Summary of American Whitelash By Wesley Lowery: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress

By Willie M. Joseph

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Summary of American Whitelash By Wesley Lowery: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress

 

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American Whitelash by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wesley Lowery explores the cyclical pattern of violence in American society, which has marred racial progress since Obama's 2008 election. The election of Barack Obama fueled white supremacy, igniting a new phase in a historical cycle. Lowery charts the return of this blood-stained trend, revealing how white power retaliated against Obama's victory and profited from Donald Trump's rise. The book combines historical analysis with firsthand reporting on victims and perpetrators of violence, revealing the federal government's failure to intervene and the possibility of finding a way out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Jul 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223680666

Willie M. Joseph

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A Note on Language

This book uses lowercase for black and white racial groups, acknowledging their history and culture. Capitalizing the b in black may promote racial violence and white grievance, as race is a fiction rather than a biological reality.

Part I

White Grievance

1

In November 2008, Barack Obama became the first person of African descent to be elected president of the United States. His campaign slogan, Yes we can!, resonated with thousands of people at Chicago's Grant Park, where he spoke to a crowd of thousands. The event was marked by a shift in consciousness, as Obama promised to eradicate the injustice upon which the nation had laid its foundation. The election of a black president did not usher us from the shadows of our racist past but led us down a perilous path and into a decade and a half of explicit racial thrashing.

The years that followed Obama's election saw two longsimmering racial movements burst to the fore of mainstream politics. The first was a nativist movement of white Americans that questioned the president's citizenship, Christian faith, and fidelity to America itself. This opposition was fanned by leaders on the political Right who preached a politics of racial agitation: fear of immigrants and Muslims, contempt for black public figures and elected officials, and rebellion against government attempts to address racial inequalities.

The Obama years were an era in which the murderous brutality of the Islamic terrorist network ISIS renewed for many their post-9/11 concerns about Muslim terrorism. New census forecasts had many Americans imagining fundamental demographic changes to the face and feel of their nation. The passage of the Affordable Care Act represented a crushing blow to the small-government conservatives who had argued that the expansion of federal government services represented a march toward socialist doom. President George W. Bush's tax cuts and the Obama bank bailouts left many working-class Americans convinced that the system was rigged against them and that they had been left behind. Decades of activism resulted in major legal victories for LGBTQ Americans, including the U.S. Supreme Court's legalizing same-sex marriage.

All of this occurred alongside the ongoing racial integration of both public and private life, forcing a critical mass of white Americans to increasingly share space with their black and brown neighbors. The post-Obama era saw white Americans become convinced that they were targets of antiwhite bigotry and being systematically discriminated against. Both white and black Americans believed that racism against black people had decreased since the 1950s, but white people believed it had declined faster and more significantly than black respondents did. Two corresponding polls in 1986 and 2015 documented a surge of American pessimism, particularly among white respondents. By the end of the Obama presidency one year later, another poll found that 55% of white Americans believed the country discriminated against them racially.

The Obama years also prompted deep dissension within his own political base, driven by movements of progressives, young voters, and black and brown people. The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations captured working-class frustrations with income inequality and the excesses of capitalism. A rising generation of immigration activists demanded that Obama halt deportations and create a legal pathway to citizenship for at least some of the millions of undocumented migrants living in the United States.

Frustrations with the limitations of a black president prompted a new era in the American civil rights movement, known as Black Lives Matter, arguing for structural and systemic changes to create a country in which the outstanding invoice from centuries of explicit inequity would finally be paid through aggressive measures to rid our society of the discrimination baked into our systems and institutions.

The election of a black president allowed black Americans to dream even bigger, and the backlash to his presidency and the constraints on his rule only heightened the urgency. The Tea Party movement, a right-wing rebellion, contained elements of racial bigotry that were thinly veiled and unmasked and explicit.

The achievement of what had been an unimaginable political accomplishment—the election of a black president—had provided permission for black Americans to demand even bigger victories. The climate crisis threatens the livelihoods of the Black and poor, the Black and coastal, and the Black and immigrant communities. The wealth gap has only worsened in the last decade, leaving Black communities even more vulnerable to the failures of late-stage capitalism than they already were before the First Black Presidency. The Obama administration faced a challenge from the growing black protest movement, which pushed for more drastic action on racial inequity. The movement was driven by the desire to disarm white supremacy and the growing white backlash against a black presidency.

After two terms, Obama was replaced by Donald Trump, a reality television star who emerged as the leader of the growing white backlash movement. Trump capitalized on the frustration of those who believed they had been left behind by Washington elites and believed they occupied an America forever changed. Trump's first forays into politics in the early 2010s included opposition to the Ground Zero mosque, an attempt to turn a building two blocks away from the World Trade Center into an Islamic cultural center, and vows to investigate Obama's citizenship based on the racist birther conspiracy theory. As a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump pledged to build the wall on the southern border to keep out Hispanic immigrants. While Obama embraced the growing black protest movement, Trump cast it as his foil, railed against protesters, sought police union endorsements, and leaned into the rhetoric of law and order while playing up urban unrest.

Trump received nearly sixty-three million votes in 2016, overwhelmingly by white Americans, including millions of Obama-toTrump voters. The Trump victory was attributed to factors such as the decades-long demonization of Hillary Clinton, misogyny towards her historic candidacy, tactical errors committed by her campaign, and an electorate opposed to