Part I
- Jenée Desmond-Harris
A question a lot of people ask around the question of the role race and racism played in Trump’s election is, “How can you say Americans are concerned with race when they elected Obama?” I know the long answer is in the data presented in your book, but what’s the simple response to that?
Cornell Belcher
They didn’t. That’s the thing here. The majority of whites did not elect Obama, and that’s the wolf at the door. The vast majority of whites did not support President Obama and President Obama won back-to-back majorities, and that caused the realization of their power waning. Mitt Romney ran up a higher score among white voters than Ronald Reagan, when Reagan had a landslide in 1984.
One of the things that comes to mind is I distinctly remember seeing headlines that stated polls of showed Americans no longer considered racism a big issue after the 2008 election. Clearly, though, that's a red herring if you consider the rest of the time up until now.
It's kind of scary isn't it, when you've always been able to jump around and celebrate symbols of a racist past (Confederate Flags), never apologizing for the grounds on which it stands? Even scarier, you're now noticing that you're losing the power of majority to someone that might just be a jackass about it. Just like the jackass you've been. That would be scary. Maybe it's time for all of us to stop hanging on to this racist crap and get on with getting along.The point I make at the end of the book, which I think is important, is this idea that America has never had to really repent for the horrors and terrors of our racial past, and from a spiritual standpoint there can be no forgiveness or no atonement in moving on without repentance. But unlike Germany, where they’ve been repentant about their Nazi past and it’s illegal to even have a Nazi flag, here in this country, not only are they not repentant, they celebrate the Confederate flag. ... That’s part of what we have to move past if we’re in fact going to be one country united as one people all on the same team.