This American period of renewed and open hostility to Black Americans will long outlive Donald Trump’s second term as president. Could be a decade. It could, as some suggest, last for forty to seventy years, but history tells us it won’t be four years as many of us believe.
Yes, that notion hurts like hell. It’s nightmarish, even. But the history of this country is one of a pendulum, swinging from 246 years of slavery (1619-1865) to 12 years of Reconstruction Era progress (1865-1877) to 77 years of Jim Crow and racial violence (1877-1954) and then to 66 years of civil rights struggle and success, culminating with the end of Barack Obama’s second term of president in 2020.
Trump’s defeat of Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, ushered in a new era. And if history is any guide, it won’t end in 2028. Trump most definitely doesn’t want it to end then; just this past weekend he was making noises about somehow running for a third term.
How long Will It Last
Even if Trump can’t get around the 22nd amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which bars anyone from serving more than two elected terms as the country’s chief executive, this post-Obama period of racial retrenchment and hostility isn’t likely to end when the guy with the long red tie goes back to his gold-plated estate in Palm Beach.
That’s because, while Trump is the most famous and powerful purveyor of hate toward Black Americans, millions of other Americans share his antipathy. Trump got 77 million votes in 2024. Perhaps all of those 77 million people don’t share Trump’s views on race, but it strains credulity to believe that nearly all of them were unaware of those views. They knew who and what they were voting for, and they cast their ballot for him.
This Was a Plan Set Years Ago
It’s important to also remember how long the Republican Party has planned and diligently worked to bring about this era.
This is the party whose president, in 2003, joined in an ultimately successful lawsuit seeking to dismantle the University of Michigan’s admissions process because it included race. Victory in that case spawned other lawsuits, and other universities have had to change their admissions process. That’s one of the factors in the declining Black enrollment at colleges and universities over the past 25 years.
In 2013, Republicans were successful in getting the U.S. Supreme Court to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act of 1965. States with a long history of electoral racial discrimination would no longer have to go to the U.S. Justice Department to get clearance before making changes to their voting laws. Despite Chief Justice John Roberts’ laughable assertion that the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance provision had “no logical relationship to the present day,” southern states soon began changing their voting laws in ways designed to make it more difficult for Black Americans to vote.
Roberts, an appointee of George W. Bush in 2005, is but one of the many, many conservative judges appointed and elevated by Republicans over the past 25 years. Civil rights lawyers now know they can no longer trust that constitutional provisions protecting Black rights will be respected by the federal judiciary.
Trump is reaping the harvest from seeds planted by Republicans long ago. His administration can fire top Black officials for no apparent reason other than race with little worry that they could win a discrimination case against him. His administration can end diversity, equity and inclusion programs and know he will face no consequence if the federal government returns to a nearly all-white club that routinely discriminates against Black Americans.
It will take more than three years to unring these bells. It will take more than a protest or boycott, more than a march. It will take all of that - and time, more time than we can contemplate without crying.