{"id":55027,"date":"2017-10-08T04:18:03","date_gmt":"2017-10-08T04:18:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=55027"},"modified":"2017-10-08T04:18:03","modified_gmt":"2017-10-08T04:18:03","slug":"we-should-have-seen-trump-coming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=55027","title":{"rendered":"We should have seen Trump coming"},"content":{"rendered":"

We should have seen Trump coming<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/a>
\n2017-09-29<\/p>\n

Ta-Nehisi Coates<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s<\/a> rise felt like a new chapter in American history. But the original sin of white supremacy was not so easily erased.<\/em><\/p>\n

I have often wondered how I missed the coming tragedy. It is not so much that I should have predicted that Americans would elect Donald Trump<\/a>. It\u2019s just that I shouldn\u2019t have put it past us. It was tough to keep track of the currents of politics and pageantry swirling at once. All my life I had seen myself, and my people, backed into a corner. Had I been wrong? Watching the crowds at county fairs cheer for Michelle Obama<\/a> in 2008, or flipping through the enchanting photo spreads of the glamorous incoming administration, it was easy to believe that I had been.<\/p>\n

And it was more than symbolic. Barack Obama\u2019s<\/a> victory meant not just a black president but also that Democrats, the party supported by most black people, enjoyed majorities in Congress. Prominent intellectuals were predicting that modern conservatism \u2013 a movement steeped in white resentment \u2013 was at its end and that a demographic wave of Asians, Latinos and blacks would sink the Republican party.<\/p>\n

Back in the summer of 2008, as Obama closed out the primary and closed in on history, vendors in Harlem<\/a> hawked T-shirts emblazoned with his face and posters placing him in the black Valhalla<\/a> where Martin<\/a>, Malcolm<\/a> and Harriet<\/a> were throned. It is hard to remember the excitement of that time, because I now know that the sense we had that summer, the sense that we were approaching an end-of-history moment, proved to be wrong.<\/p>\n

It is not so much that I logically reasoned out that Obama\u2019s election would author a post-racist age. But it now seemed possible that white supremacy, the scourge of American history, might well be banished in my lifetime. In those days I imagined racism as a tumour that could be isolated and removed from the body of America, not as a pervasive system both native and essential to that body. From that perspective, it seemed possible that the success of one man really could alter history, or even end it…<\/p>\n

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

Obama\u2019s rise felt like a new chapter in American history. But the original sin of white supremacy was not so easily erased.<\/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":[21057,6000,2103],"class_list":["post-55027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-donald-trump","tag-ta-nehisi-coates","tag-the-guardian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55027","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=55027"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55028,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55027\/revisions\/55028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}