Racial Harmony Always Exists in the Imaginary Past

Race relations weren’t better a decade ago. America just had better demographics.

In the glorious past, racism was on its way to extinction. Before the Obama presidency, America was close to racial harmony. We all listened to pop-rap and rap-rock together. Ordinary Americans stopped seeing race. We were truly a post-racial nation.

That’s what many people seem to believe. It’s a common theme to think racial harmony was upon us in the not-so-distant past, but Obama or “elites” came in to destroy this. One frequently encounters this theory with the Occupy Wall Street meme, which imagines a colorblind populist movement was about to take down the corrupt system until the elites invented identity politics to destroy it.

Many want to believe that a post-racial America was within our grasp–until it was stolen from us. This is a crucial part of the popular nostalgia for the 90s/2000s.

Like all myths, it’s not quite true. One could even argue that race relations are better today than ever before. What’s different is America’s racial demographics and dynamics. In the ‘90s and 2000s, the black-white dynamic was still the norm and there were more whites. Today, demographic change has scrambled America’s old culture and upended expectations. The threat of race riots and conflict between whites and blacks may be lower today, but you’re also more likely to be surrounded by foreigners at your local Costco.

America wasn’t close to post-racial harmony in the pre-Obama era. Its racial dynamics were just more comprehensible and less disorienting than they are today.

Neither the ‘90s nor the 2000s were the Golden Age of race relations. In the ‘90s, you had numerous race riots–with the LA riots being the most well-known example–high crime, the OJ Simpson trial, growing unease with immigration, battles over campus political correctness, and white backlash. In the 2000s, you had the Cincinnati riots, Hurricane Katrina, the Duke Lacrosse case, the Jena Six case, and the Knoxville Horror. We may have elected a black president in 2008, but the racial tensions were still there.

As I argued in both my podcast and article on the Duke lacrosse hoax, the fake rape claim served as a preview for many of the race and gender battles of the 2010s and 2020s. A country eager to crucify innocent white men over the preposterous claims of a deranged black criminal was not one living in post-racial bliss.

It’s true race relations were aggravated under the Obama administration. Race riots, hysteria over police shootings, and anti-white racism all became more common while the first black president sat in the White House. We didn’t have Black Lives Matter in the 2000s, nor were cranks like Ibram X. Kendi mandatory reading. Woke came to dominate American life, imposing white privilege training on employees and DEI on first-graders.

Race was far harder to ignore in the 2010s and early 2020s. But it wasn’t that this brand of aggressive identity politics came out of nowhere or was conjured up by Barack Hussein Obama. It was based on trends that were already apparent in the 2000s and were able to get a wider audience thanks to the new media environment of the time. An insensitive comment from a random person could be blown up on Twitter and rally a hate mob against the offender. A false allegation of racism could generate worldwide outrage. A niche academic theory could become the rule in newsrooms thanks to activists and other journalists. Backlash towards Trump inflamed these tendencies and made them more noticeable.

But we’ve seen a retreat from peak woke. Social media is largely free from censorship. It’s never been easier to express right-wing views in public. DEI has been pushed back. Affirmative action has been truncated. Black Lives Matter is now a bad memory. It’s far harder to make a hate hoax go viral. There hasn’t been a race riot in years. Black cultural dominance is receding (to an extent). A sizable majority of white adults now say race relations are good.

High crime helped inspire the white backlash in the ‘90s. Last year, America experienced the lowest murder rate since 1900 and 2026’s figure could be even lower. Declining crime means better race relations.

A Brookings Institution study released in February found overwhelming majorities of Americans approach personal interactions race-blind and 72 percent report having a friend of another race. Interracial marriage is more common now than it was 20 years ago. The Brookings study reports over half of Americans have dated someone of another race. Ninety-four percent of Americans say they have no problem with it. A majority of Americans still didn’t approve of interracial marriage at the beginning of the ‘90s.

Anti-white racism is still a problem and there’s still strong evidence of discrimination against whites in college admissions and job hirings. But race relations, at least between whites and blacks, are probably the best they’ve been in recent memory. Something like the Duke lacrosse case is far less likely to gain traction in our time.

The conflict of our time is less black vs. white but native vs. immigrant. This isn’t something new for America. But what’s different today is the introduction of new racial elements and how pretty much nowhere in this country is immune from it. In the past, the migrant waves were kept to the major cities and factory towns. Now they’re everywhere. You can find plenty of Haitians in small-town Pennsylvania and plenty of Hispanics in rural Alabama.

It’s reshaping the country in ways people don’t like. Hence, Trump winning the 2024 election on the most anti-immigration platform since Calvin Coolidge. Immigration is the dominant cultural issue for modern conservatism and animates many Republican election campaigns. There’s little sign it will disappear as a major issue anytime soon.

Many Americans feel like a stranger in their own country. That’s why they look to the recent past as a better time for race relations, even if the race relations were in fact worse. America’s racial situation was more understandable and our demographics were whiter. The suburbs solved most of the racial problems for whites. That’s not the case anymore. These enclaves kept out urban crime, but not immigrants.

Mass immigration threatens America’s identity and social fabric more than the racial conflicts of the ‘90s and 2000s. Many people would take the high crime and idiocy of the OJ case in exchange for a whiter, less complicated America. Demographic change, however, makes that model impossible.

The fantasy of a pre-Obama racial utopia may be based on faulty memories, but there is something to it.

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