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black Republicans are caught in a double bind. Their real struggle is what do you do when you’re a political minority within your racial group, and a racial minority within your political group?

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In 1955, E. Frederic Morrow joined President Dwight D. Eisenhower's White House as its administrative officer for special projects. His job was to reach out to African-American voters who were leaving the Republican party that they'd once supported wholeheartedly.

Morrow, a black Republican, quickly found himself on an island. African Americans wanted a stronger stance on civil rights, especially as battles over integration became more heated. Eisenhower was a gradualist, who was concerned that a strong stance for racial equality would alienate the party's Southern wing.

Morrow found himself constantly juggling his racial and political concerns.

"I am an appointee, who feels loyalty to the administration, but I am also a Negro who feels very keenly ills that afflict my race in its efforts to secure all the privileges of citizenship that have been denied for three centuries," Morrow wrote in his diary.

Sixty-five years later, African American Republicans still find themselves on an island. But it is even smaller than Morrow's, says Leah Wright Rigueur, who teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and is the author of "The Loneliness of the Black Republican."

Wright Rigueur says black Republicans are caught in a double bind: "Their real struggle is what do you do when you're a political minority within your racial group, and a racial minority within your political group?" Wright Rigueur says.

Uncle Toms or outliers?

White Republicans like Pat Buchanan have applauded black Republicans for "leaving the plantation politics" of the Democratic Party." "This line of thinking stems from the simplistic belief that African Americans have been brainwashed into voting for the Democratic party," Wright Rigueur says.

African Americans critics, however, label black Republicans as accommodationist at best, and some stop just short of calling them "Uncle Toms." Wright Rigueur quotes a 1992 article in the Pittsburgh Courier that called black Republicans "a bogeyman dressed ... to cajole blacks into believing ... the Republican Party ... is a trumpet-tongued angel ... playing the jazz of economic salvation and social harmony."

Stereotypes aside, scholars say contemporary black Republicans are a diverse group.
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"Some of them ...have an ideological affinity to conservatism and evangelical Christianity," says Musa Al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Columbia University. "Ben Carson is pretty authentically... conservative ideologically."

But others, like Herman Cain, are drawn to the party's support for business and entrepreneurship. "You have others who support this other wing of conservatism (that is) about hard work and free market. "

Republicans like Cain and Carson aren't outliers when it comes to social and economic conservatism. For example, a 2019 survey from the Pew Research Centers found that 49 percent of Blacks oppose same-sex marriage compared to 32 percent of Whites. Last November, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies think tank polled 1,200 African Americans on their concerns going into the 2020 elections. It found a majority of respondents believe most people can get ahead if they work hard - a statement often repeated by Republicans opposed to social programs. In a similar survey of Democratic primary voters, a majority of respondents said hard work is no guarantee of success.

Republicans have been able to capitalize on shared positions. During the 2004 presidential election, George W. Bush got 16 percent of the African American vote in Ohio. Much of that support came from African American pastors, who urged parishioners to vote for a state constutional amendment banning same-sex marriage that was also on the ballot.

Republican Kenneth Blackwell was Ohio secretary of state during that time. He says he helped put the amendment on the ballot. Appealing to African Americans' social conservatism was an important strategy that ultimately benefited Bush.

"We would go into churches, black and white, and advocate for passage of this constitutional amendment ...The Apostolic and Pentecostal churches that normally sat out elections, with that issue being on the ballot came out and voted for the candidate that was for the motion," he says.

And Blackwell, who is campaigning for Donald Trump's re-election, predicts 12 percent of African American voters will help put the president back in office. Trump received 8 percent of the African American vote in 2016.

"The black community is not homogenous. There is diversity of political thought. I think that where (Trump) is making advances is with young black males. I think the work we've been doing for years on criminal justice reform... that means something. Tapping into the entrepreneurial spirit means something."

Votes don't tell the whole story

However, claiming 12 percent of Black votes wouldn't necessarily indicate African Americans are becoming more sympathetic to the GOP. Wright Rigueur says Republicans routinely win 8% to 15% of African American votes. That's a far cry from 1956, when 39% of black voters backed Eisenhower.

She agrees with Blackwell that African Americans espouse conservative social values. When it comes to political support, though, they look for something else.

"At the end of the day, black voters are constantly seeking to understand whether or not a political individual is working in the best interests of the community," Wright Rigueur says.

That insistence was why African Americans pledged allegiance to Republicans during the first half of the 20th century, and abandoned it during the latter half.

For decades African Americans faithfully voted Republican. Some of the loyalty came from the party's association with Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. During Reconstruction after the Civil War, state and federal office holders like U.S. Sens. Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce. both of Mississippi, were Republicans.

When Jim Crow all but eliminated the right of blacks to vote in the South, Northern blacks especially clung to the Republican party.

"The Republican Party was the party of Lincoln. It was the party that emancipated the slaves," Al-Gharbi says. "From Lincoln through the mid-20th century, the Republican Party was the more reliable party for civil rights and civil liberties."

But African Americans began to drift away during the Depression. In 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat, got 71 percent of black votes. That was a major migration for voters who saw the party as the stronghold of segregationists who oppressed them.

Wright Rigueur writes Northern blacks benefited from New Deal programs such as the Work Progress Administration and Federal Emergency Relief Assistance. In addition, Eleanor Roosevelt's activism for civil rights convinced black voters to switch parties.

But the shift didn't mean blacks had completely left the Republican Party; instead voters weighed each group carefully. In 1956, Eisenhower got black support because of Southern Democrats opposition to the Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ruling in 1954, which said that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

"Eisenhower was able to get a strong number of the black votes because black voters are predominantly Northern voters and they are punishing the Democratic Party for allowing racist to remain within their mix.," Wright Rigueur says.

She says black voters flowed between both parties until the early 1960s, when the parties begin to forge identities around civil rights and economics. When black voters saw parties converging on civil rights, they looked to the parties' stances on economics.

"By 1961, most black voters are saying the same thing as white voters, which is the Democratic Party is the party of the working man," she says.

A shift in the '60s

But the 1964 presidential race that shaped the modern-day Republican Party also sent African Americans to Democrats.

Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the Senate. He lost the election, but his support for states' rights - the term was a rallying cry for segregationists opposed to federal intervention - and anti-communism helped the party break the Democratic stranglehold on the South.

In 1968 - with an eye on George Wallace's third party run - Nixon added a racial component to his message - against the wishes of liberal Republican stalwarts like former Michigan governor George Romney and former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller - and won the election.

As the Republican Party became more conservative, the differences between it and the Democrats became more stark.

"Today, there's almost no muddiness whatsoever, when it comes to questions of economics, and questions of race. Black folks are very, very clear about how they view the Democratic Party and how they view the Republican Party," says Wright Rigueur.
Afi Scruggs is an award-winning multi-platform freelancer based in Cleveland.
But that doesn't mean another shift couldn't occur, she says. Securing African American loyalty will require more than appeals to fight racism.

"That is no longer enough," says Wright Rigueur. "Black voters have always been sophisticated and nuanced. They've always been multi-issue voters."

Which means it's the multi-issue candidate, Republican or Democrat, who has the better chance with blacks come Election Day.

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In a world full of African American Democrats, black Republicans stand alone

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In 1955, E. Frederic Morrow joined President Dwight D. Eisenhower's White House as its administrative officer for special projects. His job was to reach out to African-American voters who were leaving the Republican party that they'd once supported wholeheartedly. Morrow, a black Republican, quickly found himself on an island.

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Understanding why African Americans are such steadfast supporters of the Democratic Party is not as straightforward as it seems. Although committed to the Democratic Party, African Americans are actually one of the most conservative blocs of Democratic supporters.

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African Americans are Democrats. Since 1968 no Republican presidential candidate has received more than 13% of the African American vote and surveys of African Americans regularly show that upwards of 80% of African Americans self-identify as Democrats. However, understanding why African Americans…

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Democrats and Republicans have very different views about how much discrimination various demographic groups face in American society. That disagreement underlies virtually everything happening in American politics today, from the discussions about race and policing in the wake of George’s Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police to the 2020 presidential election.

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Democrats and Republicans have very different views about how much discrimination various demographic groups face in American society. That disagreement underlies virtually everything happening in American politics today, from the discussions about race and policing in the wake of George's Floyd's killing by Minneapolis police to the 2020 presidential election.

We wrote about these differing perceptions near the start of President Trump's term in 2017. Those perceptions have not changed that much, but we felt like these questions of discrimination are more relevant than ever, with Trump running for a second term and the country rethinking its racial policies in the wake of Floyd's death.

Here are some recent findings about perceptions of discrimination and perceptions of various groups in American society, based on recent polling from the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape project. The survey we relied on was administered after Floyd's death, from May 28 to June 3, but previous sets of polls from Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape had similar results - except for shifts in responses to questions about black people and policing, as we explain below.

Perceptions of discrimination differ across party

An overwhelming majority of Democrats thought black and Muslim Americans face "a great deal" or "a lot" of discrimination in America today, as opposed to "a moderate amount," "little" or "none at all." Perceptions of discrimination against black people have surged among all groups, including Republicans, in the wake of Floyd's death. But the vast majority of Democrats thought that black people in America faced high levels of discrimination even before Floyd's death. About half of Democrats also thought women face a lot of discrimination.

Very few Democrats thought that Christians, men or white people face high levels of discrimination in America.

In contrast, only about half of Republicans thought that black people and Muslims face high levels of discrimination, and only about a quarter thought that women do. The majority of Republicans thought those groups face "a moderate amount," "little" or "no" discrimination at all.

Who faces discrimination?

Percentage of respondents who said each group experiences "a great deal" or "a lot" of discrimination, by party identification

Survey conducted from May 28 to June 3. "Democrats" and "Republicans" refer to self-identified Democrats and self-identified Republicans.

Source: Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape

Generally, Republicans were less inclined to say that any group in America faces high levels of discrimination, at least according to this polling. But significantly more Republicans than Democrats thought there is discrimination against Christians and white people.

These views of discrimination line up closely with partisanship, among both voters and elected officials. Among voters, black Americans, Muslims and women are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates; Christians, men and white Americans are more likely to vote for Republicans.
[Related: Republicans And Democrats Increasingly Agree On The Protests ... But Not Why People Are Protesting]
At the political elite level, former President Obama's administration took a number of steps to reverse discrimination against black Americans and women. The Trump administration reversed some of the Obama policies aimed at blacks in particular, while adopting policies that the administration said created a more level playing field for Christians, men and native-born Americans, who are more likely than immigrants to be white.

There are similar numbers of people in both parties who thought that Jewish Americans face high levels of discrimination. What explains that? Well, Jewish Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates. But Trump has cast himself as a defender of Jewish people in America and particularly in Israel, which may explain why a lot of Republicans also viewed Jewish Americans as facing high levels of discrimination.

