Where Did Obama Hurt You, White Folks?

And no, touching your worldview in a way that made you uncomfortable doesn’t count

Getty images, licensed by the author from Unsplash with the Unsplash+ license

You’ll hear it all the time.

Despite Donald Trump’s long history of racist remarks and actions, dating back over 50 years, his supporters are quick to insist that it was Barack Obama who was the nation’s “divider in chief.”

Obama, they insist, is to blame for the racial tension with which we currently live.

Not the white man who has consistently said and done blatantly racist things throughout his life, but the Black guy, whom the white guy racistly swore wasn’t even an American.

Reactionary mouthpiece Megyn Kelly repeated this mantra recently, laying the blame for racial division at the feet of Obama, as if hundreds of years of state-sanctioned white supremacy, private sector discrimination, and the inertia of all that had nothing to do with it.

According to Kelly, Obama was a “slick snake” who “never missed an opportunity to twist the knife on the racial issue,” and whose divisiveness necessitated Trump as an “antidote” to whatever poison he, the Black guy, had injected into the body politic.

You may remember Kelly as the “journalist” who once defended blackface, excused viciously racist…