Racism is very much alive in America - just in new forms

American civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King (1929-1968) and his wife Coretta Scott King lead a black voting rights march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital in Montgomery in March 1965. Getty ImagesShow less

For decades, "reverse racism" – the myth that white Americans, especially men, were being systematically discriminated against – was a particularly reliable conservative touchstone. Now the backlash against anti-racist policies, and even sensibilities, has revealed that much of the right never lost its impulse to think and act in overtly racist ways.

The US was very different before the civil rights movement of the 1960s. African Americans, in particular, but also Hispanics, Asians and others were discriminated against by law or custom. In the South, segregation ensured a distinctly inferior place for African Americans. They were denied the vote, prevented from mingling with white Southerners in many places, denied service in public accommodations, and openly mocked.

In the rest of the country, similar practices were more discrete, and there was the pretence of equality, but no doubt about the social order. "Redlining”- the practice of systematically denying services, including of homes on the basis of race or ethnicity – ensured that Black and White Americans had different neighbourhoods, and therefore schools and social services. Separate and unequal wasn't enforced by law, but largely unchallenged practice.

In states with large Hispanic populations, similar conventions ensured that Spanish-speaking people of Caribbean, Mexican and Central American origin were also kept at arm's length. Many Native Americans were already gathered in "reservations”.

The normative “American” was white and middle-class, and the rarely challenged prevailing presumption held that the country was naturally and properly dominated by Protestants of Western European ancestry.

Desegregation began in the military after the Second World War. It was ordered nationally in school districts in the mid-1950s. A powerful multiracial coalition then formed to demand change in the South.

But when Martin Luther King Jr tried to extend the logic of desegregation from the Jim Crow South to suburban Chicago, he was shocked to discover levels of racism he said were more vicious than anything he had encountered in Mississippi or Alabama.

Over the past 50 years, most of the country apparently sincerely embraced opposition to racism as a self-evident ethical and legal imperative. Americans even twice elected an African-American president, Barack Obama.

Yet there was always palpable resistance to this cultural transformation among parts of the political right. Racists, along with all conservatives, in the South switched parties after the mid-1960s. They abandoned the Democratic Party that had long harboured them, becoming Republicans.

Thereafter, anti-anti-racism had to be encoded – until now. Indeed, it was in the name of anti-racism that many conservatives opposed affirmative action and other measures to redress centuries of slavery and decades of segregation — the scars of which are still searingly etched on the American body politic. It was, they said, discrimination against white people and, in the case of universities, also Asians.

The Supreme Court’s chief justice, John Roberts, built his career on opposing, supposedly for principled conservative legal reasons, the 1965 Voting Rights Act that enfranchised African Americans. A case currently before the court may at last provide Mr Roberts the perfect opportunity to thoroughly gut this law he so detests.

US President Donald Trump built his political career vehemently opposing both Latin American immigration and programmes of diversity, equity and inclusion to ensure greater minority representation in corporations, institutions and universities.

He denounced the removal of monuments commemorating Confederate leaders who forced the civil war to defend slavery, the renaming of military facilities once honouring them, and even the Washington football team dropping its offensive former name, the “Redskins“.

The Trump phenomenon in US politics may eventually be seen partly as a backlash against the election, and especially re-election, of a black president

The Trump era, especially the second term, has been accompanied by a resurgence of racism in policies, law and, above all, attitudes. One young administration official even boasted he was "racist before it was cool".

When they are discovered to have made such outrageous statements, Republicans frequently insist they were "joking" or taken out of context. But conversations among young conservative leaders on a Telegram chat group illustrate how normative such thinking remains behind closed doors.

In 2023, the Supreme Court prohibited affirmative action in university admissions policies as, in effect, racist against white people. But in September, it permitted immigration enforcement officers to detain people based merely on their appearance, perceived ethnicity, speaking Spanish, and even their alleged accents.

Mr Trump has vowed to effectively eliminate immigration from Mexico and Central America, but issued an executive order welcoming white South Africans as a "persecuted minority," despite no evidence they face any threat from either their government’s policies or black compatriots. He complained there aren’t more immigrants coming from "Norway, Denmark or Switzerland" but instead from African countries and Haiti.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detain a man after conducting a raid in Denver, Colorado, on February 5. Reuters

His administration and many state and local Republican authorities are seeking to minimise teaching and commemorating the history of slavery and racism in the US as unpatriotic, mislabelling all of it as “critical race theory,“ and claiming it might induce guilt among white students, of which there’s no evidence.

Polling finds that the percentage of Americans who believe black people face high levels of discrimination has dropped sharply from 60 per cent in 2021 to 45 per cent. But those believing white people face high discrimination is steady at 30 per cent.

The Trump phenomenon in US politics may eventually be seen partly as a backlash against the election, and especially re-election, of a black president, combined with outrage at the rapid growth of Latin American immigrant communities.

There is a strong class element at work too, with many of his supporters believing that the country's government and culture have been mismanaged and even betrayed by “woke” college-educated liberal and urban "elites," despite the strong support for Mr Trump from many of the wealthiest Americans.

The anti-racist progress of the civil rights movement has sunk too deeply into American culture and society to have been erased by this backlash. But the (largely illusory) "racial reckoning” following the 2020 police murder of George Floyd on the one hand, and the increasingly open embrace of casual, even normative, racism on the political right (especially among younger Republicans) on the other, demonstrate the cultural chasm dividing Americans – and that racism remains a powerful sociopolitical intoxicant.

As always, the struggle continues.