In other words, it's likely that voters would see discrimination through partisan lenses anyway, but decisions by leading politicians are probably reinforcing those dynamics. In fact, partisans shift their support on policies to align with their party's leaders, and not the other way around.

There are partisan gaps in favorability

To get another assessment of feelings about different groups and how partisanship might shape those feelings, we looked at measures of favorability, where people are asked, "Do you have a very or somewhat favorable or very or somewhat unfavorable view of group X?" Although questions about group favorability are fraught because of " social desirability bias" - basically, even if someone feels intensely negative feelings towards, say, black or white people, they might not admit it to a pollster - we can still learn something by analyzing responses. We focused here on "very" and "somewhat" unfavorable views because we are assuming you must really dislike a group to admit this on a survey.

Nearly half of Democrats expressed unfavorable views about police and evangelicals. Unfavorable views of the police have substantially increased from polling before Floyd's death, but Democrats' unfavorable views of evangelicals were already very high and remain so. About a quarter of Democrats said they had unfavorable views of white Americans; a quarter said the same of undocumented immigrants, even though the Democratic Party is increasingly supportive of immigration and immigrants.

(Un)favorability is partisan

Percentage of respondents who have a unfavorable impression of each group, by party identification

Survey conducted from May 28 to June 3. "Democrats" and "Republicans" refer to self-identified Democrats and self-identified Republicans.

Source: Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape

In contrast, large shares of Republicans expressed unfavorable views of undocumented immigrants, LGBT Americans and Muslims. More than 20 percent of Republicans said that they had unfavorable views of black Americans and police, with the latter group having increased in unfavorability substantially since Floyd's death.

Younger and older Republicans diverge

On both perceptions of discrimination and favorability measures, Americans' views seem to be shaped more by partisanship than age, race or gender. So, Republicans - men and women - generally see discrimination in similar ways and view the same groups favorably or unfavorably. So do black and white Democrats. A helpful illustration of the partisan dynamics is that a greater share of Democratic men (44 percent) than Republican women (28 percent) thought that women in the U.S. face high levels of discrimination.

But there is a big GOP split on age. Republicans under the age of 45 were more likely to say that they saw high levels of discrimination than those over 45. And that cuts across the traditional divisions - younger Republicans saw more discrimination than older Republicans against blacks (a more Democratic group) and against whites (a more Republican group). In the wake of Floyd's death, a clear majority of Republicans under 45 thought there was a lot of discrimination in America against black people. The over-45 GOP cohort did not share that view.

Older Republicans were much more likely than younger Republicans to say that they had negative views of undocumented immigrants and Muslims.

More of the younger Republicans see discrimination

Percentage of respondents who said each group experiences "a great deal" or "a lot" of discrimination, by age category

Survey conducted from May 28 to June 3.

Source: Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape

There were also some notable differences among Democrats. For example, Democrats under 45 were significantly more likely than those over 45 to say they had an unfavorable view of the police (54 percent compared to 38 percent). Black Democrats were more likely than white Democrats to have unfavorable views of the police (58 percent to 41 percent). Black and Hispanic Democrats were about twice as likely as white Democrats to view LGBT Americans unfavorably, and about 30 percent of both groups expressed unfavorable views of white Americans. And white Democrats, in particular, viewed evangelicals unfavorably (50 percent).

We should be careful not to overstate these identity-based divides. There are plenty of women in the Republican Party. There are plenty of non-religious Republicans. There are plenty of Christian Democrats. Also, it's not that the two parties are on different planets in terms of perceptions of discrimination - Republicans and Democrats agree that Muslims face more discrimination than Christians, and that black people face more discrimination than white people. Most Republicans and Democrats view Asian, black, Latino and white people favorably. (Or at least feel compelled to say so in a survey.)

But this also isn't a "both sides" situation - Democratic perceptions of discrimination line up more with the evidence than Republican perceptions. No candidate has recently run for president with a plan for banning Christians from entering the U.S. And by most measures, whatever discrimination they might face, Christians, men and white people remain fairly powerful in American society today, certainly more so than black people, Muslims and women.
[Related: Do You Know How Divided White And Black Americans Are On Racism?]
This data is important because it illustrates a serious identity-based disconnect at the heart of American politics. When social identities are threatened (real or imagined threats, often made salient by group leaders), individuals retreat to the safety of their in-groups, and react defensively with more negative feelings toward outside groups. And given the effectiveness of in-group retreating for political outcomes, there is little chance of this changing anytime soon, at least from political leaders who stand to gain the most from these identity-based fights.

The activation of social identities can have positive democratic outcomes, too. For instance, Trump's anti-Latino rhetoric led to increased political activity from Latinos with a stronger racial identity. And as we wrote about last week, strong racial identity among black Americans leads to collective voting to defend group interests. Moreover, if a sense of shared identity can be triggered, partisans can come together to prioritize national interests.

But so long as the parties remain largely distinct in terms of the group identities of their members - and how those members feel about other groups - ingroup and outgroup conflict is easily activated.

CORRECTION (June 17, 2020, 3:52 p.m.): An earlier version of a footnote in this article incorrectly said that the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape survey did not ask respondents whether Asians faced discrimination. Respondents were, in fact, asked whether Asians faced discrimination.

FiveThirtyEight Podcast: Views of Black Lives Matter have shifted. What happens next?

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There's A Huge Gap In How Republicans And Democrats See Discrimination

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Democrats and Republicans have very different views about how much discrimination various demographic groups face in American society. That disagreement underlies virtually everything happening in American politics today, from the discussions about race and policing in the wake of George's Floyd's killing by Minneapolis police to the 2020 presidential election.

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Many Americans changed their perceptions of discrimination and racism after Barack Obama became the nation’s first black president. This belief that racial biases had softened, however, did not translate to positive feelings about policies that address racial disparities

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ANN ARBOR, Mich.-Many Americans changed their perceptions of discrimination and racism after Barack Obama became the nation's first black president. This belief that racial biases had softened, however, did not translate to positive feelings about policies that address racial disparities, according to a new University of Michigan study. In fact, opposition to affirmative action and immigration may have increased since 2008. "When racial progress is made, and perceived, by many Americans from a variety of racial backgrounds, it may seem counterintuitive that opposition to affirmative action would increase," said Nicholas Valentino, an associate professor of communication studies and political science.

He wrote the study with Ted Brader, a research assistant professor at the U-M Center for Political Studies.

"The answer may be simple: If the playing field is perceived to be more balanced than before, then the need for policies to address inequality is lessened," Valentino said.

Perceptions of discrimination could play a factor in how some vote in next year's presidential election.

"It is possible that these perceptions could be used by both parties to mobilize their base voters," he said.

The survey involved telephone interviews before and after the 2008 presidential elections. The pre-election interviews were completed by 617 respondents and 82 percent of these completed the post-election survey. They were asked how much discrimination they thought blacks faced in America.

Prior to the election, 61 percent said there was "a lot" or "some" discrimination against blacks, but only 50 percent endorsed that view after the election. More than one in four people revised their estimate of racial discrimination downward immediately after the election.

Significant declines in perceived discrimination occurred in all subgroups, including blacks, whites, men, women, the rich and the poor.

Declines in perceived racism were significantly larger among conservatives, perhaps because this group opposed race-related policies to begin with.

Anxiety before the election-regardless of party affiliation or ideology-was linked to large drops in perceived discrimination as the result of Obama's victory, Valentino said.

"Anxiety may trigger a more open-minded approach to new information, and thus facilitate belief change," he said.

Other emotions such as anger, enthusiasm and sadness before the election did not seem to affect the size of the change in perceived discrimination.

"These results suggest that voters used Obama's election as a sign that things have improved for blacks even more than they previously believed. They think the playing field is more balanced," he said. "As a result, and regardless of the reality, policies designed to improve equality of opportunity such as affirmative action are seen as less necessary."

The findings appear in this month's Public Opinion Quarterly.

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Obama's election reduced perceptions of racism, but boosted opposition to race-related policies

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ANN ARBOR, Mich.-Many Americans changed their perceptions of discrimination and racism after Barack Obama became the nation's first black president. This belief that racial biases had softened, however, did not translate to positive feelings about policies that address racial disparities, accord

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As a bi-racial, multi-ethnic woman, Kamala Harris has broken down many barriers in her political career. But after her latest election victory, the US vice president-elect will need to tackle the country’s entrenched racial divides

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As a bi-racial, multi-ethnic woman, Kamala Harris has broken down many barriers in her political career. But after her latest election victory, the US vice president-elect will need to tackle the country's entrenched racial divides as her party scrambles to address some of the darker lessons of the 2020 election results.

Before a sea of cheering, weeping supporters, many of them waving flags from the tops of cars as they juggled jubilation with coronavirus-distancing measures, Kamala Harris delivered a victory speech on Saturday night like no other.

Acknowledging her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan - who, she reminded the nation, "came here from India at the age of 19" - Harris noted that Gopalan "maybe didn't quite imagine this moment".

Dressed in a white suit - the colour of the women's suffragette movement - the US vice president-elect proceeded to unpack the historical import of the "moment".

Her mother, Harris noted, "believed so deeply in an America where a moment like this is possible. And so, I am thinking about her and about the generations of women, Black women, Asian, White, Latina, Native American women, who throughout our nation's history, have paved the way for this moment tonight", she declared above the roar at the Delaware Chase Convention Centre parking lot.

On social media, photographs of little Black girls dressed in "My VP Looks Like Me" T-shirts went viral as online shopping sites offered an array of Kamala Harris celebratory attire in various shapes and sizes.

Born to a Jamaican immigrant father and Indian Tamil mother who met during the 1960s civil rights struggle in California, Harris represents multiple minority identities that are a checklist of American diversity today. America's first female vice president-elect is also the first Black, South Asian and Caribbean person to hold the office. Her husband, Douglas Emhoff, is also set to become the first "second gentleman" and the first Jewish spouse of a US vice president - or president, for that matter.

Identity is back in the halls of power as a celebration of diversity, an acknowledgment of the progress the US has made so far, as well as the challenges that still lie ahead. After four years under Donald Trump, a president who peddled in racially incendiary rhetoric, stoking divisions and encouraging White supremacist groups, the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris win was greeted with palpable relief among people of colour.

CNN political correspondent Van Jones expressed the collective sense of deliverance minutes after the TV network called the election, when the 52-year-old Black commentator paused, collected his thoughts, and ventured, "Well, it's easier to be a parent this morning. It's easier to be a Dad this morning." Choking back tears, Jones evoked Minneapolis resident George Floyd's dying words, which became a rallying cry at Black Lives Matter protests: "This is vindication for a lot of people who really have suffered. 'I can't breathe.' That was not just George Floyd. There were a lot of people who felt like they couldn't breathe."

Vindication was in the air Saturday night as Americans took to the streets, banging pots and dancing at impromptu neighbourhood parties in several cities and towns. "Black people are certainly relieved at the outcome of the election because Donald Trump was an obvious racist and was obviously seeking to elicit the support of racists in the US," said Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School and author of the award-winning book "Race, Crime, and The Law", in an interview with FRANCE 24.

