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What you grew up with was the fruit of the Reconciliation Movement after the civil war. This social contract was purposely torn up in 2016 by progressives butt hurt about Trump. I'm trying to find them now, but I was awash in editorials talking about how reconciliation was a mistake, and the boot should have been on Southern White's neck forever more to make them learn their place.
I would suggest 2016 was less the cause and more the 'masks off' moment.
Hanging around various fan forums in the early 2000s, one common thread I saw pop up time and time again was the typical 'Whatif' of 'What would you have done differently in the treatment of the South post civil-war' and the thread wouldn't even get past the first page before the notion of 'Kill them all' would get thrown out.
Ground-level liberal/progressives have had a common genocidal fantasy toward Southerners for a very long time, with very little if no pushback against it.
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I think you might be mixing up your timeline. Trayvon Martin (2012), Eric Garner (2014), Freddie Gray (2015 - Ferguson riots attached), Philando Castile (2015) and other moments like Kaepernick (2015) and the Charleston church shooting (2015) ALL predate Trump. The racial unrest wasn’t invented by progressives. It was already there.
The double impact of the video of George Floyd (2020) and Trump’s own, self inflicted “both sides” response to the Charlottesville protester killings (2017) has far more to do with it than some progressive scheme to make Trump look bad. In particular that 2017 event was tied to Confederate backlash… which even extended to efforts within Southern states to remove Confederate flags. Mississippi removed their own flag in 2020. Even South Carolina stopped displaying it. While there was certainly national pressure to do so, it wasn’t progressive-exclusive.
And speaking in terms of the historiography, it’s also a big mistake to say that the sentiment was new. Many historians have long felt that Reconciliation was a bit too lenient. Since about the 60s I would say, reaching stronger mainstream around the 80s. Many blamed civil rights “taking too long” and Jim Crow type discrimination and political repression “lasting too long” on Reconstruction. Perhaps out of political convenience (easier to blame the past), but again, this wasn’t something new in response to Trump.
I think everything you described especially Floyd were part of the old pact on race. Disparate impacts were ignored and the right went with an idea that the failure of the black community was bad culture versus lower IQ and higher rates of criminality.
Before Trump George Floyd would have just been a drug addict overdosing. The revitalization of it was progressives.
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You might be right about me being off slightly. Key events I remember were all from 2015. Stuff like Apple censoring conflict simulators that contained the confederate flag. Dukes of Hazzard being memory holed also occurred in 2015. Amazon removing confederate flag merch also happened in 2015.
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