“BLACK GUY ASKS NATION FOR CHANGE”19
This 2008 headline from the satirical newspaper the Onion captures just how remarkable Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy was for the United States. The play on words highlighted the contrast between the stereotype of a black man as a freeloader (begging for small change) and Obama as an inspirational leader (asking for cultural change).
It is easy to forget there were fewer than forty-five years between the Freedom March and the election of the first African American president. Much has changed in race relations in the years since the civil rights movement, a lot for the better. This made it possible for the country to elect Obama, just as the president and the prime minister of India in 2019 were from the erstwhile backward castes, something equally unthinkable forty-five years ago.On the other hand, while the African American population today is much better educated than it was in 1965, the income gap between white and black men with similar education has been growing and is now as much as 30 percent, more than that between the scheduled castes and the other castes in India.20 Black Americans have substantially lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility than whites.21 This clearly is related to the much discussed large gap in incarceration rates between black males and everyone else,22 but it is also related to a persistent segregation in neighborhoods and schools.
Despite the fact that white males seem to have no reason to feel economically threatened by African Americans, there is evidence of rising (or at least more open) articulation of anti-black sentiments in recent years. According to the FBI, the number of hate crimes rose by 17 percent in 2017. It was the third consecutive year they increased. They started rising in 2015, after a long period when they had been flat or declining. Three out of five hate crimes targeted a person’s ethnicity.23 Nine candidates who were self-described white supremacists or had close ties to white supremacists ran for office in the congressional elections in 2018.24