However, just after the 2008 presidential election I was asked to write an essay for an online publication called Inside Higher Ed, specifically in response to a series of ugly campus incidents that took place just before and after the election—incidents such as the hanging of an effigy of Barack Obama at the University of Kentucky, the appearance of a noose on a tree at Baylor University, the dumping of a dead bear plastered with Obama posters at Western Carolina University, and the postelection Facebook post by a University of Texas student that called for “all the hunters to gather up, we have a n——in the white house.” These four examples seemed perplexing among a generation of students that voted so enthusiastically, two to one, for Barack Obama.
My theory about this seeming paradox is rooted in my understanding of psychology. I know that a shifting paradigm can generate anxiety, even psychological threat, for those who feel the basic assumptions of society changing in ways they can no longer predict. According to a USA Today poll taken immediately after the 2008 election, 67 percent of Americans expressed pride in the racial progress the election represented, even if they did not vote for Barack Obama. Yet 27 percent of the poll respondents said the results of the election “frightened” them.49 Some of that fear could have been connected to disagreement with Obama’s policies or related concerns. But for some small segment, perhaps like those involved in the campus incidents, the fear might have been related to an unvoiced and maybe even unconscious recognition that the racial calculus of our society was being changed by the election, a change that could threaten the racial hierarchy that has advantaged White people for so long. Such a sense of threat can lead to irrational, potentially violent behavior, and of course, in 2008 the fear of such violence was underscored by the not-so-distant history of brutality and murder that accompanied the struggle for civil rights (including voting rights) in our nation. If, as Reverend Lowery said, America was being reborn, we might think of those campus incidents and others like them as a kind of birthing pains—painful contractions that no one wants, yet signs of something new emerging.
What was that new thing? One answer might be high voter turnout—particularly among young voters and voters of color. That was the secret to Barack Obama’s successful campaign. A record voter turnout delivered President Obama a very decisive victory, winning the electoral college vote, 365 to 173, and 53 percent of the popular vote.50 In 2008 President Obama garnered significant White support, more than the 2004 Democratic candidate, John Kerry, had received. But he also captured 66 percent of voters under thirty, 66 percent of the Hispanic vote, 62 percent of the Asian vote, and 95 percent of the African American vote. The turnout of Black voters was so high that for the first time in history, it nearly equaled that of White voters. His Republican opponent, Arizona senator John McCain, was only successful in capturing the majority of elderly White and evangelical Christian voters, a declining segment of the voting population. The growth in the electorate was driven largely by the rise in voters of color, of which only 8 percent identified as Republican.51 “The demographics race we’re losing badly,” said Senator Lindsey O. Graham (SC), adding, “We’re not generating enough angry White guys to stay in business for the long term.”52
Certainly the election of 2008 and the reelection of President Obama in 2012 challenged a fundamental social narrative in American culture. That narrative has been replayed on television and in movies throughout most of American cinematic history. It can be summed up in this way: In a heroic struggle, after all the twists and turns of the plotline, the White guy (usually the blond) wins. The Black guy, if there is one, is usually eliminated from the story before the end. Surely the formula ending of that movie plot is familiar! Yet the presidential election of 2008, and subsequently of 2012, gave that story a new ending. It seemed that we could no longer predict the winner based on race. The possibility of an unpredictable ending makes for a much better story and a much better society. But, as noted, it also generates anxiety and, for some, a sense of threat.