But Kennedy - like most Black scholars, activists and community leaders - does not mistake relief for reassurance.

Over 74 million Americans voted for Biden, more than any other presidential candidate in history. But Trump's score of more than 70 million votes - up from 63 million in 2016 - highlights the unsettling reality that the Republican president's supporters are, at best, willing to turn a blind eye to his racism, at worst, supportive of his race-baiting.

"It's sobering to note that 70 million, nearly half of the electorate, supported Donald Trump," said Kennedy. "That's deeply, deeply disturbing. Trump is ousted, but Trumpism is very much a part of the American political landscape going forward."
Trumpism trumps 'the blue wave'
Trumpism, unlike other "-isms" in political theory, is an ideology that's hard to define primarily due to the lack of philosophical consistency of its founder and ideologues. It's broadly viewed as a version of right-wing conservative populism that, according to Peter J. Katzenstein, professor of international studies at Cornell University, rests on three pillars: nationalism, religion and race.

A week after Election Day, Democrats and their supporters are confronting the bitter reality that the extraordinary voter mobilisation and turnout for the 2020 polls failed to deliver a decisive repudiation of a populist movement that has invigourated the Republican Party and its base.

The " blue wave " that pollsters predicted would give Democrats control of the Senate and extend their gains in the House of Representatives did not materialise. The Democrats' Senate majority dream now depends on two tight run-offs in Georgia while their majority in the House has narrowed.

As a longtime senator, Biden is keenly aware of the power of the US Congress, particularly the Senate, to hobble presidential policy initiatives. The 77-year-old Democratic politician's message on the campaign trail and during his victory lap has consistently been a pledge to serve as "uniter-in-chief" by bringing together a bitterly divided nation.

But as a former vice president to Barack Obama, Biden has already confronted the partisan limits of that message inside the Beltway.
Obama 'got kicked in the mouth and then we got Donald Trump'
On the 2008 campaign trail, Obama electrified his supporters - and the world - with his message of hope in a post-racial nation.

But when America's first Black president entered the White House, his message of reconciliation had no takers in Congress, particularly with Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader at that time, who vowed to obstruct Obama's initiatives. McConnell is currently the Senate majority leader. Last week, the 78-year-old senator from Kentucky beat his Democratic rival, former US Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath, to win a seventh term.

Obama's presidency galvanised the White far-right base, with conservative talk show hosts hurling racist invective, including "birther" conspiracies that questioned, without evidence, Obama's birth certificate. One of the most enthusiastic birthers was Trump, a New York businessman with no political experience in Republican Party ranks.

Through it all, Obama played it cool. Or as his wife, Michelle Obama, put it, "When they go low, we go high."

Some Black academics, such as Michael Eric Dyson of Georgetown University, have questioned whether Obama's "racial optimism" failed to address the country's enduring, systemic racism.

But Kennedy believes it was too heavy a burden to be handled by one man, even if he was president of the United States of America. "The fact is, I really respect Barack Obama a whole lot," said Kennedy. "He was a decent man, he held a hand out, he preached and preached and preached the gospel of reconciliation, the gospel of racial reconciliation, the gospel of regional reconciliation, the gospel of reconciliation with respect to party politics. The man tried and tried and tried, and what did he get? He got kicked in the mouth and then we got Donald Trump."

During his second term, Obama did address racist policing, particularly after the Black Lives Matter protests erupted in the aftermath of the 2013 acquittal of a White man, George Zimmerman, in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager.

Two years later, the country's first "post-racial" president acknowledged the legacy of the African American community's bloody history of slavery and struggle for civil rights in a Southern Black church. During a searing eulogy for a Charleston pastor and eight parishioners who were gunned down in a South Carolina church by a White supremacist, the 44th president of the United States appeared to address the weight of history when he broke into an impromptu rendition of "Amazing Grace", joined by a 5,000-strong audience.

"Obama was in an almost impossible position as the country's first Black president. He had the double burden of having to prove himself as an African American leader while at the same time having to demonstrate to Whites that he was an American president, not a 'Black president'," said Adam Shatz, a New York-based contributing editor at the London Review of Books who has written extensively on race in America, in an interview with FRANCE 24.

"I wouldn't blame Obama for failing to achieve a post-racial America. That's not a job for one person, no matter how powerful, and Obama was under no illusion that racism would magically disappear thanks to his leadership. Post-racialism wasn't so much a policy aim as an aspiration in the tradition of Martin Luther King's 'judge not by the colour of the skin, but content of the character'," said Shatz, referring to the civil rights leader's 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech.
Divisions in Democratic ranks
Following the Trump presidency and his surprisingly strong showing in the polls, the dream has been left even further behind. Meanwhile, Democrats are divided on how to address the persistent issue of socio-economic inequalities.

Only a few hours after Biden was declared the winner of the presidential race, divisions between progressives and moderates within the Democratic Party - which remained united in the lead-up to the vote - spilled out in public.

In an interview with the New York Times, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blasted moderate Democrats who blamed the party's farther-left factions for losing them important seats in the House.

Ocasio-Cortez - or "AOC" as she's commonly known - slammed the "finger-pointing that this was progressives' fault and that this was the fault of the Movement for Black Lives". The 31-year-old New York politician noted that, "We know that race is a problem, and avoiding it is not going to solve any electoral issues. We have to actively disarm the potent influence of racism at the polls."

AOC is a member of "the Squad", an informal group of Democratic congresswomen that includes Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. All four women of colour won reelection this year to a second term in the House.

Responding to AOC's criticisms, South Carolina Representative Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip, quipped that, "Sometimes I have real problems trying to figure out what 'progressive' means."

Clyburn, an 80-year-old African American community leader who has served in Congress for 27 years, is credited with helping Biden secure the Democratic Party nomination earlier this year when the race was crowded with popular progressives, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Clyburn endorsed Biden before the South Carolina primary and the state's Black voters - constituting 56 percent of South Carolina Democratic primary voters - overwhelmingly voted for Biden. With the critical Black vote swinging decisively in Biden's favour, other Democratic contenders began pulling out of the race and it wasn't long before the former vice president was declared the party's 2020 presidential candidate.

Dubbed the "kingmaker", Clyburn said that if Biden got the party's candidacy, he should select a Black woman as his running mate.

"I say a Black woman as opposed to a minority," Clyburn told The Washington Post earlier this year. "It needs to be a Black woman. Biden is winning Black women overwhelmingly."
'The target of a lot of animus'
Black women have been a bedrock of Democratic party support, with 91 percent of the demographic voting for the Biden-Harris ticket, the highest percentage of any racial group, according to exit poll data.

While White voters were Trump's single largest voting bloc, exit polls showed Republicans had managed to lure away a portion of the Black male vote. In 2008, for instance, 95 percent of Black men voted for Obama; in 2016, this fell to 82 percent Black male votes for Hillary Clinton. Early exit poll data from the 2020 elections showed 80 percent of Black men voted for Biden.

Before her successful 2016 Senate election, Harris served as California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney, positions in which the self-confessed "top cop" took some tough law-and-order decisions that affected the biggest victims of bias in the US criminal justice system: Black men.

Her subsequent record in the Senate, notably in pushing back against Trump's immigration policies and cosponsoring police reform legislation, earned her credit for her capacity to tackle law-and-order issues from the inside. But the daughter of immigrant academics has arguably not been embraced as warmly by the Black brotherhood as by the sisterhood that has championed her glass ceiling-busting record.

In a Washington Post column, " America calls on Kamala Harris - and Black women - to clean up its mess ", Karen Attiah, the daily's global opinions editor, warned of the racist, patriarchal backlash America's first female vice president is likely to face. "As much as Harris's victory is a moment for celebration, as a Black woman, I can't help but brace myself. Black women know the ugliness that America is capable of," wrote Attiah.

Harris's multiple ethnicities make her a prime target for supporters of Trumpism, fears Kennedy. "I have no doubt that in the weeks and months and years to come, we will see the other side of America," said Kennedy. "We will see sexism - you don't think there will be resentment and an aggressive voicing of sexism with respect to that part of her identity? You don't think racism will jump out? You don't think anti-immigrant attitudes will jump out? She will be the target of a lot of animus going forward."

The former California top cop, whose single Tamil Brahmin mother brought her up to confront challenges fearlessly, is in a good position to face down an oncoming backlash. For the young women and girls proudly wearing "My VP Looks Like Me" T-shirts, the issue in the future may not be how they look but whether they have their VP's resilience to take on a violently divided America.

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VP-elect Kamala Harris ticks many firsts, but the old problem of racism still lurks

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As a bi-racial, multi-ethnic woman, Kamala Harris has broken down many barriers in her political career. But after her latest election victory, the US vice president-elect will need to tackle the country's entrenched racial divides as her party scrambles to address some of the darker lessons of the 2020 election results.

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Distinctions in tone, emphasis and perception between the nation’s first Black president and its first Black vice president are not easy to draw. Obama spoke personally and poignantly about the nation’s troubled racial history — including in a 2008 Philadelphia speech sparked by controversy over his pastor — and Harris similarly has been able to interpret her personal encounters with the country’s racial divide for non-Black audiences.

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Barack Obama campaigned for president in 2008 with explicit advice from his inner circle to downplay "any topic that might be labeled racial grievance" or to "do anything that would box me in as 'the Black candidate,'" he wrote in his recent memoir.

Just over a dozen years later, Vice President Kamala Harris was ushered into the White House by the drumline of historically Black Howard University, her alma mater, to be the second in command of an administration that has made closing the racial wealth gap one of four policy "pillars."

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Distinctions in tone, emphasis and perception between the nation's first Black president and its first Black vice president are not easy to draw. Obama spoke personally and poignantly about the nation's troubled racial history - including in a 2008 Philadelphia speech sparked by controversy over his pastor - and Harris similarly has been able to interpret her personal encounters with the country's racial divide for non-Black audiences.

Yet many see Harris as willing to lean harder into her public identity as a Black woman and to place societal racial gaps higher on her agenda. That is widely interpreted as an important marker in the country's movement, spurred by a Trump presidency that placed white racial grievance at its center, by a summer of nationwide protests over the abuse of Black people in the criminal justice system and by a Capitol siege this month in which Trump supporters waving Confederate flags sought to overturn Joe Biden's election.

"Both of them are candidates that act as translators on race," said Arisha Hatch, vice president and chief of campaigns at Color of Change, a progressive political group that focuses on civil rights. "We're just in a different place as a country."

In the wake of police shootings of Black people caught on video, Americans of all races increasingly cite racial equity as a top issue in opinion polls. The Democratic Party has recognized that it would not have won the presidency, or the pair of crucial Senate run-offs in Georgia this month that gave it control of Congress, were it not for high turnout among Black voters, Black women in particular.

