How the Election of Barack Obama Changed Race Relations in America

Here is the fourth wave of white supremacy.

In response to one of my stories, Iris Bracy-Ahmad, four years older than me, wrote about her experiences with segregation and racism. Her words are more descriptive than mine; I wouldn’t dare change them.

“I was born in 1952 in Columbia, South Carolina during the Jim Crow Segregation era. South Carolina’s government was so Racist that my family could only live in Black neighborhoods and me and my siblings could only attend Black schools. When we went downtown to shop we couldn’t try on the clothes that we wanted to buy, and we couldn’t sit down and eat in white restaurants. We had to sit in the back of city buses. I saw the college students where my dad worked protesting local white businesses for not allowing us to shop in their stores which was located in our Black neighborhoods! The Racism was so much a part of my childhood that I began to think that it was normal to be treated that way. The news would show shocking stories of Black people being killed by the KKK and the police. Every Black American 🇺🇸 who grew up during that time period of institutional racism was traumatized by racism in America 🇺🇸. Now we as Black Americans are all still suffering from post traumatic slave syndrome. This is why our government Leaders need to apologize to Black Americans and support Reparations for all Black Americans who were born in this country. The system of institutional racism has to be dismantled. If this isn’t done there will always be a division between so called white people who want to maintain their white privilege and black people who want to be treated as equal citizens in this country. With our elected politicians continuing to deny that America 🇺🇸 has been and still is a racist country there will always be racism in America 🇺🇸!” — Iris Bracy-Ahmad

As I grew up in Minneapolis, I spent my first years in a segregated neighborhood; by the time I was five, we’d moved into a newly integrated one, recently freed from the restrictive covenants that would have blocked us previously. The elementary school I attended was newly integrated, and I could shop without thought at the neighborhood stores, including the Piggly Wiggly and Red Owl chain stores, though there were no Black employees. I could order a sandwich and soda at a Woolworth’s lunch counter. I rode the city bus to school and sat in the back voluntarily to talk with my friends. My mother sometimes rode the same bus to work and always rode in the front. She refused to sit in the back without ever giving a reason.

I was young during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. There were occasional riots locally, and I knew the little that appeared on national news. I was 12 when my mother ran down the alley to collect me from playing basketball at my white friend Mark’s house when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated. MLK spoke with presidents; I couldn't conceive at the time there would one day be a Black president.

It took a perfect storm for Barack Obama to become President. He became a star in the Democratic Party as a state senator from Illinois after a rousing keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC). He parlayed that into a successful run for U.S. Senate the following year. After winning the Democratic nomination, his Republican challenger, Jack Ryan, withdrew from the race after allegations he tried to force his wife to perform sex acts in public. Republicans replaced Ryan with a hastily recruited Black candidate, Alan Keyes. Obama won by a large margin.

Obama wasn’t taken seriously when he announced he was running for President on a cold day in February 2007 in Springfield, IL. Surprisingly, he won the Iowa Caucus in a three-way race between himself, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton. Edwards finished second in Iowa but lagged well behind in New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries. A scandal about a love child that later proved true aided in his political demise: he dropped out of the race and endorsed Obama but praised Clinton. Obama and Clinton went back and forth, each winning primaries with Obama claiming the needed delegates just before the DNC.

It was exciting to be Black and watch him accomplish what few thought possible when the campaign began. I met then-Senator Obama at an Orlando fundraiser during that race and personally experienced his magnetism. A campaign worker I knew said behind the scenes he was called Barack-Star. Few of the area's Democratic bigwigs were in attendance, though several hundred people were. Those not in attendance were holding out for Hillary Clinton.

There’s a case to be made that if Obama’s leading opponent had been a white male, he may not have won. There were many Democrats who found the prospects of a female president more unappealing than a Black one. Not to say Obama’s race didn’t come into play in the Democratic race. Joe Biden gave him a backhanded compliment by saying he was “articulate and clean. Does that mean the rest of us are not?

In March of 2007, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist, Mark Penn, wrote a campaign memo that proposed painting Barack Obama as un-American or “other”:

“His roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values … Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century … Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t.“ — Mark Penn

Hillary Clinton stated her campaign had broader appeal, suggesting she had a better chance to sway white voters and that white people were hard-working and Black people not so much.

