Ongoing killings of Black men undermined the era’s post-racial moral narrative.

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 coexistence of cultural-inclusion gains with structural violence against Black bodies is the same gap between cultural signal and material reality traced across the Frankfurt School readings.