"Politicians, or leaders, tend to follow the voters," said Cornell Belcher, a pollster for Obama and author of "A Black Man in the White House: Barack Obama and the Triggering of America's Racial-Aversion Crisis."

"In 2008, we didn't have hundreds of thousands of our young people on the street protesting racism and the sort of systemic racial issues that you see with the criminal justice system," he said. Those issues were propelled to the "front and center," polls showed, among voters who chose Biden and Harris.

The two Democrats have a friendship that began when Harris was district attorney of San Francisco and a prominent Obama supporter early on, when his presidential bid was seen as unlikely. She traveled to Springfield, Ill., in February 2007 for his campaign launch. Obama drew criticism in 2013 for joking at an event that Harris "happens to be, by far, the best-looking attorney general in the country." The controversy, though mild, pointed to the different set of challenges Harris faces as a woman in politics.

They spoke several times during the 2020 Democratic primary and general election campaigns, according to advisors, including when Harris was still a presidential candidate, and Obama, while neutral, was widely believed to favor Biden. An Obama aide said the former president has never explicitly advised Harris on how to address race on the political stage.

Obama did not shy from addressing the country's history of racism. But he presented himself as a bridge-builder and emphasized that he was raised by white grandparents in an America that had begun the process of overcoming its fraught history on race. He persuaded doubters during the 2008 Democratic nomination contest, including Black voters, that he could win a general election. He coolly dismissed overtly racist lies promoted by Trump that he was not American and stereotypical slurs from others that his wife Michelle was an "angry" Black woman.

"The feeling that we had then was that the historical nature of his candidacy was obvious, that we did not want [him] to get pigeonholed as a candidate who was running to be the first Black president," said David Axelrod, his chief political advisor. "We wanted him to be a candidate who was running for president who was Black, which was different."

While recognizing the importance of Rep. Shirley Chisholm's 1972 campaign as the first Black and woman seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, and of civil-rights leader Jesse Jackson's runs in 1984 and 1988, the members of the Obama team did not want their candidate to be viewed as "making a statement" in a way that lowered expectations that he could win, Axelrod said.

Valerie Jarrett, a close advisor and friend throughout Obama's political career, said, "We never used the words 'racial grievance.'" She went on, "I would describe it as sensitivity that, in order to get elected ... to govern effectively, the country needs to see that you will govern for the entire country."

Obama spoke out about racism on many occasions during his presidency, though mainly when events all but demanded that the first Black president do so. He invoked his young self and his young daughters when an unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin, was shot dead in 2012 in Florida by a self-styled neighborhood watchman and delivered a stirring eulogy in 2015 for the nine people killed in a Black church in Charleston, S.C., by a white supremacist. His Justice Department made efforts to change policing practices, including establishing a task force that wrote a guidebook for police departments - initiatives that were abandoned by the Trump administration.

Advisors were cautious about drawing Obama into too many such discussions. They expressed frustration in 2009 when his remarks promoting his signature healthcare plan, the Affordable Care Act, were ignored in the controversy over his comment that police acted "stupidly" in arresting a Black Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., as he tried to enter his home.

Jarrett said she not only worried that Obama would lose momentum for the bill but was annoyed that a single sentence at the end of a news conference appeared to hurt his standing among white voters in polls.

"I assure you, if Vice President Biden had said the same thing, the reaction would be very different," she said.

But Jarrett said she also believes Obama's tenure helped erode the double standard she saw and gave both Biden and Harris unprecedented opportunity to discuss race more frankly.

"In the current climate, people would not be surprised by either a President Biden or a Vice President Harris making a similar comment," Jarrett said. "We are now talking about that in a way people were not a decade ago. ... In a sense, it's progress."

Donna Brazile - who was the first Black woman to lead a major party's presidential campaign, when she managed former Vice President Al Gore's bid in 2000 - said it's too much to expect any politician to fix systemic problems that permeate the culture, the economy and the criminal justice system. Asking Black Americans to fix racism, she said, is like telling them to solve global warming, just because the floods hit the low-lying areas first.

"We have to dispense with the notion that Black people can uproot systemic racism in the United States of America," she said. "We don't have the power to do that. We don't control the institutions. We're not in charge."

Harris, whose Black father emigrated from Jamaica, wrote in her memoir that her Indian-born mother, who had custody of Harris and her sister, Maya, when the parents separated, "understood very well that she was raising two black daughters." She wanted to make sure "we would grow into confident, proud black women."

Covering Kamala Harris

Harris came of age at Howard University, the preeminent historically Black university, and cites her membership in Alpha Kappa Alpha, a Black sorority, as formative. Though she spent much of her adult life in San Francisco and entered politics there as the district attorney, she launched her presidential campaign in Oakland, with a jazz-funk band playing 1970s protest music, and based it in Baltimore, two cities known as Black cultural and political centers.

Harris had a mixed record on police reform during her years as a prosecutor and attorney general, and as a presidential candidate, she was forced on the defensive for her tough-on-crime stands. For example, she'd rejected demands for investigations into a pair of police shootings of Black men in 2014 and 2015.

She has since positioned herself as a leader in rooting out racial bias in policing and opposing cash-bail laws. She spoke out forcefully after the videotaped death of George Floyd during an arrest last May jump-started a summer of nationwide protests for racial justice.

She and Biden remain under pressure, however, to push harder on such issues - and certainly more forcefully than prior Democratic administrations, including Obama's. Many young activists who have moved to the forefront of civil rights advocacy over the last decade, while frustrated that Obama did not make more strides, recognize that even many Black voters were reluctant to pressure him because of the obstacles he faced as the first Black president.

"It was actually harder as an accountability organization to demand things," said Hatch, the activist at Color of Change. "The Biden-Harris administration doesn't actually have that sort of veil of immunity from the Black community, and I think we expect to see promises fulfilled."

Alicia Garza, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter who now leads the advocacy groups Black Futures Lab and Black to the Future Action Fund, said Harris uses the language of the movement to talk about racism as a structural problem. Obama and Biden, she said, were more likely to describe racial divisions as an issue of individuals failing to understand each other.

For example, Obama held a "beer summit" with Harvard's Gates and the white police officer who mistakenly arrested him, attempting to bridge that gap in understanding. Biden, as a presidential candidate, told a story of his reconciliation as a young man with a Black antagonist nicknamed "Corn Pop."

Harris, Garza said, understands racism as a problem that "permeates every aspect of our lives" and is not the result of a few white nationalists and "fanatics." But she worries that the Biden administration may lose its resolve to tackle systemic racism as other crises take precedence.

"I think the question is not so much what her perspective on the question will be," Garza said. It is, she went on, "What power does she have to address it?"

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For Black pioneers Harris and Obama, different times mean different approaches on race

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Barack Obama campaigned for president in 2008 with explicit advice from his inner circle to downplay "any topic that might be labeled racial grievance" or to "do anything that would box me in as 'the Black candidate,'" he wrote in his recent memoir.

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Floyd was one of approximately 1,100 people killed annually by police use of force in the United States in recent years, according to data compiled by Fatal Encounters, a nonprofit that tracks police-involved deaths since 2000. A disproportionate number of the people killed, like Floyd, are African American.

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The 1960s Black Power activist formerly known as H. Rap Brown once said that "violence is as American as cherry pie."

Over the last two weeks, more than a thousand protests-most of them peaceful, though some devolved into violence-have swept across America caused by outrage over the death of George Floyd, recorded as a Minneapolis police officer pressed a knee to his neck for nearly nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed and lying face down. Floyd was one of approximately 1,100 people killed annually by police use of force in the United States in recent years, according to data compiled by Fatal Encounters, a nonprofit that tracks police-involved deaths since 2000. A disproportionate number of the people killed, like Floyd, are African American.

Casting their eyes to the past, observers search for comparisons to today's uprisings in the chaos of 1968. But the roots of 2020's events go far deeper into the last hundred years of American history, which were punctuated by race riots, massacres, and clashes between the police and African Americans. Starting in 1919, three major waves of nationwide uprisings in the20th century shed light on how the fight for racial equality has grown, how it's changed, and what has stayed the same.

Red Summer

The first wave came in the early 20th century, culminating in the so-called Red Summer of 1919, when the country was recovering from World War I, bitterly divided by racial and gender tensions and anti-immigration fervor, and ravaged by the deadly Spanish flu epidemic. That year, dozens of violent racial clashes played out with ferocity in at least 25 places including small towns such as Elaine, Arkansas, and Bisbee, Arizona, and in big cities, including Omaha, Nebraska, Chicago, Illinois, and Washington, D.C. During this first wave, hundreds of thousands of African Americans were moving north in what came to be known as the Great Migration, seeking jobs created by wartime spending and fleeing the violence and oppression in the former Confederacy.

In 1921, white mobs, with the complicity of local police, torched Tulsa, Oklahoma's black business district, known as "Black Wall Street," killing about 300 people and leaving nearly all of the city's black population homeless. In most of these massacres and riots, the police turned a blind eye to white violence and instead arrested African Americans for defending themselves.

In response to these brutal tactics, African Americans invested energy in building up civil rights organizations in the 1920s and 1930s. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, expanded its nationwide campaign for racial justice, creating one of the largest mass-membership organizations in the country, with 500,000 members by 1945. Millions of African Americans-in both the urban North and the rural South-gravitated toward organizations that promoted racial pride and self-determination, most notably the United Negro Improvement Association, led by Marcus Garvey. Empowered by the right to vote (a right denied to blacks through voter suppression across most of the South), African Americans in northern cities began to exercise their electoral clout.

Fighting fascism abroad, racism at home

The second mass wave of protest and racial violence came during the disruptive years of the Depression and World War II. In 1941, when civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph threatened a March on Washington to demand that the federal government open up defense jobs to African Americans, President Franklin Roosevelt succumbed to the pressure and signed an order creating the Committee on Fair Employment Practices. The hypocrisy of racism in a country that was fighting a world war for democracy fueled anger among many African Americans, unleashing one of the most intense periods of black political organizing and white opposition ever.

In a second wave of the Great Migration, hundreds of thousands of black workers moved north and west during the war, finding jobs in aircraft factories and shipyards. Newspapers serving African American communities, led by the Pittsburgh Courier, publicized racial discrimination and violence and launched the "Double V" campaign for victory against fascism abroad and against white supremacy at home.

In Mobile, Alabama and Detroit in 1943, whites fearful of rising black militancy and competition for jobs and housing rampaged through black neighborhoods and attacked black workers, a reprise of what had happened in the 1919 Red Summer. More than 240 race riots broke out that year throughout the United States. African Americans were not the only targets; the same year, in Los Angeles, white mobs angry about a new racial threat attacked young Mexican American men. In all of these cities, the police swept in, taking the side of white rioters.

