Obama’s election prompted a surge of racist ideas claiming America was post-racial

Evidence

Behind the scenes of the exploding happiness that November night and over the next few weeks was the exploding fury of hate attacks on Black people. The producers of racist ideas were working overtime to take down some of their color-blind rhetoric that had blinded consumers from seeing discrimination for a decade. They were working to put up something better: a portrait of America conveying that there was no longer any need for protective or affirmative civil rights laws and policies—and no longer any need to ever talk about race. “Are we now in a post-racial America? … Is America past racism against black people?” John McWhorter asked in Forbes weeks after the election. “I say the answer is yes.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1227

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the ‘post-racial’ claim as a textbook example of a racist idea deployed to dismantle civil rights protections, contradicting the contemporaneous spike in hate attacks.
• QUESTION: Kendi frames post-racialism as color-blind rhetoric that blinded consumers from seeing discrimination; worth testing whether post-racial arguments ever precede rather than follow policy shifts.