Did Obama Becoming President Make People Hide Their Racism?
It felt like it was uncool to have even a touch of racism when Obama got elected and through his presidency. But since the MAGA movement, I feel like subtle and out-right racism has increased. Like a gateway was opened.
Tan suit. Don’t have to say much more about this one. Tons of people have worn tan suits without being hassled about it. I wonder why they hassled Obama specifically about it?
This was when he was running for President and while he was President. Those are just examples off the top of my head.
I don’t even like Obama. He let war criminals off the hook and then legalized and codified the worst excesses of the War on Terror under Bush.
But it’s clear as hell that his mere existence made conservatives lose their fucking minds and they’ve never come back from it.
Also, at least two of these examples have full fucking wikipedia pages for the controversy alone. It sent conservatives into such a tailspin that we have to have encyclopedia entries about these events.
EDIT: Only somewhat related, but after 4 years of Obama, the racists were fucking furious at a film like Django Unchained. So many who were like “I like Quentin Tarantino, but I’m not watching some shit that is racist against white people!” Yeah, they only like Tarantino films filled with white people dropping the N-bomb repeatedly.
Holy! Never knew any of that. I wasn’t on social media that much during his presidency, so whatever the news showed is what I saw. And obviously they weren’t showing this insanity at the forefront. Thank you for this, gonna check it all out.
Plenty of internet photos of white people wearing shirts that said things like “put the white back in the White House” or “It’s called the White House for a reason.” Racism was rampant and on public display.
I always thought of romney as the republican's plan C. If White Supremacy fails, and More White Supremacy fails, then they might try Quieter White Supremacy.
You aren’t imagining things. We take social cues from others. If you have friends who are weird, you will feel more free to be weird. If politicians have to hide their racism to work with someone above them, others will follow suit. If they don’t have to hide it… same.
I feel the country spent the 90s hiding racism, and it came out during the election. I knew things were going south when McCain at that town hall in 2008 had to shut down an elderly woman trying to be racist about Obama, amd McCain had to defend Obama as a great person and that they simply have policy differences, and McCains own supporters boo’ed him.
MAGA and Trump are for sure symptoms and products of a pre-existing condition.
Some go as far as saying Reagan ending the fairness doctrine in news gave rise to Fox news which unraveled the closeted racism in time to hate Obama, and then I wanna say Obama roasted Trump in 2011 and I once read that some in his inner circle admit that triggered Trump to look at running for President cause he was butthurt. Although Trump talked about running since like the mid-80s.
The prevelance of social media makes many fringe groups seem much more numerous than they really are. I’d be willing to bet that racism is on the decline but now the actual racists have a platform to make their voices heard and there’s also the fact that a ton of people get accused of being a racist who infact aren’t but the masses are willing to take these accusations at face value especially when the target is a person they already don’t like. The term itself has suffered a major inflation in the past decade or so.
How old were you in 2008? Because I saw some really ugly racism directed at him both when he was running and during that first term. It went up, not down.
Yeah, that’s probably why. I’m 38 and racism has always been prevalent here. If anything, I’d say it was worse when Obama was president because all the racists/White Supremacists didn’t want a black guy running the country since it has been white guys since the 1700s.
Some live a more sheltered life, and there’s always a varying degree of racism in different areas.
My experience was of becoming an adult right around that time, which just meant other adults were now suddenly ok being openly racist around me, and boy did they have a lot to say around that time.
Holy crap haha. No, I either forgot or dont remember and had to look it up. Man, they didn’t even wait for the man to get in office before selling racist memorabilia.
I have had the misfortune of reading comments from dimwits writing that racism was ended but Obama brought it back. Really pleased to be off of reddit now.
My experience as a suburban white kid growing up in the Reagan era was that racism was just something to learn about in history class. Part of me really misses being that naive.
You’re not wrong. Obama was a really good president. The problem is that instead of being far left, he was a very left central president and tried very hard to work with Republicans.
Part of the problem is that Republicans didn’t want to associate with the opposing factor and started moving further right as Obama positioned himself in the center. The racists in the far right were ready to undo everything Obama helped shaped during his 8 years in office.
Nah it was a catalyst for racists to find out how many racists there were all around them which then caused the spineless pick me bitches to think racism was their ticket to having friends.
I’d say a big event that kicked up a load of the racism we’ve got today was 9/11.