During and after World War II, African Americans actively protested-both peacefully and violently-against racism and police brutality. New York's City's Harlem neighborhood was a hotbed of civil rights activism. In August 1943, after a white police officer shot Private Robert Bandy, an African American soldier on leave, angry crowds of blacks outraged at police brutality broke shop windows and clashed with law enforcement officials. In wartime Birmingham, Alabama, African Americans resisted second-class treatment on the city's buses, clashing with white drivers, passengers, and police. In 1943 and 1944, civil rights activists in Chicago staged sit-ins at restaurants that refused to serve blacks. Those protests snowballed into a nationwide movement between the war and the mid-1960s.

The turbulent Sixties

Fueled by growth of the civil rights movement, a third and enormous wave of urban uprisings swept the country between 1963 and 1968. The protests grew out of decades of grassroots organizing against racial segregation and discrimination in employment, housing, transportation, and commerce, both in the North and the South.

In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference marched in Birmingham, Alabama, demanding the desegregation of department stores, restaurants, public restrooms, and drinking fountains. In a violent show of force, Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene "Bull" Connor infamously ordered police officers and firefighters to turn guard dogs and fire hoses on nonviolent protestors, many of them schoolchildren. In retaliation for the brutality, angry local blacks calling for self-defense rampaged through the city's business district. When peaceful demonstrations did not get the desired results and law enforcement officials used force to suppress dissent, protestors often turned to more disruptive tactics.

It was a pattern that would be repeated hundreds of times over the next several years, drawing energy from the rising Black Power movement, which called for black pride, self-defense against racist attacks, and self-determination. Philadelphia, Harlem, and Rochester burned in 1964; Los Angeles in 1965; and Chicago and other cities in 1966, culminating in the "Long Hot Summer" of July 1967, when 163 cities erupted in collective violence over police brutality and indifference to black suffering.

African Americans burned and looted stores and faced violent retribution on the part of big cities' nearly all-white police forces. In Newark, New Jersey, 34 people died, 23 of them at the hands of the police. In Detroit, 43 people died, most of them shot by some 17,000 police, National Guard, and military troops sent to put down the rebellion. In April 1968, sorrow and fury over Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination turned to uprisings in which more than 100 cities were burned.

The 1960s uprisings differed from their precursors in 1919 and 1943. The later demonstrations-both nonviolent and disruptive-were led by African Americans, unlike the race riots in Chicago, Tulsa, Detroit, and Los Angeles that were instigated by white mobs. In the 1960s, almost all looting and burning happened in African American neighborhoods, targeting mostly white-owned local shops accused of overcharging black customers for inferior goods. Some whites joined in vandalizing stores, but the crowds and the business districts affected were overwhelmingly black.

The only whites out on the streets in sizeable numbers were law enforcement officials, who fueled the flames of discontent by beating and shooting protestors. Many white Americans-including presidential candidates Richard M. Nixon and George Wallace-cheered the police. Those who were more sympathetic to black protesters included prominent members of the blue-ribbon, bipartisan Kerner Commission, established by President Lyndon B, Johnson to investigate the causes of the 1960s uprisings. Its 11 members, including the nation's only black U.S. Senator, Edward Brooke (R-Mass), and NAACP Executive Director Roy Wilkins, published a bestselling report that concluded that for many blacks, "police have come to symbolize white power, white racism, and white repression."

Changing face of protest

In the decades that followed 1968, outbreaks of protest and conflict were more geographically isolated, but their causes and fury foreshadowed the events of 2020. In 1992, mass protests and riots exploded in Los Angeles after the acquittal of white police officers who were captured on video brutally beating black motorist Rodney King. Twenty years later, the deaths of more African Americans at the hands of police ignited public outrage, mass protests, and sometimes attacks on white-owned businesses. Activists around the country loosely banded together in the Black Lives Matter movement, founded in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi in response to the acquittal of a Florida man who fatally shot an unarmed 17-year-old black student, Trayvon Martin, who was visiting relatives in a gated community. The coalition uses protests, social media, and publicity to shine a bright light on police violence against African Americans.

2020's uprisings resemble those of 1919, 1943, and 1968 in certain respects: They grow out of simmering hatreds seeded by the long, festering history of white violence and police brutality against African Americans that has taken hundreds of lives of per year, including Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, three of the most recent victims. Most of 2020's protests have been peaceful, early reports have found, with a fraction becoming violent.

But more than ever before, today's demonstrations are markedly interracial-African American, Asian American, Latinx, and white faces, covered by masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19, appear in city centers, blockaded across bridges and highways, and gathered in front of the White House. It suggests a new phase of opposition that is uniting groups who did not have much in common for most of American history. In cases where conflicts have erupted, those assaulted, tear-gassed, or shot with rubber bullets are of all races.

The geography of violence and looting looks different in 2020 as well. Clashes of the past happened mostly in black neighborhoods; today, they have often started and spread to wealthy downtowns and suburban shopping malls. Looters have gone after local shops and global chains in wealthy neighborhoods such as Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, Soho in New York, and Buckhead in Atlanta. We can't yet wholly grasp the significance of demonstrators spraying graffiti that say both "Black Lives Matter" and "Eat the Rich" but amidst soaring unemployment and ongoing racial injustice, we might be seeing something that is both old and new.

The solidarity of today's protesters transcends the bloody racial divides of the past and may be a springboard for more sweeping reforms. George Floyd's death has sparked a global movement, with statues of slaveowners being torn down from Bristol, England to Richmond, Virginia; anti-police protestors taking the knee from Seattle to Rio de Janeiro and Rome; and U.S. public officials debating whether to defund or rebuild their police forces from the ground up.

It remains to be seen if the uprisings of 2020 will resolve the long-standing issues of racial injustice fought again and again on America's streets, but when many races march together rather than face off, the arc of history may be bending toward justice again.
Editor's Note: This article originally misstated the number of people killed annually by police in the United States. It is approximately 1,100, including more than 1,000 police-involved shootings, in which Black Americans are killed by police at twice the rate of white Americans.

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2020 is not 1968: To understand today's protests, you must look further back

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The conflicts of 2020 aren't just a repeat of past troubles; they're a new development in the American fight for racial equality.

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A report finds that many states are not teaching students about the Civil Rights

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The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

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A silly question, right? I thought so, too, until I learned that in the year 2010, only 2 percent of 12th graders received full credit in identifying the following quote on the National Assessment of Educational Progress U.S. History Exam: " ... Separate education facilities are inherently unequal." The 12,000 students tested didn't need to come up with the name Brown v. Board of Education, mind you - just know it had something to do with 1.) segregation 2.) in the nation's schools - yet a stunning 73 percent either skipped it or received an "inappropriate" score.

"What's going on?" I asked myself, thinking about the refrain of Marvin Gaye's canonical song that captured so brilliantly the sense of frustration and angst that so many of us felt in those years following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the Black Panthers and the Cultural Nationalists seemed to be doing their best to annihilate each other, while the FBI was doing its best to annihilate them both!

Brown v. Board of Education was not only a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case for black people; it's arguably the most important case in American legal history and one that, more than any other, affected all Americans by making de jure segregation illegal, and integration the goal of our ever more multicultural society.

Like I said, I had no idea (or had I wished it away?), until Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, reminded an audience on Martha's Vineyard two weeks ago of a report that the Southern Poverty Law Center had issued in 2011. Its title: Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States Since 2011. I can boil its 108 pages of solid facts down to one sentence: The situation is "dismal." The American school system is inexcusably treating the civil rights movement, essentially, as if it never happened, part of a collective, general amnesia about African-American history as a whole. And we cannot allow this to continue.

This month, countless Americans will gather in front of televisions and computer screens across the land - or even go to the Mall - to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the emotional highpoint of the civil rights movement, the March on Washington. Yet as the SPLC's report reveals, where it really matters, where it counts most, in our nation's public schools, far too many educators (and curriculum writers) view the movement "mainly as African-American or regional history." In other words, while we may pause - some of us even weep - in claiming the "I Have a Dream" speech (pdf) Martin Luther King Jr. delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963 as our speech, one of the greatest in our history, what's really going on is that those overseeing the education of the next generation of dreamers conceive of the civil rights movement as niche history. They see it as being for and about black people, who, for the most part, reside in cities and/or in the South. As some of them might say: Aren't MLK Day and Black History Month enough?

Why are the schools so important in preserving the historical memory of crucial events in black history, such as the march? Because it is in our schools that we shape, almost unconsciously, the shared sense of identity that makes us all citizens of a common republic. It is in the schools, from kindergarten on, that students imbibe the stories that the country tells itself about itself, about its history, its purpose, its raison d'être.

Want a meaningful "conversation about race"? That conversation, to be effective and to last, to become part of the fabric of the national American narrative, must start in elementary school, and continue all the way through graduation from high school. It must do this in the same way that the story of the Mayflower, the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the " City Upon a Hill" and the key, shaping stories and myths about ourselves that each American shares at the deepest level about what America is, was and continues to mean, was formulated for us through the school curriculum - from classroom content to participation in rituals such as reciting daily the Pledge of Allegiance and singing "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." Unless our story becomes part and parcel of the common content of these rituals and teaching lessons, the stories of black ancestors' sacrifices and accomplishments will not become part of the national narrative, not part of that "more perfect union."

The Southern Poverty Law Center's Report

Sensing the urgency of this crisis, the SPLC took a three-step approach in reviewing all 50 states' standards for the school year 2011-2012. Through its Teaching Tolerance project, it established a benchmark for the "generally accepted core knowledge" any student should have about the civil rights movement, based on leading textbooks and historians. It scored each state with a letter grade, A through F. And it compared them. Let's just say that the students who missed the Brown quote in 2010 weren't alone.

While I hope all concerned will read the report's thorough breakdown (especially of your state), here's a top view: A whopping 35 states received an F grade, which, according to the report, means they cover "less than 20 percent - or, in many cases none - of the recommended content." In fact, 16 states require nothing "at all." Check out the report (pdf) to see which ones.

As of 2011-2012, only 19 states specifically require teaching Brown v. Board of Education, while 18 states require coverage of MLK; 12, Rosa Parks; 11, the March on Washington; and six, Jim Crow segregation policies. It gets better, though, right? Actually, only three states in the report earned an A grade - Alabama (70 percent), New York (65 percent) and Florida (64 percent). Three other states, Georgia, Illinois and South Carolina, received B's. And there were six C's handed out (Lousiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia) and three D's (Arizona, Arkansas, Massachusetts), which was also the score Washington, D.C., the site of the March, received. Want an even bigger shock? Nine out of the 12 highest scorers were former Confederate states; the other three, Illinois, New York and Maryland, have large black populations.

