019 State of the Union address.
On the night of the State of the Union, many of the record number of 117 congresswomen defiantly dressed in white. It was both a statement of anger against Trump and a tribute to the suffragettes and the approaching centennial of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave American women the right to vote.
In Abrams’s televised rebuttal, she squarely laid the blame for her loss on Republican suppression tactics and warned of what was to come in future elections: “While I acknowledge the results of the 2018 election here in Georgia, I did not, and we cannot, accept efforts to undermine our right to vote,” Abrams said. “This is the next battle for our democracy, one where all eligible citizens can have their say about the vision we want for our country….
“We fought Jim Crow with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Yet we continue to confront racism from our past and in our present, which is why we must hold everyone, from the highest offices to our own families, accountable for racist words and deeds and call racism what it is, wrong.”28
Watching Abrams’s response, Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to Obama, immediately tweeted: “Stacey Abrams should run for President.”29 He later told The New York Times: “She can inspire people to activism and that is key to a Democrat winning back the White House.”30
After her loss in Georgia, Abrams turned her attention to a national push for voter registration before the upcoming 2020 presidential election. Her group, Fair Fight, began enrolling voters in battleground states, including North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. A celebrated figure, she was in demand as a speaker, giving new life to calls not seen since the First Civil Rights Movement for the protection of minority voting rights. She raised millions of dollars to register voters.
Fair Fight’s online organizing and fundraising mirrored the earlier social media success of Black Lives Matter and became a new pillar of the Second Civil Rights Movement. But where Black Lives Matter had looked for utopian outcomes like abolishing ICE and reparations for Black Americans, Abrams was in line with the thinking that characterized her father’s work in the First Civil Rights Movement.
But she was squarely a Second Movement guiding light. A figure cast in the Obama mold, she called for strategic, steady gains to achieve a specific goal—to win elections and thereby gain political power for Black communities. Although she lost her own 2018 gubernatorial race, she came within inches of making history. She would have been the first Black woman governor in the country, and she almost did it in a Southern, formerly Confederate state. Abrams wrote in her autobiography that she believed that the act of voting was now part of a “long game—that battles add up over time and create space for others to feel emboldened to act.”31
Beyond the political arena occupied by the Squad and Stacey Abrams, there was a cultural battle under way. A new front opened for the Second Civil Rights Movement within establishment America, especially its largest corporations.
The New York Times, the nation’s preeminent newspaper and one of the largest media companies, broke ground on how that entrenched American establishment was becoming increasingly willing to talk about race. To commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the first British slave ship landing in America at Jamestown, Virginia, the Times published a special report called “The 1619 Project.”32
The 1619 Project put slavery at the center of the founding of the country, beginning with the economic structure before the Revolutionary War and the Constitution, which protected slavery while denying equal rights to Blacks. The journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones led The 1619 Project with a provocative article headlined: “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True.”
“In August 1619, just 12 years after the English settled Jamestown, Va…. colonists bought 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from English pirates,” Hannah-Jones wrote. “Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’ But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst.” She argued that there would never have been an American Revolution “if [the colonists] had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.”
She made the story of Black people “foundational” to the story of the birth of the United States, arguing that through “centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals.” She added that the Black struggle was “not only for ourselves—black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.”33
The editor of the project, Jake Silverstein, defended the concept of the newspaper’s special section by asking readers to question if the lessons “taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July” were wrong and “the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?”34
The publication of The 1619 Project by the Times, a pillar of the establishment, came as a measure of public opinion moving away from Trump’s message of racial grievance. Across American life, it was evident that the mainstream was looking for new ways to repair the fraying racial fabric. The country urgently needed to build on the progress and accommodations that were the hallmarks of the First Civil Rights Movement.
Clearly the election of mayors, governors, and even a Black president had not been enough. Black Lives Matter’s protests against police violence signaled the need for a new generation to take on race relations, instead of being content with what had been achieved fifty years prior.