Right wingers went on a big public islamophobic tirade against anyone who they thought looked slightly Muslim for nearly a decade. This is where they got used to being confidently racist. This actually happened all over the western world, but I’m gonna focus on the American events after this.
Then Obama got elected, and relatively quickly a vast number of them had expanded their confident racism to include him, because they could hide it behind the flimsy excuse of criticising the opposing politicians. Then you had people banging on about the Kenya thing, which was just more emboldening.
This is also when we saw a lot of these “free thinker” talking head fuckos show up, and they start filling gullible viewers heads with lies and a tiny bit of racism sprinkled in.
One of the guys behind huge amounts of that, Steve Bannon, expressly targeted “angry young men” as a specific demographic he saw as easy to manipulate. Believe it or not GamerGate was one of the sources of angry guys he specifically manipulated to great success. So all these podcasts start getting funding and certain kinds of guests, and before you know it we have the manosphere, MAGA and an openly racist, criminal president.
Then of course COVID comes along which gives another angle for them to be racist through sinophobia, and also a new hook to pull people in and then get their brain warped slowly by the other cryptofascist topics that get dripfed from people talking about it.
Basically, the original event showed some Machiavellian right-wingers that a big enough enemy can be used to brainwash people towards racism, once there, they’re incredibly easy to manipulate. They then used Obama becoming president to test the theory and got the results they wanted. Next was to get the presidency in the hands of this new right-wing, and finally the January 6th coup was supposed to be the final touch.
That failed so they’re back in recruitment mode, and now they’ve got it down to an almost industrial process whenever some celebrity/influencer espouses a right wing view, a podcast set appears around them and suddenly all the funding they need to make the pod full-time, just as long as they get some certain guests on or discuss some topics in particular.
Edit: worth noting I tried to trim this down a bit, so a fair few events have been left out.
It wasn’t even 9/11 itself that did it. It was the government’s and right-wing public’s insistence on LETTING BIN LADEN WIN by overreacting to it that did it!
I wonder how different things would be now if Roger Stone (still politically involved Roger Stone who was a major player in the last Trump administration and who has a back tattoo of Nixon) hadn't caused the Brooks Brothers Riot and fucked up the counting of votes in Florida allowing the supreme Court (whoch at the time had multiple clerks that Trump put on the court) to declare Bush the winner.
Yeah, it's been all the same people, fucking stuff up, all along.
This is also when we saw a lot of these “free thinker” talking head fuckos show up, and they start filling gullible viewers heads with lies and a tiny bit of racism sprinkled in.
I know I’ve already responded once, but this line reminded me of that absolute motherfuckerSam Harris.
I am staunchly atheist and at the time it was nice having some outspoken and seemingly thoughtful atheists promoting the idea that you don’t need religion to be a decent person.
However, that quickly became an excuse and cover for racism. People like Richard Dawkins soon showed their ass and how they were just as adamant about their own unhinged beliefs as religious people. (Dawkins lost me when he suggested that children shouldn’t be allowed to read fiction or “fairy stories” so they “know how to separate fact from fiction.” What a fucking yutz.)
What’s even wilder to me is that the pipeline to racism ended up also turning into a pipeline into religion for men through the Manosphere. We literally have seen a drop in atheist men and an increase in atheist women. This is after nearly two decades of “outspoken atheists” who happen to mostly be male!
Pushing the trad-wife lifestyle and Christianity are popular as hell with young men, especially under the auspices of “controlling women.”
They still like to selectively act like they care about things like “evidence.” They are right now disingenuously presenting the long-well-known-among-women side-effects of birth control as a pretense to try to ban it.
As an atheist, watching men who started out in an atheism pipeline be brought into the religious pipeline through racism is fucking wild.
EDIT: Sam Harris was also one of those early “Won’t take no for an answer about a debate” guys when you’re absolutely not interested in a debate with them. His emails with Chomsky are a perfect example of two people talking past each other, because Harris isn’t actually as interested in listening to Chomsky (especially at first, when he says he does not want to debate.) as much as he is interested in getting his opportunity to voice his opinion at someone whether that person wants to hear it or not. There’s a lot of these fuckin guys around now. Debate me!!!
The book Everybody Lies looks at search data and based on that the racism was the same but outwardly admitting it has changed. It went from saying we’re not in polite company to being loud about it.
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