Going behind the numbers, we learn that, as of 2011-2012, only 19 states specifically require teaching Brown v. Board of Education, while 18 states require coverage of MLK; 12, Rosa Parks; 11, the March on Washington; and six, Jim Crow segregation policies. Only one, Arkansas, covers one of the chief obstacles to the civil rights movement: the Ku Klux Klan. Yet open up a recent American newspaper and you'll see that some states are actually clamoring for change in the opposite direction. In 2010, according to the New York Times,the Texas Board of Education voted in edits to its history textbooks that promoted a decidedly more Christian view of the nation's founders (none of whom owned slaves, right?) while playing up the Black Panthers' "violent philosophy" and emphasizing Republicans' role in voting for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. If it gets its way, the Tea Party in Tennessee will do much of the same, apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Whatever the reason for the SPLC's findings - not enough instructional time because of No Child Left Behind, poor teacher preparation in schools of education or too low expectations - the civil rights movement and, more generally, African-American history, are being left out, and it's not only black students who are suffering. You can't have a "conversation about race" only among black people! This is American history, after all.

While I commend states like New Jersey, New York and Illinois for passing legislation establishing Amistad Commissions to ensure the interweaving of black history throughout their social studies curriculums, I must also note that other cities, like Philadelphia (pdf) and Chicago, feel they have no better option than to mandate stand-alone courses for their high school students. I wish more school systems would offer the same, just as we do in college.

And while these are very positive steps - most of us, after all, learned African-American history in these sort of classes - not even separate stand-alone courses can have the larger and more lasting effect of integrating and interweaving our ancestors' stories into the common core of knowledge that every school child imbibes from the very first day of kindergarten. Teaching naturalizes history; the content that is taught in our schools makes knowledge second nature. And until the contributions of African Americans become second-nature to all American school children, desperate calls for one more "conversation about race" are destined to repeat themselves, in an endless cycle, following the next race-based hate crime.

"This will be the day," Dr. King dreamed 50 years ago this August, "when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, 'My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.' " Dr. King was a careful student of history, keenly aware of the presence of the past in the present. (I think part of his strength as a leader of the movement was the depth of the historical knowledge he brought to the task of slaying Jim Crow.) Yet how many school students today could even name the tune to which he was referring, or sing its words, let alone place it in context or communicate the power behind Marian Anderson's decision to change "of thee I sing" to "of thee we sing," when she sang it so defiantly during her 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial, after the Daughters of the American Revolution had refused her manager's request to have her perform at Constitution Hall?

It's not enough to spotlight one leader's clarion call for moral action at one moment in history - however magical - because the nature of the movement today, and the nature of the problems confronting the black community (and therefore America) today, are so much more complex than they were even then.

It's a small example, I know, but shared knowledge like this is what I mean when I refer to the "common culture" that Americans should share, and which public schooling forges. And that is where "the content of the character" (to paraphrase Dr. King) of black history is being left out of the schools, and therefore of our larger society. For what place is "race" currently given in the curriculum, except for the acknowledgement of Kwanzaa (an African-American invention by Maulana Karenga) and homages to heroes such as Dr. King on his birthday and Rosa Parks during Black History Month?

Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the March

Like just about everybody else in America at the time, I watched Dr. King give his "Dream" speech on a black-and-white television set, sitting with my mother and father in our living room, back home in West Virginia. I'll commemorate the 50th anniversary by participating in a march on August 24. And this August 28, I plan on listening to it again, which I can't seem to do without tearing up.

But listening to Dr. King's mellifluous tones isn't enough. It's not enough to spotlight one leader's clarion call for moral action at one moment in history - however magical - because the nature of the movement today, and the nature of the problems confronting the black community (and therefore America) today, are so much more complex than they were even then.

The civil rights movement was, as the SPLC reminds us, a series of events, leaders, groups, strategies and tactics, legislative acts, court cases and obstacles overcome - through decades in numerous jurisdictions - which was why Dr. King was so insistent on beginning his "Dream" speech with a reference to history. In his case, it was the history that had begun in Washington, at the Executive Mansion, with President Abraham Lincoln's execution of the Emancipation Proclamation 100 years before King arrived at the podium. "Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation," Dr. King reminded his listeners, only to add, "But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free."

Basic Literacy About the Negro

In conceiving of this series, a tribute to the black journalist Joel A. Rogers, a witness to the civil rights movement who died in 1966 at age 85, I had no intention of covering the most outdated of his 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro, curious "facts" such as these:

No. 1: "The white population of New York is a third more illiterate than the Negro one."

No. 19: "The peoples of Southern Europe, including Italy, and most of those of Eastern Europe, including Russia, are more illiterate than the Negroes of the United States. In seventy years Negro illiteracy has fallen off about 80 percent. In 1870 it was 82 per cent; in 1930, 16.3."

No. 20: Though "Aframerican illiteracy [sic] is three times higher than the white one," New York, Minnesota, Oregon and South Dakota "Negroes are less illiterate than Mississippi Whites." And when you throw in California, Nevada and Washington; they're "less illiterate by 100 to 400 per cent than the foreign-born Whites of all the States, save one." And -

No. 21: "In the United States Army Intelligence tests during World War I, the Negroes of [Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, and Ohio] led the Whites of [Mississippi, Kentucky, Arkansas and Georgia] by from one to seven per cent."

I understood Rogers' pre- Brown v. Board of Ed. reasons, of course, to prove with facts that African Americans were worthy of equal citizenship rights, but to me they no longer seemed relevant to readers in our time, especially when we now have an African-American former Constitution law professor sitting in the White House with degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School. But now I know there is a different burden to shoulder, a relevancy to convey with no less urgency: basic literacy for all Americans about a truly American history, reflecting its various intellectual complexions.

I know - math and science education is critical if we are going to compete with other advancing nations. But, remember, America isn't exceptional only because of its capacity to lead the free world, but because it was conceived as an experiment meant to prove that ordinary people could govern themselves. At least that's what I learned in school, and a similar spirit animated the broader civil rights movement itself five decades ago, as ordinary black and white citizens of goodwill struggled together to extend the founders' aspiration to the descendants of their slaves - and, through them, to all people, "through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall," as President Obama summed it up in his second inaugural address.

Just ask anyone fighting for marriage equality today and, chances are, he or she will know something of the significance of Brown v. Board of Education. While I applaud California for becoming the first state to mandate the teaching of LGBT history in its schools, I also hope it and the 34 other states that received F's in the SPLC study will redouble their efforts to narrow the gap between the suggestions they make and the requirements they implement for teaching the civil rights movement that has inspired so many others.

In this 50th anniversary season of the assassination of Medgar Evers, the March on Washington and the Birmingham Four, I will try to contribute to this basic literacy in my next two columns: the first on the march's organizing genius, Bayard Rustin, a man who straddles both black and LGBT history, and the second on the "Dream" speech itself and its historical setting, the Lincoln Memorial.

The March Ahead

Want to honor the people who gave their lives and risked so much during the movement? Ask your school leaders to improve their design for teaching the history of the civil rights movement and for interweaving the sweep of African-American history into your child's social studies curriculum. If that history teaches us anything, it is that it takes a movement to "bend" "the arc of the moral universe ... toward justice." And to appreciate everything about that quote, you'd have to have taken a history class or read a history book (or at least clicked around online) and imagined it applying to past, present and future causes. I'm certain that's what Dr. King did in riffing off the 19th-century abolitionist Theodore Parker, and what we can do by teaching our kids about the movements both men helped lead, the movements that were bigger than them or any individuals - so big, in fact, they encompassed a nation and, in the face of violence and fear, summoned its "better angels" for a better future.
Fifty of the 100 Amazing Facts will be published on The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross website. Read all 100 Facts on The Root.

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What was the Civil Rights Movement? Many Students Don't Know | African American History Blog | The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

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A silly question, right? I thought so, too, until I learned that in the year 2010, only 2 percent of 12th graders received full credit in identifying the following quote on the National Assessment of Educational Progress U.S. History Exam: " ... Separate education facilities are inherently unequal."

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America is racist! it depends on where you are

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America is racist! it depends on where you are

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The Gazette interviewed Yacovone about the origins of his research, his findings, and why he thinks it’s necessary to teach the difficult story of slavery and white supremacy and their legacies.

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Historian Donald Yacovone, an associate at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research and a 2013 winner of the W.E.B. Du Bois medal, was researching a book on the legacy of the antislavery movement when he came across some old history school textbooks that stopped him cold - and led him to write a different book.

Yacovone, who co-authored "The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross" with Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 2013, is now writing "Teaching White Supremacy: The Textbook Battle Over Race in American History."

The Gazette interviewed Yacovone about the origins of his research, his findings, and why he thinks it's necessary to teach the difficult story of slavery and white supremacy and their legacies.

GAZETTE: How did you start examining history textbooks from the 19th and 20th centuries?

YACOVONE: I had begun a different book about the legacy of the antislavery movement and the rise of the Civil Rights era. I had spent several months at the Houghton Library before it closed down. When I was nearly finished with one particularly large collection, I wanted to take a break and find out how abolitionism had been taught in school textbooks. I thought this was going to be a quick enterprise: I'd go over to Gutman Library at the Graduate School of Education, take a look at a few textbooks, and keep going. Imagine my shock when I was confronted by a collection of about 3,000 textbooks. I started reviewing them, and I came across one 1832 book, "History of the United States" by Noah Webster, the gentleman who's responsible for our dictionary. I was astonished by what I was reading so I just kept reading some more.

In Webster's book there was next to nothing about the institution of slavery, despite the fact that it was a central American institution. There were no African Americans ever mentioned. When Webster wrote about Africans, it was extremely derogatory, which was shocking because those comments were in a textbook. What I realized from his book, and from the subsequent ones, was how they defined "American" as white and only as white. Anything that was less than an Anglo Saxon was not a true American. The further along I got in this process, the more intensely this sentiment came out, I realized that I was looking at, there's no other word for it, white supremacy. I came across one textbook that declared on its first page, "This is the White Man's History." At that point, you had to be a dunce not to see what these books were teaching.

"Americans tend to see racism as a result of Southern slavery, and this thinking has all kinds of problems."

GAZETTE: What are the roots of white supremacy? How is white supremacy connected to the history of slavery?

YACOVONE: White supremacy precedes the origins of the United States. Every aspect of social interaction, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, was dominated by white identity, and white supremacy became an expression of American identity.

Americans tend to see racism as a result of Southern slavery, and this thinking has all kinds of problems. First of all, slavery was in the North as well as in the South, and the people who formed the idea of American identity were not Southern slave owners, they were Northerners. The father of white supremacy was not a Southerner; it was John H. Van Evrie, a Canadian who ended up settling in New York City. Van Evrie argued that if no slaves existed, the class-based structure of Europe would have been transferred, kept, and developed in the American colonies. But with the African presence, Van Evrie said, the descendants of white Europeans saw that the difference among white people was virtually insignificant compared to what they perceived as differences between themselves and African Americans. This allowed democracy, which was an unpopular idea in the 17th and 18th century, to flourish and develop.