“There was just an AP article posted that found how Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans is weakening again, and how the, you know, whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me … I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.” — Hillary Clinton

The general election removed any pretense that race was not a factor. Surrogates for John McCain depicted Barack and Michelle as monkeys. Obama faced birtherism charges of being born in Nigeria, Kenya, or maybe both, led by Donald Trump. Racist memes flooded the Internet, yet Obama prevailed and won the election, becoming the first Black President-elect of the United States. One might think things would have calmed down, but there were outbreaks of racism and race-based attacks throughout the country well before Obama took his oath of office. NBC News noted several such incidents.

• Four North Carolina State University students admitted writing anti-Obama comments in a tunnel designated for free speech expression, including one that said: “Let’s shoot that (N-word) in the head.”
• Second- and third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted “assassinate Obama,” a district official said.
• University of Alabama professor Marsha L. Houston said a poster of the Obama family was ripped off her office door. A replacement poster was defaced with a death threat and a racial slur. “It seems the election brought the racist rats out of the woodwork,” Houston said.
• Black figures were hanged by nooses from trees on Mount Desert Island, Maine, the Bangor Daily News reported. The President of Baylor University in Waco, Texas, said a rope found hanging from a campus tree was an abandoned swing and not a noose.
• Crosses were burned in yards of Obama supporters in Hardwick, N.J., and Apolacan Township, Pa.
• A black teenager in New York City said he was attacked with a bat on election night by four white men who shouted ‘Obama.’
• In the Pittsburgh suburb of Forest Hills, a black man said he found a note with a racial slur on his car windshield, saying, “Now that you voted for Obama, just watch out for your house.”

Some suggested we had achieved a “post-racial America” where the country had evolved from its racist beginnings. The election of a Black President was proof positive of our growth. The “Southern Growth Policies Board” coined the term in a report from 70 politicians and professors who believe their region of 60 million citizens had entered into an era in which race relations are soon to be replaced as a major concern by population increase, industrial development, and economic fluctuations.”

A large number of white people didn’t get the word about a post-racial America. As race-related issues popped up, they blamed Barack Obama for not being the cure he was supposed to be. They claimed Obama made the country more divisive. But Barack Obama didn’t create divisiveness in the nation; he exposed it by being that third rail nobody could touch without revealing themselves.

Just as the Klan was formed after the Civil War, rose after Reconstruction, and rose again during the Civil Rights Movement. Those same forces rose again in a fourth wave, including Neo-Nazis, skinheads, right-wing militias, and white supremacy groups: the Patriot Front, Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois, Oath Keepers, and others. A rose by any other name is still a rose.

The new Klan no longer feels the need to hide. They wear their racism like a badge of honor, encouraged by the hatred of either the man or the thought of a Black man in the Oval Office. Coincidental to the Obama campaign and election, there was an increase in cross-burnings and other race-based incidents. Memberships rose in hate groups immediately after Obama’s election. People of color celebrated Obama crashing through a barrier some believed would never be broken. Others also never thought Obama would win, and they were enraged. See this report on Reuters.

The antagonism towards Barack Obama became part of a strategy. It was acceptable to be against everything Barack Obama was for. People who didn’t have health care and received it got angry. Obamacare was used as a slur. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was falsely accused of saying, “Our №1 priority is to make this president a one-term president,” as soon as Obama took office. McConnell said it, but not until 2010. Republicans attempted 55 times during the Obama presidency to repeal his signature legislation. Overall attempts have now exceeded 100. There was often no hope of success; the main goal was to remind the base that they, too, hated Obama.

The 2016 Republican nomination process saw 17 announced candidates for office. The Republican base whittled them down until they got the polar opposite of Barack Obama: Donald Trump. He promised to “Make America Great Again.” While what period “Again” was supposed to represent was always vague, it clearly meant before Obama. Being a Republican didn’t make you a racist, but it did signal you were willing to co-exist with racists.

The fourth wave of racists didn’t die out after the Trump victory; they only grew stronger. It remains to be seen if they are now at their peak or whether they will ignore all of Trump’s flaws, some potentially criminal, and elect a man whose stated goal is retribution. His unstated goal is to pardon himself if needed, depending on the outcome of four indictments with 91 charges.