The 1619 Project was an immediate sensation, becoming “one of the most talked-about journalistic achievements of the year,” in the words of even critics like Professor Leslie M. Harris of Northwestern University.35 This new framing could have faded into academic debates, but with race relations in turmoil, it came to be seen as a public backlash to “Make America Great Again.” This sentiment was evident when Hannah-Jones won the Pulitzer Prize, giving the project more establishment credibility. The 1619 Project was also being used to change school curricula, with support from major corporations. Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions soon developed it as a TV series.
The 1619 Project was not without its detractors. Some historians, including some on the left, took aim at Hannah-Jones’s charge that slavery was central to the American Revolution. Five preeminent American academics, in a letter to The New York Times, wrote: “On the American Revolution, pivotal to any account of our history, the project asserts that the founders declared the colonies’ independence of Britain ‘in order to ensure slavery would continue.’ This is not true,” said the historians, who included prize winners from Princeton, Brown, the City University of New York, and Texas State University. “If supportable, the allegation would be astounding—yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false…. Instead, the project is offered as an authoritative account that bears the imprimatur and credibility of The New York Times.”36
Even inside the Times, the project stirred division. The conservative columnist Bret Stephens wrote: “The 1619 Project is a thesis in search of evidence, not the other way around…. What makes America most itself isn’t four centuries of racist subjugation. It’s 244 years of effort by Americans—sometimes halting, but often heroic—to live up to our greatest ideal. That’s a struggle that has been waged by people of every race and creed. And it’s an ideal that continues to inspire millions of people at home and abroad.”37
Despite the debate, the publication of The 1619 Project reflected an increased awareness by major U.S. companies, such as the Times, of changing attitudes among a new generation of American consumers. It also reflected shifting demographics in the workplace, as in the increased diversity of people editing and writing in The New York Times. The leaders of other major corporations, including the biggest blue-chip firms on Wall Street, could see the risks of the economy being dragged down by Trump’s racial provocations, which denigrated the largest-growing segments of their markets.
This negative financial impact of racial polarization, including anti-immigrant fervor in a globalized economy, led many American companies to increase their emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training. Time magazine reported that as early as 2003 companies were spending “an estimated $8 billion a year on diversity efforts.” Following the election of Donald Trump, that corporate effort ramped up to an unprecedented level. Time wrote that because of “the emergence of movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, the [DEI] industry has exploded.” They cited a 2019 survey of more than two hundred companies that found “63% of the diversity professionals had been appointed or promoted to their roles” since Trump’s election.38
Another novel expression of racial awareness within corporate America came in the heart of Trump country. In Alabama, Bryan Stevenson, a Black lawyer known for successfully defending Black people facing the death penalty, built a museum highlighting the painful history of lynching in America. Major corporations, including Google, joined with mainstream philanthropists such as the Ford Foundation and the Colorado billionaire siblings Pat and Jon Stryker to contribute millions of dollars to construct a site commemorating the victims of white racial violence. According to The Washington Post, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice was “one of the most powerful and effective new memorials created in a generation.”39
The corporate backlash to Trump also reached into the white, male-dominated world of sports ownership. Colin Kaepernick, who spent years condemned to the NFL sidelines for protesting police violence, became celebrated for calling out racism. In 2018, Kaepernick’s face appeared on Nike billboards with the slogan: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” He fit into the mold of the heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, an activist during the First Civil Rights Movement who was stripped of his titles after refusing to be drafted into the Vietnam War. Eventually even the NFL changed its attitude. They issued a statement on their website, NFL.com, which said flatly that Kaepernick’s social justice campaign “deserve(s) our attention and action.”40 They also agreed to a financial and legal settlement with the former player.
Trump responded angrily to the celebration of Kaepernick as well as to the changes signaled by The 1619 Project, and corporate DEI efforts. “Look, they want to take your history from you,” Trump said specifically in reference to The 1619 Project. “They want to tell you that you’re bad. They want to tell you that all of your heroes are not heroes anymore.”41
He hastily announced the creation of the 1776 Commission, to promote “patriotic education” and a “pro-American curriculum.” The president called out the 1619 Project–inspired curriculum as a “twisted web of lies” and said it was “a form of child abuse.”
“Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country,” Trump said.42
Concepts elevated to a new level by Black Lives Matter, such as “systemic racism” and “mass incarceration,” became increasingly present in the national conversation. Even a previously arcane academic thesis calling attention to racial bias across society, “Critical Race Theory,” was becoming a topic of wide discussion. There was also newfound attention from universities and think tanks to the racial wealth gap and racial disparities in education.
Academics writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences noted that Black Lives Matter was succeeding in changing the terms of debate on race in America: “BLM has successfully leveraged protest events to engender lasting changes in the ways that Americans discuss racial inequality.” They went on to note that the new framework introduced “antiracism discourse [that] is distinctive in that it does not view racism as an individual pathology or disfunction,” but rather a wider social issue.43
Trump doubled down on his criticism in a speech in front of Mount Rushmore, with its granite profiles of iconic American presidents. He decried “cancel culture” coming from left-wing activists against conservatives, saying that it was “driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism. In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished.”44
Trump acted on his denunciations by issuing an executive order to halt all DEI training in the federal workforce, claiming it perpetuated “racial stereotypes and division and can use subtle coercive pressure to ensure conformity of viewpoint.” His order appeared to blame the people behind Black Lives Matter and The 1619 Project for undermining a common American identity: “This destructive ideology is grounded in misrepresentations of our country’s history and its role in the world.” Trump’s order added that “this malign ideology is now migrating from the fringes of American society and threatens to infect core institutions of our country.”45
Trump’s criticism was reflected by other conservative public figures, who highlighted fears that American children were being indoctrinated with radical left-leaning ideas that diminished the contributions of the white Founding Fathers. States with conservative legislatures, like Florida and Texas, passed laws banning the teaching of material from The 1619 Project.
Not all corporations were on board with the new discussions of what was becoming known as “woke” culture, after a Black slang term referring to being aware of injustices that may not be immediately apparent. Some corporations were profiting from divisiveness, notably Facebook. Founded in 2004, the social media site boasted more than a billion users worldwide within its first ten years. It was the most common online destination for families and friends to share photos and keep up with one another’s birthdays and graduations. It first became a major political force in 2008 when the Obama campaign used it to reach young voters. Its international power became evident during the Arab Spring of 2011, when activists used Facebook to plan protests against authoritarian governments in North Africa and the Middle East.
It was ironic that the social media titan, once celebrated among activists as a springboard for a new civil rights movement, became a major platform of far-right attacks against progressives. White supremacists began using Facebook to bully Black Lives Matter supporters as early as the Ferguson protests, even going so far as publishing their personal information online in a practice known as “doxing.” Alicia Garza appealed to Rashad Robinson, the head of Color of Change, for help when her life was threatened by white supremacists on Facebook. She wanted Color of Change to pressure the social media company’s executives to stop the abuse of racial activists and limit the online threats.46
Facebook failed to go beyond cosmetic changes. The platform continued to be a fountain of threats against liberal activists, including Black Lives Matter, while lies, misinformation, and conspiracies spread on the site like wildfire. Color of Change raised the pressure on Facebook by demanding a “civil rights audit” to address concerns they had about “hate speech, [advertising] discrimination, voter suppression and Facebook’s failure to protect the safety and security of Black users and users of color.”47
The response from the social media giant was angry. Facebook hired a right-wing public relations firm, Definers, to search out negative information about Robinson’s organization in a clandestine effort to undermine it. The Definers strategy was to portray Color of Change as a tool of a favorite villain of the right wing. “We started seeing the threats coming in at us, in emails that were physical threats mentioning George Soros in them,” Robinson later told the website Salon. “For us it was a very weird thing, as a Black racial justice group.”48 The New York Times then reported that the Definers campaign was just one part of a larger effort by Facebook to cripple the civil rights group.49
Unmasked by the Times report, the social media company finally agreed to make changes. It launched an audit of its content, including efforts that blocked some Black opinion on the grounds that it had been too extreme, even as there had been no similar leash on white extremism. That began to change when Facebook finally removed some of the most extreme far-right disinformation on its platform, including permanently banning the infamous Alex Jones, and his InfoWars page, which had over 1.7 million followers in 2018.
