It’s the racism, stupid!

Every time Blacks in America make a significant advance, there is a violent backlash. Emancipation and Reconstruction gave way to the KKK, lynching, and Jim Crow. Civil Rights was quickly followed by Nixon’s “Southern strategy” and the War on Drugs. And now Obama’s election — and *especially* his reelection (which proved it wasn’t a fluke) — has prompted a wave of mass shootings, overwhelmingly carried out by disaffected white men, coupled with a wave of legislative actions to make guns ever more pervasive in public places (including precisely the kinds of places that are targetted by mass shooters) and measures like Stand Your Ground that presuppose that the state somehow has an interest in allowing fights to escalate.

In the postwar era, the strategy became much more subtle. The open bigotry of Jim Crow was no longer acceptable, at least among the upper classes. Instead, the system deployed seemingly race-neutral criteria that could be easily mobilized in racist ways. The racism of the War on Drugs is evident, for instance, in the differential treatment of crack and powder cocaine. Both are literally the same substance, but one is more often used by blacks — hence it carries harsher penalties than the stereotypical pastime of high-powered white lawyers.

The current backlash is even more elusive, in part because there is a clear taboo against pointing it out as such. The Tea Party is about liberty and American values and — ruh roh — taking back our country! From whom? Well, you know…. Similarly, why exactly do we need all these guns? Who are we expecting to run into such that we’ll need to defend ourselves? Criminals? Hmm… what do they look like? I bet the mental image is strikingly similar to Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown or even Tamir Rice. But you can’t say that in the mainstream media, because white men feeling accused of racism is regarded as a more serious matter than black people being literally gunned down in the street.

Despite the campaign of silence, there is occasionally a news story that cannot be explained away, like the bizarre attempt to boycott the new Star Wars film for its supposed advocacy of “white genocide.” Like every mass shooting, though, such things are by definition isolated incidents that we can only shake our head at and must never “politicize.” But for those with eyes to see, the racist backlash is literally the only way to make sense of American politics since Obama’s election.