We always forget that democracy was not an idealized form of government back then. In fact, it was considered an evil. Van Evrie's argument was that Americans had to reimagine a new kind of government and social order and they could do so because of the African presence. This can also explain why white supremacy has persisted for so long, because it is an identity of oneself in contrast to others, a sort of a self-fulfilling, reinforcing thought about one's self-perceived superiority. Even people who opposed slavery believed that African Americans could never be absorbed by white society. Samuel Sewall, who wrote the first antislavery pamphlet in 1700, condemned slavery, but he also characterized people of African descent as "a kind of extravasate Blood," always alien. His idea remained central to the American mind for the next 200 years.

GAZETTE: Some historians say that white supremacy ideology served to justify the enslavement of African Americans.

YACOVONE: The main feature of white supremacy is the assumption that people with Anglo Saxon backgrounds are the primacy, the first order of humanity. Van Evrie, however, saw people of African descent as essential to do "the white man's work," and were designed to do so "by nature and god." He wrote about six different books on the subject, and he used a racial hierarchy in which Caucasians were at the top and Africans at the bottom. You'd think that white supremacists were driven mostly by hate, but at the core they were driven by their ideas of racial superiority, which of course were pure fiction and had nothing to do with reality. White supremacy wasn't developed to defend the institution of slavery, but in reaction to it, and it preceded the birth of the United States.

A lot of the white supremacists in the North didn't even want an African American presence there. Many Northerners advocated the American Colonization Society, which would export African Americans to Liberia. But there was no unanimity of ideas about white supremacy; the only thing they all agreed upon was the "superiority of the white race."

"White supremacy is a toxin. The older history textbooks were like syringes that injected the toxin of white supremacy into the mind of many generations of Americans."

GAZETTE: I once heard a Harvard historian say that the Founding Fathers were white supremacists. Is that a fair characterization?

YACOVONE: Of course. Thomas Jefferson is the classic example. He is the individual responsible for giving us the phrase that embodies the democratic promise - "All men are created equal" - and set the trend to exclude slavery from newly acquired territory. Yet, he refused to free his own slaves, considered people of African descent inherently inferior, and when he wrote those famous words in the Declaration of Independence he thought only of white men.

GAZETTE: What did the textbooks published in the 20th century teach about slavery in comparison to those written in the 19th century?

YACOVONE: For the most part, the textbooks from the pre-Civil War period through the end of the century followed a basic format: They would go from exploration to colonization to revolution to creation of the American republic, and then every succeeding presidential administration. Anything outside of the political narrative was not considered history and was not taught.

During the brief period of Reconstruction (1863-1877), the story emphasized the fulfillment of democracy, and the ideology of freedom suffused many books. This was a dramatic change. I even came across a couple of books that contained pictures of African Americans, and I was flabbergasted when I discovered one that had a picture of Frederick Douglass - that was unheard of. Prior to Reconstruction, textbooks had a few pictures, some engravings. But they disappear pretty quick once we get into the 20th century, because the "Lost Cause" mythology takes over academia and white supremacy reappears with full force.

"We're not teaching students the true American history because African American history is American history."

During the 1920s, the 1930s, and the 1940s, it was astonishing to see positive assessments of slavery in American history textbooks, which taught that the African American's natural environment was the institution of slavery, where they were cared for from cradle to grave. There was a legacy of African American writing about freedom, but the white power structure simply wouldn't accept it as legitimate. They dismissed the slave narratives as propaganda, downplayed the history of Africans before slavery, and ignored the work of African American scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois and others.

GAZETTE: A report by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that schools failed to teach the "hard history" of African enslavement. What role have the textbooks played in the miseducation of many generations of Americans?

YACOVONE: This is the problem. We're not teaching students the true American history because African American history is American history. I've been lecturing about this project, and every time I ask students what they learn about the history of slavery, they all said, "Not much." But even if there are textbooks that deal with those issues in a more accurate way, white teachers are so intimidated that they won't teach it.

GAZETTE: You mentioned in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that while doing your research, you found the history book you read when you were a fifth grader. What did that book teach you about the history of slavery?

YACOVONE: That was one of the great revelations of this research. Like so many of these books, "Exploring the New World" by O. Stuart Hamer and others, which was published repeatedly between 1953 and 1965, said almost nothing. All these books, particularly from 1840 for the next 25 years, go out of their way to not discuss slavery. Some would say that slavery began in 1619, but most said it began in 1620 because those who are writing this narrative are New Englanders, and 1620 is when the Pilgrims sailed on the Mayflower. Half the books from this early period got the date wrong. If the textbooks wrote about slavery, it was only one sentence and would never discuss the nature of slavery or include any descriptions. When American politics became absorbed by the debate over slavery, they could not avoid that, and would mention the 1820 Compromise [that admitted Maine to the union as a free state and Missouri as a slave state] and the 1850 Compromise [that abolished the slave trade -but not slavery- in Washington, D.C.]. None of the textbooks published prior to the Civil War would ever talk about the abolitionist movement, which began in the late 1820s. It wasn't until 1853, when the educator Emma Willard published her massive history of the United States, that she mentioned the abolitionists, but she didn't say who they were or what they were about, except that they were tools of Great Britain dedicated to destroying the republic.

GAZETTE: What did the textbooks published after the 1960s teach about slavery? Has there been any progress over the past few years?

YACOVONE: In the mid 1960s, textbooks began noticeably to change because attitudes and scholarship were changing in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Scholars such as Kenneth Stampp reimagined Reconstruction, and it had a dramatic effect. There was a gradual reintroduction of the African American element in history textbooks. And now, many history teachers don't even use textbooks. They're using online resources. Some of the best work is being produced by the Zinn Education Project, the Gilder-Lehrman Center, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

But even when textbooks are accurate, teachers have to be willing to teach it. We know there are many white teachers who are afraid of doing it. And you have to have school systems, both public and private, committed to doing this work and not to punish teachers for doing so, which is happening. The resources are endless. But it's complicated because in many states there are institutionalized approval processes that determine what textbook will be used. And as far as the publishing industry is concerned, this is huge money. Texas and California dominate and they determine what gets published and what doesn't.

GAZETTE: What are the risks of not teaching the full story of slavery and its legacy?

YACOVONE: This is essential work that has to be done. If America is to be a nation that fulfills its democratic promise, the history of slavery and white supremacy have to be taught in schools across the country. We need to acknowledge that white supremacy remains an integral part of American society and we need to understand how we got to where we are. The consequences of not doing so are lethal. White supremacy is a toxin. The older history textbooks were like syringes that injected the toxin of white supremacy into the mind of many generations of Americans. What has to be done is teach the truth about slavery as a central institution in America's origins, as the cause of the Civil War, and about its legacy that still lives on. The consequences of not doing so, we're seeing every day.
This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

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Harvard historian examines how textbooks taught white supremacy

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We interview historian Donald Yacovone, an associate at The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, who is writing the book "Teaching White Supremacy: The Textbook Battle Over Race in American History."

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“I don’t think America is a racist country.” Yet immediately following this sentence she quickly pointed out, “But we also do have to speak truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today.”

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South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott shocked many people when, in response to President Joe Biden's congressional address, he stated that " America is not a racist country ." He admitted that he himself had experienced " the pain of discrimination, " and noted, " I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason, to be followed around a store while I'm shopping. " When asked o n ABC's Good Morning America the following day , Vice President Kamala Harris s eemed to agree with Scott when she s aid , "I don't think America is a racist country." Yet immediately following this sentence she quickly pointed out , "But we also do have to speak truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today."

As Soledad O'Brien said, "It sounds like a racist country to me," in to Scott-but it seemingly applies to comments by Harris as well. President Biden, who seemed to not pull any punches during his speech, stated, "W e have a real chance to root out systemic racism that America ." However, Biden appeared to his remarks on The Today Show to align more with Harris and Scott (to a certain degree) by noting that slavery and Jim Crow laws had a cost.

It is almost as if simply saying America is not racist, but then turning the other cheek and saying it is racist in subtler terms and that racist things have been done to you makes it ok. It is confusing to Americans and the international community. To supporters, these comments are disappointing . To others, they were shocking. For me , the cognitive dissonance of some of our elected leaders is real and explainable . The re is an oversimplification of racism in America, because as sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva notes, there can be systemic racism without racists.

W hen a person critique s America for the racism that i s deeply embedded in our social institutions, some feel they are being personally attacked. This is because deep down they realize that they benefit from unearned assets associated with whiteness. Scott, Harris, and Biden recognize this and try to balance these varying perspectives as they worry about voters nationally and in a state like South Carolina.

Recently, a at a city council meeting had a meltdown when trying to explain why she does not want critical race theory taught in her children's school. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that s ystemic racism as a concept is " a bunch of horse manure ." So, not only has Florida made it legal to harm people protesting, but he banned teaching critical race theory in schools. For a deeper dive on critical race theory , people should read the work of sociologists Victor and Ted , who lay out why DeSantis' perspective is problematic .

I conducted with Matt Hunt on what predicts who believes they are middle class. For education, income, and occupational prestige, Black people are less likely to identify as middle class compared to whites with comparable levels of these socioeconomic outcomes. Why? It is because social class is not just about what a person looks like on paper , but how people experience social class in everyday life and t he deference that one receives for their socioeconomic status. Black people are less likely to get that deference, while white people are often afforded more. It is so commonplace for white people that some cannot fathom living without it. This is because many white people, particularly white people with lower levels of education and income, realize that comes with a premium that extends beyond economics to include cultural and social capital. As Pr esident Lyndon Johnson said, " If you can the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and h e'll empty his pockets for you."

Harris and Scotts' comments are puzzling at a broader level as well considering how much of a collective memory their experiences with racism are- Harris reliving her systemic experiences with bussing and Scott recounting the nearly 20 times he has been pulled over by police, where being an elected official potentially made the interaction worse.

These stories acknowledge that life is different if you are Black, and unfortunately systemic racism seems to ripple through our social institutions and into our daily social interactions, whether in Congress or at a coffee shop down the street from the Capitol. These type s of experiences-racialized cuts and hurdles- have a cumulative effect on . Sociologist s Pam Jackson and Jason Cummings' research documents that middle-class Blacks have worse health profiles than working-class whites. They attribute this difference to the daily racialized trauma experienced in predominately white environments like work and neighborhood settings.

Systemically, we know that Black people compared to whites are more likely to attend schools with less funding per student, less likely to obtain a job because of our "Black-sounding" name or even when attending an Ivy League university , less likely to obtain a (even when having the same credit score ), have their homes appraised for equitable value, more likely to experience pregnancy complications and maternal mortality , and more likely to have contact with police and the criminal justice system .

Systemic racism inhibits (rather than prohibits like in the past) people's ability to actualize all aspects of the American Dream. This occurs  even for highly-educated Black people with high incomes and no criminal record. In fact, research documents that white people with a criminal record are more likely to get called back for a job than Black people without one.

Research documents that hard work (or lack thereof ), intellect, or criminality do not explain these outcomes. Instead, it is the embedded deeply within our social institutions' , rules, regulations, and laws that segment people's experiences along racial lines. It is the same for gender. Women can achieve but have a much harder time doing so. If not, America would have had a woman vice president and speaker of the House sitting behind the p resident long before 2021.