At the same time, President Trump was also trafficking in disinformation, telling lies and sending off incendiary tweets, some coming in the middle of the night. Now Twitter, as well as Facebook, had to decide what was permissible as political speech, especially if it was coming from the president of the United States.
Trump’s online antics made daily headlines; he was spinning out of control with one fight after another. He made furious statements about economic collapse and immigration while instigating the longest government shutdown in American history. His anger was continuing to infect people on the fringes of American society. The anti-immigrant tensions he’d been stoking boiled over in August 2019, when a twenty-one-year-old white Trump supporter took a gun into a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and killed twenty-three people, mostly Hispanics. It was soon discovered that the gunman had posted a manifesto online that condemned “cultural and ethnic replacement” and what he called a “Hispanic invasion.” Trump set off more alarms by downplaying the racism behind the shooting. Just as he did in Charlottesville, the president said he was opposed to hate of any kind, be it “white supremacy, whether it’s any other kind of supremacy, whether it’s antifa.”50 That deflection and false equivalency led to a tweet storm, with #WhiteSupremicistInChief rising to become the most trending topic.
Just weeks earlier, FBI director Christopher Wray (who had been appointed by Trump) had warned Congress that the greatest source of domestic terrorism in the United States was “white supremacist violence.”51 Yet once again Trump refused to acknowledge the racist anger he was stirring in the country. Instead, he tried to distract from it. After Wray’s testimony, the president tweeted that he was considering declaring left-wing protests “a major Organization of Terror (along with MS-13 & others). Would make it easier for police to do their job!”52
But for all the online outrage, there was little in the way of street protests, a stark contrast to the earlier Black Lives Matter demonstrations or the Women’s March. In fact, Black Lives Matter had not been on the front lines for years, since the police killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling back in 2016. But things were about to change. In February 2020, Ahmaud Arbery, a twenty-five-year-old Black man living in Georgia, was intercepted and gruesomely executed by two white men while jogging in his neighborhood. Gregory McMichael, a retired police officer, and his son Travis had been following Arbery in a truck, wrongly suspecting him of being a thief. Initially the local prosecutors took no action in response to the shooting. One prosecutor recused herself from handling the case because McMichael had worked as an investigator in her office. A second prosecutor said there was no evidence to suggest that McMichael had acted illegally in the context of Georgia’s self-defense laws. While McMichael was ultimately prosecuted and convicted, there were no immediate national protests despite the initial refusal to bring charges.
Less than three weeks later, on March 13, police in Louisville, Kentucky, broke into the apartment of a twenty-six-year-old Black woman named Breonna Taylor. They were looking for a drug dealer’s stash and had acted on the basis of false testimony to get a “no knock” warrant. Taylor, an emergency room technician, was in bed sleeping alongside her boyfriend. She was hit by eight shots out of a barrage of twenty-five bullets fired by the police and died at the scene.
Like the Arbery killing, the Taylor case drew little immediate media attention. Initially there was no video to go viral on social media. The urgency and anger that had attended earlier police shootings of Black people generated only small local protests. There was nothing like what had happened in Ferguson. But under the surface, the racial fever was simmering hot, stoked by anxiety, frustration, and grievance.
But there was an even larger problem brewing in America, one that went far beyond changing demographics, politics, and police violence. This looming crisis would affect the entire planet, as all eyes turned their focus to one single issue—the fear of a pandemic with the potential to kill millions.
Covid-19 would also transform the Second Civil Rights Movement.