“We haven’t felt like ourselves since Barack Obama. He was such a slick snake. This affable guy wearing good suits and looked the part and sounded the part and dressed the part. But so divisive in his messaging.” – Megyn Kelly of “The Megyn Kelly Show”
Several days ago, when asked how she was handling the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s death, conservative commentator and host of “The Megyn Kelly Show” responded with what for many seemed to be a bewildering response, referencing former president Barack Obama and launching into a tirade that included the following: “He’s the one who started to inject race where no one had been doing it. He’s the one who started to use his pen in the phone to shove things down our throats that we didn’t want. He’s the one who shoved through an entitlement on our healthcare and our personal doctor visits that he promised he wouldn’t mess with, and he did, really hurting people and causing massive anger and open lies.”
As awkward as her response was, the thing is, she said aloud what many Black Americans have long known. For many white Americans, our nation’s first Black president broke something in their minds. Their sense of order was askew, because in their minds a Black man with a Black wife being president of the United States was simply not acceptable, and this country would have to pay for darkening their White House.
In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s historic win, many believed that we as a nation had finally started to dismantle our nation’s race problem. Remember those several years when, according to social media posts and media commentators, we were supposedly post-racial? The naiveté was staggering, especially amongst a certain segment of the white population, and even for some Black folks and people of color. It was a moment of hopefulness tinged with the promise of change.
But perhaps we should have looked to history to better inform us.
Black progress in this country has always been met with fierce resistance and attempts to squash that progress. During the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War, Black folks in this country started to make a life for themselves, which included public service and education and commerce. Despite how Black folks had come to be in this country—as enslaved Africans—they were determined to become a part of the country, and with that came the emergence of Black excellence.
The response to Black people’s political and social gains at that time was Jim Crow, a system of policies and laws meant to crush all progress and put Black folks back in their place. The last of the Jim Crow laws in this country fell in 1965, only eight years before I was born, though the stench of Jim Crow lingered on in many deep rural parts of the south in small towns like the ones my family was from in Arkansas.
It has been 17 years since Obama was elected on that historic night in 2008 and more than eight years since he left office, and he is still living rent-free in a lot of white minds. I would dare say he is living rent-free in a lot of non-white minds too, because the uncomfortable truth is that if we never had our first Black president, we almost certainly never would have had a President Trump—and without a Trump, we probably wouldn’t be at the precipice of Civil War or worse in this country.
Here’s the thing: For many white folks who don’t consider themselves to be racist, too often they are naive about the depth of racism that exists among their own people and truly don’t grasp the insidious nature of racism and just how to work to break the racist cycles that exist within white-bodied people. It is why people left of center in 2016 were stunned when Trump won the first time and it is why they were stunned last year when he won again. It’s why white boys and young white men are being radicalized at alarming rates and white nationalism is one of our largest domestic terrorist concerns.
Of course, the Department of Justice has removed from its website the study that documented the threat of white nationalism (and the fact that in general domestic terrorism was mostly conducted by right-wing people and groups, not liberals and leftists) and with Kash Patel heading up the FBI and doing Donny’s bidding, it is safe to say that the agents who would be paying attention to the threat of white nationalism as potential danger to all of us have been reassigned to go harass the elotes cart guy and Latino grandmas.
Meanwhile, in the current climate, the white nationalists—who used to have to hide out because, as a country, we publicly insisted that racism to that extreme was a bad thing and pretended it didn’t still exist on a wide scale—can now be fast-tracked into good government gigs, living out their best racist John Wayne fantasies. Meanwhile, women (especially Black women) and others who don’t fit the administration’s narrative of proper Americans or who are unwilling to follow the script (and who hold important institutional knowledge and skills) find themselves scrambling to make ends meet after being made irrelevant.
For years, there was a mass delusion that we were moving beyond race in this country and confronting our racist foundation but really, we were just in our respective silos or echo chambers of like-minded individuals and failed to realize the danger that those outside of our non-racist (or more accurately less-racist) spaces posed to everyone.
Perhaps instead of harping on white privilege and fragility at the height of the post-Obama, anti-racism years, we should have done more work around white naiveté and how to give white people the skills to connect with other white people who still harbored strongly racist views. To learn how to talk to people, instead of talking at people and seeking the commonalities that did exist as a foundation to build on.
In any case, if we survive this period as a nation we will require some maturation on the part of the non-racist white folks and a willingness to accept reality as it is, not as they wish it to be. To stop expecting someone else to save them. It will require accepting that while you truly may not see yourself as racist, many of your people are racist. It is looking at what your sons, brothers and husbands are doing online. It is accepting the uncomfortable truth that Black and brown people excelling makes many white people mad. It is accepting that the reason so many white people hated and continue to hate our first Black president was simply because of the color of his skin. At the end of the day, Obama was simply another president; he was hardly the radical revolutionary that was going to exact justice for hundreds of years of injustice to Black people. And yet, in their white minds, he was Fred Hampton, Assata Shakur and Malcom X rolled up in one.
It is accepting that Trump’s wins have always been about race and restoring white men to what far too many white men and an awful lot of white women see as their sole rightful place in this country. It is accepting that we have a long way to go in this country when it comes to race.
Many white people in this country simply have not been comfortable with the social and racial changes in this country, despite the fact they were long overdue and hardly threatened the true structure of power in this country, given that the majority of power and wealth in this country has never left white hands.
I see that up close here in Maine where I live, where if you only read the conservative news or the comment section of any news story online that even reeks of diversity, commentators would have you believe that Maine still isn’t one of the whitest states in the Union. I have lived here since 2002; in the 2000 census Maine was 96.9% white, in 2020 it was about 91%. The Black and Latino populations did grow during that 20-year period but only in our most populous or urban areas. You can still travel through large parts of Maine and never see a non-white face, but even that minor growth has been enough to have people throwing out dog whistles regularly about how Maine has become a welfare state filled with undocumented people sucking up all the benefits. Which is patently false.
Here’s the thing, for years, white people could be involved in racial or social justice work but still be detached and steeped in their whiteness because for many, the fight wasn’t personal. But for once, we are all fighting for our lives. It is no longer just the struggle of BIPOC and Black folks. As the administration consolidates power, it is actively seeking to come for any and all who will be a roadblock to their agenda and if you are reading this in good faith and not as a hate read, that means you, too.
If we are going to be in the trenches fighting for our safety together that means you need to get up to speed. It means getting over your disbelief that this is happening and accepting that we are here and that ultimately this is fascism and authoritarianism but it is also about race because ultimately almost everything in this country is rooted in race. It is foundational to how we built this country, using the bodies of enslaved Africans and the stolen land of Indigenous people to create its wealth and power.
So, as surprising as Megyn Kelly’s comments were, I am grateful that for once, someone said the quiet part out loud thus validating what millions of us already knew. Far too many white people in this country haven’t felt right since Obama became president, Trump offered himself as the savior of white personhood, who would restore whiteness to its proper place and thus make America great again by enacting Jim Crow 2.0—not just targeting Black folks and BIPOC folks (though they still bear the brunt) but also anyone who dares to dream and desire a racially just and equitable world.
So, what will you do? Will you cower and hide behind your cloak of whiteness to protect you and yours, or will you get in these trenches and keep all people safe and do all you can to push back against this return to an imagined era of American greatness and white domination?
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Image by Patrick Fore via Unsplash
