Did Obama Becoming President Make People Hide Their Racism?

When a black man was elected president the racism actually ramped up. But it was still quiet. Trump gave them the freedom to be loud about it.

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No, people were racist about him constantly

“He said it so now I can say it.”

Evidence it sent racists into a tailspin of racism:

Assertion that he was not actually American citizen, born in Kenya.
Assertion that Michele Obama is actually trans and their daughters are adopted. Joan Rivers just made it worse. Treating black women as "masculine" has been a long and well-worn racist trope.
Tan suit. Don't have to say much more about this one. Tons of people have worn tan suits without being hassled about it. I wonder why they hassled Obama specifically about it?
In early July 2010, the North Iowa Tea Party (NITP) posted a billboard showing a photo of Adolf Hitler with the heading "National Socialism", one of Barack Obama with the heading "Democrat Socialism", and one of Vladimir Lenin with the heading "Marxist Socialism", all three marked with the word "change" and the statement "Radical leaders prey on the fearful and naive".
Google is doing a pretty damn good job of throwing these ones down the memory hole, but there were a massive number of photoshops of Obama as a monkey. I also remember conservatives acting like it wasn't a big deal because there had been a photoshop of George W. Bush as a monkey floating around since around 2004.

This was when he was running for President and while he was President. Those are just examples off the top of my head.

I don't even like Obama. He let war criminals off the hook and then legalized and codified the worst excesses of the War on Terror under Bush.

But it's clear as hell that his mere existence made conservatives lose their fucking minds and they've never come back from it.

Also, at least two of these examples have full fucking wikipedia pages for the controversy alone. It sent conservatives into such a tailspin that we have to have encyclopedia entries about these events.

EDIT: Only somewhat related, but after 4 years of Obama, the racists were fucking furious at a film like Django Unchained. So many who were like "I like Quentin Tarantino, but I'm not watching some shit that is racist against white people!" Yeah, they only like Tarantino films filled with white people dropping the N-bomb repeatedly.

Holy! Never knew any of that. I wasn’t on social media that much during his presidency, so whatever the news showed is what I saw. And obviously they weren’t showing this insanity at the forefront. Thank you for this, gonna check it all out.
- Plenty of internet photos of white people wearing shirts that said things like “put the white back in the White House” or “It’s called the White House for a reason.” Racism was rampant and on public display.

How old were you in 2008? Because I saw some really ugly racism directed at him both when he was running and during that first term. It went up, not down.

I was 10
- Yeah, that's probably why. I'm 38 and racism has always been prevalent here. If anything, I'd say it was worse when Obama was president because all the racists/White Supremacists didn't want a black guy running the country since it has been white guys since the 1700s.
The turboracism of the Tea Party Repubs is basically a knee-jerk reaction to seeing a black man in the Oval Office.

Okay buckle up, this is a bit of a crazy ride.

I'd say a big event that kicked up a load of the racism we've got today was 9/11.

Right wingers went on a big public islamophobic tirade against anyone who they thought looked slightly Muslim for nearly a decade. This is where they got used to being confidently racist. This actually happened all over the western world, but I'm gonna focus on the American events after this.

Then Obama got elected, and relatively quickly a vast number of them had expanded their confident racism to include him, because they could hide it behind the flimsy excuse of criticising the opposing politicians. Then you had people banging on about the Kenya thing, which was just more emboldening.

This is also when we saw a lot of these "free thinker" talking head fuckos show up, and they start filling gullible viewers heads with lies and a tiny bit of racism sprinkled in.

One of the guys behind huge amounts of that, Steve Bannon, expressly targeted "angry young men" as a specific demographic he saw as easy to manipulate. Believe it or not GamerGate was one of the sources of angry guys he specifically manipulated to great success. So all these podcasts start getting funding and certain kinds of guests, and before you know it we have the manosphere, MAGA and an openly racist, criminal president.

Then of course COVID comes along which gives another angle for them to be racist through sinophobia, and also a new hook to pull people in and then get their brain warped slowly by the other cryptofascist topics that get dripfed from people talking about it.

Basically, the original event showed some Machiavellian right-wingers that a big enough enemy can be used to brainwash people towards racism, once there, they're incredibly easy to manipulate. They then used Obama becoming president to test the theory and got the results they wanted. Next was to get the presidency in the hands of this new right-wing, and finally the January 6th coup was supposed to be the final touch.

That failed so they're back in recruitment mode, and now they've got it down to an almost industrial process whenever some celebrity/influencer espouses a right wing view, a podcast set appears around them and suddenly all the funding they need to make the pod full-time, just as long as they get some certain guests on or discuss some topics in particular.

Edit: worth noting I tried to trim this down a bit, so a fair few events have been left out.

This is a great post (ya fuckin nailed it) but you somehow missed Barack HUSSEIN Obama.

The Hussein middle name absolutely made post-9/11 racists lose their fucking shit. Associations with Saddam were made all over the place.
- Oh man, I'd completely forgotten about that
  
  Actual nutjobs
This is also when we saw a lot of these “free thinker” talking head fuckos show up, and they start filling gullible viewers heads with lies and a tiny bit of racism sprinkled in.

I know I've already responded once, but this line reminded me of that absolute motherfucker Sam Harris.