History tells us that social change is hard and often resisted. One form that resistance has taken since 2008 has been the systematic effort on the part of Republican-controlled state legislatures to reduce voter participation among communities of color, a pattern that harkens back to the days of Jim Crow. Historian Carol Anderson writes, “Barack Obama’s election was a catalyst for a level of voter suppression activities that had not been seen so clearly or disturbingly in decades. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Supreme Court’s 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act.”53
This “Act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution” was designed to ensure the voting rights of historically disenfranchised racial minorities and prohibits every state and local government from imposing any voting law that results in discrimination against these protected groups. It outlaws literacy tests and other requirements that were historically used to keep African Americans and other disenfranchised groups from voting, especially in the South. Because of that southern history, the Act contained special provisions that required certain jurisdictions (those with a long history of voter discrimination) to seek “pre-clearance” from the US attorney general or the US district court for DC before making any changes in their election laws, allowing the federal government to determine whether there would be any discriminatory impact.54 In 2013, in a case involving Shelby County, Alabama (Shelby County v. Holder), the Supreme Court ruled in a 5–4 decision that, given the civil rights progress that had been made since 1965, the protection of the pre-clearance rule was no longer needed and indeed now placed an unfair burden on those jurisdictions whose past misdeeds had placed them under federal oversight.55
Freed from the pre-clearance requirement, state legislatures in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia lost no time in passing laws making it more difficult for people to vote. By 2014, thirteen more states had passed voter-restriction statutes.56 Republican legislators argued that the more-restrictive laws were necessary to prevent voter fraud, yet research has shown repeatedly that there have been very few instances of voter fraud in modern US elections.57 Rather than preventing nonexistent fraud, the impact has been to limit and/or frustrate voting among those with limited resources. For example, many states have imposed some form of voter-identification laws, the most stringent of which require a government-issued card with a photograph and expiration date. Someone with a current state-issued driver’s license can easily meet this requirement, yet many students, elderly people, and low-income urban residents do not have one. Obtaining and renewing such an ID requires both time and money, thus becoming a poll tax by another name. Since the 2013 Supreme Court ruling, the only legal recourse is to challenge these new election laws in court, proving that they had a discriminatory impact after they went into effect, but that slow process leaves many eligible voters without protection in the meantime.58
This is exactly what happened in Texas in 2014. The Republican legislature in 2011 had passed Senate Bill 14, a highly restrictive voter ID law. A coalition of civil rights groups immediately sued the State of Texas. The case went to trial in 2014. The attorney general of Texas argued the law was necessary to prevent widespread voter-identification fraud. “Yet, out of ten million votes, he could produce only two documented cases of voter impersonation. On the other hand, it became clear that nearly six hundred thousand Texans, mainly poor, Black and Hispanic, didn’t have the newly required IDs and often faced financial and bureaucratic obstacles in obtaining them.”59 The district court judge ruled the law was intentionally discriminatory, and the State of Texas appealed, arguing that a change in the law so close to the November 2014 midterm election would be disruptive. On October 14, 2014, the Fifth Circuit judge sided with the State of Texas and granted its request to keep the voter ID law in place. The civil rights groups, now aided by the US Department of Justice, rushed the case to the Supreme Court, seeking to overturn the Fifth Circuit ruling before the November 2014 elect
ion. The Supreme Court decided in favor of Texas without commentary. But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a dissenting opinion, saying there was not much risk of disrupting the election process. All Texas needed to do was to go back to the voter-identification process it had been using for many years prior to the passing of Senate Bill 14. She concluded, “The greatest threat to public confidence in elections is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.”60 Yet in 2014 that is exactly what the US Supreme Court allowed to happen in Texas.61
The election of Barack Obama not only brought on intense voter-suppression activity, it also unleashed unprecedented attacks on the legitimacy of his presidency, particularly from political conservatives known as the Tea Party. “The fire that put many Tea Partiers into the streets in 2009 and into the voting booths in 2010 was fury at Obama himself—an opposition so deep it led many to firmly believe that Obama could not legitimately be president at all. An article of faith among Tea Partiers held that Obama was born outside the United States, and so was constitutionally barred from holding the presidency.”62 It is of course a fact that President Obama was born in Hawaii, as documented on his birth certificate. And his significant accomplishments in his first term as president of the United States earned him his reelection in 2012. Yet for some, the idea of a Black man in the White House was just too outside their frame of reference to accept.
To the extent that the election of Barack Obama disrupted the usual narrative of White victory, it represented unpredictability, and unpredictability creates anxiety. And during the last twenty years, we have seen the level of anxiety rise in our nation. It is not just the reality that a Black man could be the president of the United States that has threatened the status quo. It is also the collapse of the American economy in September 2008 and the financial threat that many felt in the waning months of George W. Bush’s presidency; it is the ruptured sense of security brought on by the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and other, more recent attacks around the world and on American soil; it is the slow recognition that the United States might not always hold its position of prominence in the world; and perhaps especially it is the fact that White people will soon be in the numerical minority in the US. Each of these societal changes represents a challenge to a set of assumptions, deeply held, by many in our nation, and anxiety—even fear—is the result.
And how do we deal with fear? As human beings, like other animals, typically we either withdraw or attack. In the aftermath of the 2008 election, we could see evidence of both patterns. Withdrawal takes the form of “hunkering down”—pulling in and pulling away from those we feel threatened by. When we are afraid, we quickly begin to categorize people by “who is for me” and “who is against me.” We start to think and act in terms of “us” and “them.” We withdraw into our circles of safety, and we attack those we believe are outside that circle and who pose a threat.
