How Obama’s Presidency Kicked Off Today’s White Violence
Journalist Wesley Lowery addresses the origins of this so-called ‘whitelash’ happening in America today, and how Black Americans saw it coming long before anyone else.
Carlos Barria/Reuters
Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
President Barack Obama’s presidency made history as the occasion marked the first time a Black person held that office. But according to Wesley Lowery, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress, the progress was too much for white fragility as it kicked off a surge of white violence, or “whitelash,” that is still playing out today.
A Black man becoming president isn’t the only reason why we have a growing faction of loud and proud white supremacists, Lowery tells host Danielle Moodie on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal politics podcast, but he agrees with Moodie that it was a contributing factor nonetheless.
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He explains why in the episode along with the other origins of the “whitelash” that's happening in the country, from groups like the Proud Boys to elected officials—or formally elected officials like Donald Trump.
“All of this backlash remains in the context of people responding to the very idea of a multiracial democracy: what it is, and whether or not we should have it,” he says.
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Lowery does give credit where it's due, sharing that one demographic did see this coming, though: Black Americans.
He also goes over with Danielle the moments in American history where this type of white hate-filled reaction has occurred before.
Plus, the two discuss the ways the media failed to hold Trump accountable during the 2016 election, starting with Lowery's example of how it covered the former president’s nativist “Ground Zero Mosque” fear-mongering he espoused in 2010.
Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
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