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Did they? I wasn't watching the news back then, but Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson seem to have had a lot of racial grievances then, to the point of starting racial pogroms targeting Koreans and Jews.
Guys like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were around but they were also well outside the mainstream, and widely mocked as racist grifters. Recall that Obama's association with Jeremiah Wright was actually seen as something of a scandal back in the day.
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Yes, I think so. I don't have data from the 1990s, but in 2001 70% of black adults were satisfied with race relations in America. That persisted until 2013 before collapsing to just 33% by 2021. Thanks Obama?
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx
The best way to improve race relations is to stop talking about it so damn much.
The added irony is that the election of Obama was sold at least in part as the final nail in the 'The U.S. is racist" coffin by accepting a black president over another stodgy white guy.
Like the symbolic importance was there, even if we grant that not all racism would evaporate and in fact certain racists would be inflamed by his election.
The lesson that instead seems to have been imparted is "IDENTITY POLITICS ARE EFFECTIVE!" and Obama himself ended up fanning racial animosity. I had such a turning point at the Cool Clock, Ahmed moment where he intentionally brought attention to a trumped up racial incident on the side of the grifters.
We sure felt (to me) ready to move 'past' deep racial grievance as a nation circa 2010, but I fear that it has turned into a spectacular method of forcing others to do what you want, so sociopaths will of course leverage this as much as they can.
Remember: anyone who actually remembered what racism actually was retired by 2010 (assuming an age of 20 in 1950, they’d be 65 in 2015).
Thus there was nobody there to fact-check the sociopaths. Due to the conditions that enabled racism to be abolished not persisting, the sociopaths naturally re-instituted racism.
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