It is now as acceptable to be openly racist as at any point in American History. I say that with a caveat because most of the open racism is conducted on the Internet, some anonymously and others in private groups, on the other end of the spectrum. Hate groups convene in the open; Nazi Flags have waved outside Disney World. Bearers of Confederate Flags have answered the question as to whether it was heritage or hate. Groups that once looked down on each other now come together in a common cause.

The Republican Party can be credited with inventing affirmative action, going back to the Reconstruction Acts beginning in 1867; in recent years, they’ve led the charge to erase affirmative action lest we ever arrive at equality. Strawmen like DEI and Critical Race Theory have been denounced as racism against white people. Systemic racism against people of color cannot ever be acknowledged without having to explain why it won’t be addressed.

Every aspect of Black achievement in America is under attack. Highly educated Black people are demeaned as getting degrees via affirmative action. Black educators and school administrators are working under microscopes as school boards are increasingly being taken over by the alt-right. Black History isn’t being erased; it’s being replaced by a feel-good version that doesn’t upset white students or instructors. We now learn about the “benefits” of slavery that forced breeding and rape was “natural reproduction.” Class Is More Determinative of Success and Safety in America Than Race

The biggest hint that change is possible came after the release of the George Floyd videos showing a Minneapolis police officer with his knee on a man’s neck for almost nine minutes. Millions of people around the world, most of them white, took notice and marched in the streets demanding the end to police brutality and qualified immunity while insisting on civilian oversight of police forces.

For a moment, the powers that be were silent and unprepared with a strategy, but the fourth wave was ready. Their groups let the peaceful protesters have the day, but they came out at night, leading violent attacks on protesters and police alike. A Texas man with the Boogaloo Bois pleaded guilty to firing 13 rounds from a semiautomatic weapon at a Minneapolis police station. Another member was charged with the killing of a member of the Federal Protective Service and wounding another. In addition, he has been charged with killing a sheriff’s deputy in Santa Cruz County, California.

Three other members were charged with planning to incite violence in Nevada. Extremist groups were believed to be responsible for shooting at Black Lives Matter members, damaging police vehicles, and committing arson on court buildings during demonstrations across the country, according to a report by the Network Contagion Research Institute.

Others, like the Oath Keepers, Three-Percenters, right-wing media, and many politicians, were focused on disinformation. Blame for any violence and damage was pinned on Black Lives Matter, whose name was almost always tied to another group called Antifa. Black Lives Matter and Antifa have no ties, yet they are treated as if they were one entity. When Black Lives Matter staged a peaceful protest in Washington, DC., National Guard members lined the streets for fear of a violent attack. When the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Boogaloo Bois participated in an actual attack on the Capitol, they were mainly waved through.

Like any president, Barack Obama was responsible for things I liked and things I didn’t. Included in the stimulus package to save the economy was military-grade weapons for police forces that would never be used against white people. He didn’t do as much for HBCUs as I would have liked. On the other hand, he provided almost universal healthcare and repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Obama was more than competent in the job and a much better public speaker than the president before him and the two that came after. After one of his speeches, I never hung my head in shame or shook it in disgust.

The election of Barack Obama was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. The eight consecutive years of negative portrayals by Fox News and elsewhere did nothing to harm him personally. They never laid a glove on him. The rage of being unable to topple Obama was placed elsewhere in attempts to undo his accomplishments and legacy.

After Obama’s departure from office, the fourth wave continued to grow. We are at a point where America will either rebuke Democratic values in favor of something else or retreat to something more like The Founders intended. Though most of the Founders owned slaves, so maybe that’s not what we want.

Texas is defying the Supreme Court on border matters, and Florida is sending the DeSantis private army to help. These things aren’t happening because of Barack Obama, but they wouldn’t have occurred had he never been President. Their contempt for the federal government is a holdover from their hatred for Obama.

Obama’s election and accomplishments were one step forward; with this whitelash, we’ve taken one huge step back. The next move will demonstrate what America is; we may finally determine if Ben Franklin was right about us holding onto a Republic; we may become a monarchy after all. The takeaway is that some Americans would rather have an odious white King than a President who might once again be Black. An ongoing theme is that if Biden dies, Kamala Harris might become President.

The City of Atlanta once marketed itself as “The City Too Busy to Hate.” It wasn’t true, but it sounded good. Despite denials from Nikki Haley and Tim Scott, we have experienced a hate outbreak since the Obama election. Once again, Obama didn’t cause the racism; he exposed it.