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this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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Today I Learned
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Racism in the United States is astonishing. As a non-American, until Obama’s time, I used to think that, there was just some institutional racism left over from past decades and a few extremists in the South—but not much else. After Obama, it’s incredible how most white people have become extremely right-wing extremists, all because of a single president of mixed descent. Now, the problem seems enormous, and a solution doesn’t appear to be anywhere in sight.
I’m a white American from the northeast and I felt the same way. When trump won the first time, it felt like I’d just discovered that the floor underneath my bed was rotting away.
I was blind to it because I didn’t need to see it, but it was always there. My relative privilege insulated me and ensured that I contributed to the problem
I am from Boston, northeast has always been super racist and still is.
We just hide our racism by using different words, like 'those people'. Go to any town/city meeting and you will see 50% of the people going up to talk about their 'concerns' using phrases like that. It's all very veiled and vague, for sure, but it's incredibly obvious what they mean. Being racist here is 100% cool as long as you are not doing it directly.
And hell, most of my white progressive anti-racists friends, are very very uncomfortable around non-white people. I had the 'privileged' of growing up a lower-income mixed race community, but most of my peers have zero experience with non-white people.
Well yeah, but there’s also naked and aggressive racism, like lynchings, for example, that I just didn’t notice before. I mentioned where I’m from because I also thought that only happened “in the south.”
Neither is acceptable, to be clear, and both happen all over the US, tragically.
As an American I feel exactly the same. There absolutely were holdouts of racism, but I felt we were moving forward and leaving them behind. Obama’s presidency set the stage, then trump and covid set everything on fire and the mask came off. “Draining the swamp” just meant revealing the scum at the bottom of it and setting it free. I was shocked at how many racist, petty, selfish, aggressively ignorant people there are in the US.
Seeing Americans label Obama as the most “divisive” president was eye opening…
Meanwhile, Trump was saying Obama isn’t even a US citizen! All while specific persons are saying Obama is dividing the nation…
It’s disgusting…
Don't get me wrong, he did plenty of divisive things. Pioneering the idea that the president can just call in a drone strike without the approval of Congress if he can get a quick kill in, for example.
But that's just an 'improvement' on the same shit that every US Prez has done since the Gulf of Tonkin. Literally every single one has authorized the use of extrajudicial authority to silence their critics or exercised military clout without approval. The War Powers Act of 1973 functionally gave away the most important power the representatives had. They've just invented a casus belli and gone to town, every god damn time.
Obama wasn't divisive, not by comparison. He was an improvement. At the very least he acted like there was some kind of civilized intent behind the enormous war machine he was driving. Recently, we just haven't had the luxury of a President that is polite enough to let us ignore how brutal this hellhole really is.
That hasn’t been my anecdotal observation. Obama’s election definitely freaked out the existing White racists and motivated them to get more politically active, but I haven’t seen non-racist Whites suddenly become racist because a Black man finally got elected president. Where are you seeing this? Better yet, is there research or polling data documenting it?
I think it's more that a lot of racists hid it rather than openly reveling in it like they do now.
I don't know about "most" white people, but other than that, yeah
Most people are racist. Some of the biggest racists I ever knew were Asian and Hispanic.
It's just white racism is considered wrong and bad, and the other kind of racisms are not, because the white media industry is obsessed with self-flagellating itself over white on black racism as begin the only legitimate racism.
There is also a massive issue with asian on black, and black on asian, racism. But White people don't know about it or talk about it, because white people are mostly obsessed with racism in terms of their own guilt, rather than understanding how it operates systematically across various groups. A lot of Trumps minority supports were for him because he's racist and they agree with him.