After the 2008 election, about 50% of white Americans believed that we lived in a post-racial society. They thought that because we had elected a Black man to the office of President of the United States, the country was free from racial discrimination and bigotry. Clearly, this was an idealist and naive way of thinking because the last 16 years have shown that the United States is very evidently not free of racism. We can see that in structural issues such as redlining but also in individual incidents. 

This week, a video of a high school graduation went viral. A white father of one of the graduates stormed the stage and pushed the Black superintendent out of the way so he couldn’t shake his daughter’s hand. This took place at Baraboo High School in Wisconsin, which was in the news in 2018 after a photo of students doing an antisemitic hand gesture went viral.