Trump’s election was perceived as a reversal of presumed racial progress

Evidence

That’s what we mean when we say America is exceptional. Not that our nation has been flawless from the start, but that we have shown the capacity to change and make life better for those who follow.” So said President Barack Obama in his farewell address in January 2017, just days before Donald Trump took office. And yet, many Americans did not see a “more perfect Union” coming. After all, Trump had been endorsed by a leading Ku Klux Klan newspaper and one of the organization’s former leaders, David Duke. He was advised by white nationalists like Steve Bannon. He made a political name for himself questioning Obama’s citizenship. Trump campaigned on making America “great again” after the first Black president. He framed Latino immigrants as rapists. For many Americans, Trump was not forging a path forward to “make life better.” Instead he represented a racist past they believed the nation had left behind, and his victory a reversal of the gradual racial progress they had been told was the American story. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1235

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sets up the ‘incremental progress’ national mythology the chapter will reframe against the foundational-slavery thesis.
• XREF: connects to: Perceived racial demographic shift raises White group status threat that drives Trump support. — Brenda Major and Alison Blodorn and Gregory Major Blascovich, The threat of increasing diversity: Why…, 5; Low-identification Whites show a puzzling backlash AGAINST Trump under racial-shift framing. — Brenda Major and Alison Blodorn and Gregory Major Blascovich, The threat of increasing diversity: Why…, 56