Cultural progress on inclusion coexisted with escalating racial violence and protest.

Evidence

Obama frequently referenced Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote (of nineteenth-century clergyman Theodore Parker’s phrase), “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” While much cultural progress of the Obama years seemed to affirm that sentiment, the murders of unarmed Black men underscored the limits to progress. George Zimmerman shot seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin and was acquitted. Two years later, a Ferguson, Missouri, policeman shot Michael Brown six times, igniting protests and a national reckoning on systemic racism. “In America,” wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates in his 2015 bestseller, Between the World and Me, “it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” Faith in a post-racial America was cracking. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 412

Categorization

• XREF: The Coates quote and killings connect to the reader’s existing interest in structural racism narratives and how progressive eras generate their own counter-narratives.