{"id":50077,"date":"2016-11-20T00:57:20","date_gmt":"2016-11-20T00:57:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=50077"},"modified":"2016-11-20T01:08:49","modified_gmt":"2016-11-20T01:08:49","slug":"the-end-of-the-postracial-myth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=50077","title":{"rendered":"The End of the Postracial Myth"},"content":{"rendered":"

The End of the Postracial Myth<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times Magazine<\/a>
\n2016-11-15<\/p>\n

Nikole Hannah-Jones<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Pundits are quick to say that it couldn\u2019t be about prejudice in states like Iowa, where Obama voters went for Trump. But racial anxiety is always close to the surface \u2014 and can easily be stoked.<\/em><\/p>\n

On a cold, clear night in January 2008, when Iowa<\/a> Democrats selected Barack Obama<\/a> over a white woman and a white man in the state\u2019s first-in-the-nation caucus, the moment felt transformative. If voters in this overwhelmingly white, rural state could cast their ballots for a black man as president, then perhaps it was possible for the entire nation to do what had never been done; perhaps America had turned far enough away from its racist past that skin color was no longer a barrier to the highest office of the land. In the months that followed, as Obama racked up primary victories, not just in the expected cities but also in largely white Rust Belt<\/a> towns and farming communities, it seemed evidence for many Americans that the nation had finally become \u201cpost-racial.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, that post-racial dream did not last long, and nothing epitomizes the na\u00efvet\u00e9 of that belief more than the election last week of Donald J. Trump<\/a>. As I watched my home state of Iowa join the red flood that overtook the electoral map last Tuesday, I asked myself the same questions that so many others did: What happened? Why had states that reliably backed Obama \u2014 states like Iowa, Michigan<\/a>, Wisconsin<\/a> and Pennsylvania<\/a> \u2014 flipped Republican?<\/p>\n

I was struck by how quickly white pundits sought to tamp down assertions that race had anything to do with it. It was, it seemed to me, almost a relief to many white Americans that Trump\u2019s victory encompassed so many of the heavily white places that voted for a black man just years before. It was an absolution that let them reassure themselves that Donald Trump\u2019s raucous campaign hadn\u2019t revealed an ugly racist rift after all, that in the end, the discontent that propelled the reality-TV star into the White House was one of class and economic anxiety, not racism.<\/p>\n

But this analysis reveals less about the electorate than it does about the consistent inability of many white Americans to think about and understand the complex and often contradictory workings of race in this country, and to discuss and elucidate race in a sophisticated, nuanced way.<\/p>\n

While we tend to talk about racism in absolute terms \u2014 you\u2019re either racist or you\u2019re not \u2014 racism and racial anxiety have always existed on a spectrum. For historians who have studied race in the United States, the change from blue to red in heavily white areas is not surprising. In fact, it was entirely predictable. \u201cThere are times when working-class whites, whether rural or urban, will join an interracial alliance to get the short-term gains they want,\u201d Robin Kelley<\/a>, a history professor at U.C.L.A., told me. \u201cThey don\u2019t ever do it without kicking and screaming.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The End of the Postracial Myth The New York Times Magazine 2016-11-15 Nikole Hannah-Jones Pundits are quick to say that it couldn\u2019t be about prejudice in states like Iowa, where Obama voters went for Trump. But racial anxiety is always close to the surface \u2014 and can easily be stoked. On a cold, clear night […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,8,26,20],"tags":[24986,21057,5455,2640,8894,25469,2327,13109],"class_list":["post-50077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-donald-j-trump","tag-donald-trump","tag-iowa","tag-new-york-times","tag-new-york-times-magazine","tag-nikole-hannah-jones","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times-magazine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50077"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50078,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50077\/revisions\/50078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}