I am staunchly atheist and at the time it was nice having some outspoken and seemingly thoughtful atheists promoting the idea that you don't need religion to be a decent person.

However, that quickly became an excuse and cover for racism. People like Richard Dawkins soon showed their ass and how they were just as adamant about their own unhinged beliefs as religious people. (Dawkins lost me when he suggested that children shouldn't be allowed to read fiction or "fairy stories" so they "know how to separate fact from fiction." What a fucking yutz.)

What's even wilder to me is that the pipeline to racism ended up also turning into a pipeline into religion for men through the Manosphere. We literally have seen a drop in atheist men and an increase in atheist women. This is after nearly two decades of "outspoken atheists" who happen to mostly be male!

Pushing the trad-wife lifestyle and Christianity are popular as hell with young men, especially under the auspices of "controlling women."

They still like to selectively act like they care about things like "evidence." They are right now disingenuously presenting the long-well-known-among-women side-effects of birth control as a pretense to try to ban it.

As an atheist, watching men who started out in an atheism pipeline be brought into the religious pipeline through racism is fucking wild.

EDIT: Sam Harris was also one of those early "Won't take no for an answer about a debate" guys when you're absolutely not interested in a debate with them. His emails with Chomsky are a perfect example of two people talking past each other, because Harris isn't actually as interested in listening to Chomsky (especially at first, when he says he does not want to debate.) as much as he is interested in getting his opportunity to voice his opinion at someone whether that person wants to hear it or not. There's a lot of these fuckin guys around now. Debate me!!!

Nah. Trump came along and basically said "Hey, you know how we've been openly and loudly racist? Let's do that...but MORE open and LOUDER."

That's what "make America great again" means.

MAGA is basically "we want to go back to the 1950's please"
- Just without class, style, family love or any of the benefits

No. Trump just made it ok for them to come out of the woodwork. They were always there.

It was more the fact that Trump got elected while being not-so-secretly racist that emboldened them. They saw there would be fewer consequences due to it being more normalized, so they could be more open about it.

I think the other way around. When Obama was elected the racist's heads exploded (including in Congress) and instead of being quiet they went absolutely nuts. This is what Maga is about, what the Tea Party was about. Can't forget Fox, which also went absolutely nuts https://youtu.be/S9VeNB5ili8

what the Tea Party was about

The Tea Party was about reducing wealth inequality (with surprisingly similar goals to OWS, just coming at it from the other ideological direction) for a hot minute before the Koch bros etc. infiltrated and co-opted it.
- Cough cough.

Nah it was a catalyst for racists to find out how many racists there were all around them which then caused the spineless pick me bitches to think racism was their ticket to having friends.

Obama's election made them angry, Trump's made them forget their shame

@BadmanDan@lemmy.world I think it is the opposite: lots of people hated to have a black president (remember the nozzles and the tea party?). My hypothesis is they even hated more that this was a classy, well educated guy and not thug-looking dude, which is what they expected.

They wanted President Camacho, but more of a racist trope version of him, and they were angry when they didn't get their Idiocracy wish.

Idiocracy came out in 2006.
Yes, the book "Caste" by Isabel Wilkerson describes this well. (I recommend it.)

I found out a lot more people that I knew were racist while Obama was in office through offhand remarks about black people that didn't come up prior.

They were far more open and direct about it during Trump though.

I feel the country spent the 90s hiding racism, and it came out during the election. I knew things were going south when McCain at that town hall in 2008 had to shut down an elderly woman trying to be racist about Obama, amd McCain had to defend Obama as a great person and that they simply have policy differences, and McCains own supporters boo'ed him.

MAGA and Trump are for sure symptoms and products of a pre-existing condition.

Some go as far as saying Reagan ending the fairness doctrine in news gave rise to Fox news which unraveled the closeted racism in time to hate Obama, and then I wanna say Obama roasted Trump in 2011 and I once read that some in his inner circle admit that triggered Trump to look at running for President cause he was butthurt. Although Trump talked about running since like the mid-80s.

I think you've got part of it right from my recollection and experiences, but not quite the full thing. I think Obama's success actually lead shitty people to lash out more, which brought trump to power, which emboldened those shitty people to stop hiding it and actually be proud and display it. I think the racism and shittiness was always there but people kept more of a lid on it. We just aren't able to pretend it isn't who we are more broadly anymore.

The book Everybody Lies looks at search data and based on that the racism was the same but outwardly admitting it has changed. It went from saying we're not in polite company to being loud about it.

someone missed the whole teaparty movement, huh

Not the good one https://youtu.be/_bx347ilv64

People have been hiding their racism? News to me

You're not wrong. Obama was a really good president. The problem is that instead of being far left, he was a very left central president and tried very hard to work with Republicans.

Part of the problem is that Republicans didn't want to associate with the opposing factor and started moving further right as Obama positioned himself in the center. The racists in the far right were ready to undo everything Obama helped shaped during his 8 years in office.

I see what you’re sayin. Maybe it’s because social media wasn’t as big under Obama, but the rise of terms like DEI, CRT, Woke, Great Replacement, etc. Are just so pushed out there.

Lol, no. I have family members that actively called him a n****r while he was in office.

You aren't imagining things. We take social cues from others. If you have friends who are weird, you will feel more free to be weird. If politicians have to hide their racism to work with someone above them, others will follow suit. If they don't have to hide it... same.