For black and brown Americans, Barack Obama's two terms in office were a rebuke to a society where nonwhites have long been marked as second-class citizens. For black people in particular, the literal presence of Obama's family in the White House represented a high point in the long black freedom struggle. In the long arc of history, for centuries black Americans were owned, murdered, abused and raped by whites as human property, and yet a black American had become the most powerful man on the planet.
Of course, Obama's ascent did not heal the centuries of harm done to black Americans by white racism. But that next chapter in America's history -- where one more "first" for a black person was demolished -- was still symbolically intoxicating because it validated a belief in this country's ability to change for the better.
For many millions of other Americans, the overwhelming majority of them white and conservative, Obama's presidency represented a personal insult. The very presence of an intelligent, graceful, educated and accomplished black man in the White House -- as president, instead of as a maid, janitor or butler -- rocked them to the core of their being. If a person inherently connects being a "real American" with whiteness, then a black president is unthinkable. Such a reality forces a cognitive dissonance that cannot be easily reconciled. What was understood to be the natural order of things for White America was turned upside down.
Over the course of those eight years, many white conservatives became lost in the fever swamps of white supremacist paranoia, consumed by an existential dread about some vague notion of black or brown power, manifested in their archenemy and political demon Barack Obama. For too many people, Obama seemed to represent the displacement and obsolescence of White America and the birth of some undiscovered country where nonwhites rule and whites are made to kneel at their feet in submission.
Linkypoo
This is what I have been saying for years.