What people do not seem to realize is that being upwardly mobile does not negate encountering racist hurdles on the pathway to success. Our current system is set up for some people to have to jump over hurdles to succeed, while others get to simply run to the finish line without those sa me racial hurdles. Rather , it is about whether the pathways to success are equitable . This is what America says it is: an equitable democracy. People are pushing for America to reach its true ideal s and the only way this can properly occur is acknowledging the systemic barriers that prevent us from getting there. Moreover, it is not that racial progress has not been made. It is that the United States has yet to make enough progress. In this regard, comment s of our top elected officials are disappointing, yet predictable.

Black people who succeed often walk on pins and needles because they realize that their success, and more so maintaining it, is precarious.   As a result, some Black people aim to make white pe ople feel comfortable. Many of us are mostly socialized to do so. I t is often a survival strategy for our lives during police encounters or economic survival in boardrooms. Some of us who succeed may experience "survivor's remorse" because we are some of the few to "make it." We actually embody the American Dream and become the in-person example to people who do not want to admit that systemic racism exists. We may even convince ourselves that racism is more prominent on the individual level than the institutional level. We simultaneously represent racial progress but are also most likely to be subjugated to racial discrimination because of the predominately white spaces we are embedded within. We experience a chronic form of double-consciousness   and admitting as such can often lead us to being conscious of the slow death we often experience through the cumulative racist cuts and hurdles we encounter.   The American Dream being achievable for a few does not absolve the system and an imperfect union, even when some of those successful people try to rationalize systemic racism away.

In most instances: When Black parents worry about their straight-A student's traffic encounters with the police more than they do a potential accident, this is because of experiences with racism. When a Black couple is about to have a baby and has to think consciously about what hospital to deliver in so they can obtain equitable care, this is racism. When a Black parent worries about their child attending a prestigious university outside of an urban area, this is often because of the racism they worry about them encountering driving to the school and even once physically on the campus of the school. And even more urban universities are not absolved from .

Systemic racism is not simply a thing of the past. It is up close and personal in the present.

R acism may be no more transparent in an institution with the least representative racial progress like the Senate. There have only been 11 Black senators in roughly 232 years. Clearly, the Senate is the exact space we need people with the courage to say the blunt, honest truth about our nation's past and present. Only then can we actualize a future where systemic racism does not exist. It is imperative for a , reconciliation, and reparative process to commence. This starts with atoning for the enslavement of of Africans whose descendants contin uously fall systemically behind , whether they end up being the lone Black Republican senator or a Black police officer who might have the power to pull him over.   We must have the courage to speak truth to power and one of the places it starts is in Congress.   "If not now, then when?"

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South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott shocked many people when, in response to President Joe Biden's congressional address, he stated that " America is not a racist country ." He admitted that he himself had experienced " the pain of discrimination, " and noted, " I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason, to be followed around a store while I'm shopping.

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“Today, kids are being taught that the color of their skin defines them again. And if you look a certain way, they're an oppressor,” he said. “From colleges, to corporations, to our culture, people are making money and gaining power by pretending we haven't made any progress at all.”

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Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) on April 28 said it is "backwards to fight discrimination with different types of discrimination." (The Washington Post)

The speeches given in response to presidential addresses are never really responses, as such. Given that the two speeches air back-to-back, there's very little opportunity for the opposition party to tailor its rhetoric specifically to what the president is saying, so the speeches end up just being regular speeches, loosely tied to whatever they figure the president is going to say.

So it was Wednesday night, with Sen. Tim Scott's (R-S.C.) response to President Biden's first speech to Congress. He began by tying his speech to Biden's - "we just heard President Biden's first address to Congress ... his speech was full of good words" - and then just moved forward rebutting Biden's agenda broadly.

It seems pretty clear that Scott expected Biden to focus more heavily on race in his speech. Biden spoke briefly about the death of George Floyd in Minnesota last year and about his desire "to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the people they serve" and "to root out systemic racism in our criminal justice system," but not much beyond that.

Scott mentioned his efforts to introduce police reforms, then transitioned into a broader condemnation of the left's approach to race - at least as he sees it.

"Today, kids are being taught that the color of their skin defines them again. And if you look a certain way, they're an oppressor," he said. "From colleges, to corporations, to our culture, people are making money and gaining power by pretending we haven't made any progress at all."

"Hear me clearly," he added: "America is not a racist country. It's backwards to fight discrimination with different types of discrimination. And it's wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present."

That these words came from a Black Republican obviously added some heft to his argument and to his later arguments about how his party wasn't actively trying to keep non-Whites from voting. But it is nonetheless the case that Scott's rhetoric was focused on a straw man.

Most Americans are in agreement about the existence of racism and racial discrimination at the individual level. We all know that there are people out there who view people of other races as inferior, and most of us disdain the people who hold those views. Instead, the debate centers on the extent to which systems within the country - business, government, law enforcement - reflect biases that disadvantage non-Whites. That's not the same as the country itself being racist, a position that it seems safe to assume most Americans wouldn't agree with - which is why it's how Scott frames the Democratic position.

During the past 60 years, much of the open, individual, explicit racism in the United States has been rooted out. Nearly all of the obvious systemic racism has been, too: no more segregated lunch counters or bathrooms. The debate, then, is over the pervasiveness of non-obvious racism within systems. On that point, the parties are increasingly in disagreement.

In 2014, the country saw the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement after the deaths of several Black men at the hands of police. The movement was and is contentious, but it had an obvious correlation with a dramatic increase in the percentage of Americans, particularly non-Black Democrats, who saw racial differences in the country being a function of discrimination. Data from the biennial General Social Survey makes that clear.

The argument at the heart of the BLM movement is that there are systemic problems in law enforcement that disproportionately lead to the deaths of Black suspects. It is a very specific claim and one that has come to dominate discussions of systemic racism.

Evidence for racism in other systems is readily apparent. Take homeownership. For decades, mortgage lenders sectioned off heavily Black communities as being too risky for home loans, a process known as redlining. But it remains the case that Blacks seeking a mortgage are rejected at a rate 80 percent higher than Whites. Since owning a house is a central part of building wealth, this has broad ramifications.

Does this happen because all mortgage lenders are explicitly racist? No. But does the system still demonstrate apparent discrimination against non-Whites? Yes.

Republicans are more likely than Democrats to view racial discrepancies as being a function of a lack of will on the part of Black Americans; 4 in 10 Republicans hold that position, compared with a quarter of Democrats. Republicans are also more likely to say Blacks should overcome prejudice without receiving any favors - a view that nearly three-quarters of Republicans hold.

That gets at the heart of the debate much better than Scott's "is America racist" question. If there are systemic, structural ways in which Blacks are disadvantaged, such as low historic familial wealth or being less likely to be called for job interviews when their names are perceived as Black, it becomes much harder for the individuals themselves to combat the effects. Shunting the problem of racism off to the individual level makes it easier to ignore systemic problems - and it probably leads to a sense that the individual can simply overcome racism, as well.

Scott's argument about discussions of race centered on education because of the right's current focus on "cancel culture," on the idea that there is a concerted effort to silence people who aren't adhering to certain cultural standards. The General Social Survey has an interesting bit of data speaking to that issue, as it turns out. The survey asks Americans if racists should be allowed to teach - in other words, if individuals who are racist should be teachers. About 37 percent of Democrats say they should be allowed to teach, while about half of Republicans hold that position.

This is admittedly an unusual scenario, but it does speak to the broader debate. This is an individual embedded in the educational system. Half of Republicans don't take issue with that person being there.

Vice President Harris spoke to Scott's argument in an appearance on "Good Morning America" on Thursday.

"No, I don't believe America is a racist country," she said, "but we also do have to speak truth about racism in this country and its existence today."

The challenge is that the truth to which Harris refers is not viewed as clear-cut across the political spectrum. Democrats see structural racism as obvious, and in some circumstances probably see racial discrimination where some other cause is at play. Republicans, on the other hand, prefer to see racism as an outlier, a function of explicit racists and not of systems that at times offer disproportionate benefits to White Americans - a group into which nearly all Republicans fit.

That's the subtext here. Many Republicans see discussions of racial discrimination as accusations that Whites - and they themselves - are racist. Polling shows White Republicans generally see Whites, Blacks and Hispanics as all facing equivalent levels of discrimination. A 2019 poll found only a bare majority of Republicans viewed racism as a serious problem in the country - and among supporters of former president Donald Trump, less than half said it was.

This is a complicated, nuanced issue. It is not as simple as "Democrats say that America is racist," though it's easy to see the value in presenting the discussion in that way for an audience primed to elevate patriotism. In the context of Wednesday night, there's another important point to make: Scott was ostensibly responding to Biden. But Biden came nowhere near making the claim Scott was rebutting.

In other words, it was Scott, not Biden, raising this as a subject of critical urgency.

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Analysis | What the back-and-forth over America being a 'racist country' is actually about

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The speeches given in response to presidential addresses are never really responses, as such. Given that the two speeches air back-to-back, there's very little opportunity for the opposition party to tailor its rhetoric specifically to what the president is saying, so the speeches end up just being regular speeches, loosely tied to whatever they figure the president is going to say.

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Throughout this country’s history, the hallmarks of American democracy – opportunity, freedom, and prosperity – have been largely reserved for white people through the intentional exclusion and oppression of people of color. The deep racial and ethnic inequities that exist today are a direct result of structural racism: the historical and contemporary policies, practices, and norms that create and maintain white supremacy.

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At the Urban Institute, we examine how structural racism continues to disproportionately segregate communities of color from access to opportunity and upward mobility by making it more difficult for people of color to secure quality education, jobs, housing, healthcare, and equal treatment in the criminal justice system.

Throughout this country's history, the hallmarks of American democracy - opportunity, freedom, and prosperity - have been largely reserved for white people through the intentional exclusion and oppression of people of color. The deep racial and ethnic inequities that exist today are a direct result of structural racism: the historical and contemporary policies, practices, and norms that create and maintain white supremacy.

At the Urban Institute, we examine how structural racism continues to disproportionately segregate communities of color from access to opportunity and upward mobility by making it more difficult for people of color to secure quality education, jobs, housing, healthcare, and equal treatment in the criminal justice system.

For decades, our researchers have called attention to the role of race and racism in our public and private institutions and offered evidence-based solutions for how to address these inequities. Our scholars will play a crucial role as we continue to elevate the public discourse around race and racism in America.

Urban Next50 What would it take to overcome the damaging effects of structural racism and ensure a more equitable future?

Interim Project Director, Housing Crisis Research Collaborative

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At the Urban Institute, we examine how structural racism continues to disproportionately segregate communities of color from access to opportunity and upward mobility by making it more difficult for people of color to secure quality education, jobs, housing, healthcare, and equal treatment in the criminal justice system.