Such behavior can help explain why there has been a sharp rise in hate groups and in racially and ethnically motivated hate crimes since 2008. Indeed, according to a New York Times report, Stormfront.org, America’s most popular online White supremacist site, founded in 1995 by a former Klan leader, saw the biggest single increase in membership in its history on November 5, 2008, the day after President Obama was elected. Perhaps more surprising, 64 percent of the registered Stormfront users are under thirty.63
The Myth of the Color-Blind Millennial
One of the young users of such internet hate sites was twenty-one-year-old Dylann Roof, charged with the 2015 murder of nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, after joining them for Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. “You’ve raped our women, and you are taking over our country.… I have to do what I have to do,” he said before he started shooting, leaving one survivor to tell what happened.64 Following the horrific shooting, I read an NPR report by Gene Demby entitled “Dylann Roof and the Stubborn Myth of the Colorblind Millennial.” The story opens with these lines:
The young age of Dylann Roof, who’s charged with sitting alongside nine black churchgoers for an hour before standing up and shooting them dead, is sure to inspire some head-scratching in the wake of his attack. He’s 21, which means he’s a millennial, which means he’s not supposed to be racist—so the thinking stubbornly (if disingenuously) persists, despite ample research showing that it’s just not true.
Demby continues by citing the results of an MTV survey of young viewers regarding their racial attitudes. That 2014 survey of a nationally representative group of one thousand fourteen- to twenty-four-year-olds was the result of collaboration between MTV and David Binder Research to take an in-depth look at how the millennial generation thinks about issues related to bias.65 Among the key findings was a widespread belief (91 percent) in equality and the idea that everyone should be treated equally. A corollary to that belief is that one should not acknowledge racial differences, with 48 percent believing it is wrong to draw attention to someone’s race, even if you are doing so in a positive way. Seventy-two percent believe that their generation is more egalitarian than previous generations, and 58 percent believe that racism will become less and less of an issue as they take on leadership roles in our society. For 62 percent of them, electing a Black president in 2008 was evidence that race is no longer a barrier to opportunity for people of color.
White respondents and respondents of color, however, reported significantly different life experiences. Few White respondents, for example, reported feeling excluded at school or work because of race or ethnicity (10 percent) while 23 percent of respondents of color said they often felt excluded in those settings. Approximately one in eight (13 percent) White respondents said they had been treated differently by a teacher because of their race, compared to one in three (33 percent) respondents of color. Only 19 percent of Whites reported they were often asked about their ethnic background, while three times as many respondents of color (60 percent) indicated that this was a common experience for them. Only slightly more than one in four White respondents (28 percent) said they had been seriously affected by the cumulative effect of microaggressions (defined in the survey as brief and commonplace actions or words that are subtle examples of bias), compared to nearly half (49 percent) of respondents of color. Despite the fact that White respondents reported fewer negative experiences with bias and 41 percent agreed that “I think that I have more advantages than people of other races,” almost half (48 percent) also agreed with the survey statement, “Today, discrimination against White people has become as big a problem as discrimination against racial minority groups.” Only 27 percent of the respondents of color shared that perception. Almost twice as many White millennial respondents (41 percent) agreed that “the government pays too much attention to the problems of racial minority groups” than did respondents of color (21 percent).
Despite these highlighted differences in experience and attitude, almost all millennials surveyed (94 percent) reported having seen examples of bias (defined by the survey as “treating someone differently—and often unfairly—because they are a member of a particular group”). Yet just 20 percent indicated that they were comfortable having a conversation with someone about bias. Most (73 percent) think we should talk openly about bias and that doing so would lead to prejudice reduction, but like many adults, they are hesitant to speak up. For 79 percent of them, their biggest concern about addressing bias is the risk of creating a conflict or making the situation worse.66
For me, one of the main conclusions from this survey is that neither my baby boomer generation nor theirs is living in a postracial, color-blind society. Instead we may be living in a color-silent society, where we have learned to avoid talking about racial difference. But even if we refrain from mentioning race, the evidence is clear that we still notice racial categories and that our behaviors are guided by what we notice.
Recent survey studies show that only 10 to 15 percent of Americans openly express prejudice against Black Americans. Yet as we have detailed… there is well-documented evidence of widespread acts of discrimination against Black Americans that have put them at a disadvantage in just about every economically significant domain of life.… Implicit bias may operate outside of awareness, hidden from those who have it, but the discrimination that it produces can be clearly visible to researchers, and almost certainly also clearly visible to those who are disadvantaged by it. [italics mine]67
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Page 3