The Rocks Were Always There: Race, Power, and the Lie of American Innocence

The Rocks Were Always There: On Race, Power, and the Permission Slip

Let us dispense with the swiftness the claim deserves, with the fashionable and deeply pernicious notion that Barack Obama is somehow the author of America’s racial pathologies. This is a fabrication and not even an original one. It is the oldest trick in the reactionary playbook: blame the victim of the system for disturbing the system’s false peace.

In one narrow, almost clinical sense, yes Obama’s presidency does mark an inflection point. But let us be excruciatingly precise about what that means, because precision is exactly what his critics have so studiously avoided. What Obama’s election exposed was not a problem he created, but a problem that had been festering, suppurating, and metastasizing beneath the floorboards of American civic life since December of 1865, when six former Confederate officers sat down in Pulaski, Tennessee, and decided that losing a war was no reason to concede its underlying premise.

They called their new society the Ku Klux Klan, a name derived, with the theatrical flair of men who understood that terror requires costume, from the Greek kyklos, meaning circle. They put on white robes and hoods. They rode at night. And they proceeded, with the systematic efficiency of men who had recently commanded armies, to ensure that the emancipated Black citizens of the American South would enjoy their freedom in theory alone. Violence, arson, murder, and intimidation were not incidental to their program. They were the program. The suppression of Black political participation, the driving out of Republican officeholders, the restoration of white Democratic dominance these were not side effects. They were the explicit and stated objectives.

Nathan Bedford Forrest, former Confederate general and the Klan’s first Grand Wizard, gave this enterprise its organizational spine. And when the federal government finally moved to suppress it through the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, under a president, Ulysses Grant, whose moral seriousness on this question has been chronically under-appreciated the Klan did not die. It merely went underground. It had accomplished enough.

It came back, as such things do, when the culture gave it permission. The release of Birth of a Nation in 1915, a film that portrayed Klan terrorists as heroic saviors and was screened, to his lasting shame, at the White House by Woodrow Wilson provided that permission with cinematic grandeur. The Second Klan that emerged in its wake was no longer merely a Southern phenomenon. It expanded its hatreds with the promiscuous enthusiasm of a movement that had found its moment, adding Catholics, Jews, and immigrants to its enemies list, and reaching a membership in the millions. Millions. Not thousands. Millions of American citizens who saw nothing disqualifying in membership in an organization whose primary tools were intimidation and murder.

The cockroaches, to put it plainly, had always been in the walls.

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Which brings us, with a directness Hitchens would have demanded, to the man who became president in 2008 and the convenient myth that surrounds him.

Barack Obama did not create American racism. He illuminated it, the way a flashlight held to a rotting wall does not produce the rot, it merely makes it impossible to pretend the rot isn’t there. His election was, for the organizations of white supremacy, not a provocation but a revelation: that the country they believed was theirs had, by democratic process, said otherwise. And their response was entirely in keeping with a movement that has never, in its hundred and sixty years of continuous operation, accepted a democratic verdict it did not like.

“The flashlight didn’t create the rot. It made it impossible to ignore.”

– Civil Heresy

The neo-Nazi website Infostormer began calling Trump “our leader.” Don Black, the proprietor of Storm front, the largest white supremacist internet forum in the country acknowledged openly that the political climate had been, in his assessment, a boon to his cause. David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Klan and a man whose career is a testament to the durability of American racial hatred, offered his enthusiastic endorsement. The Daily Stormer, which does not traffic in subtlety, followed suit. Hunter Wallace of Occidental Dissent made his support official. Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, a publication that packages white supremacy in the language of academic respectability was, by all accounts, delighted.

None of this happened in a vacuum. None of it was conjured from nothing by a man giving speeches about hope and change in 2008. These organizations existed before Obama. The Hammerskin Nation existed. The National Socialist Movement existed. The League of the South existed, propagating its white ethno-nationalism under the familiar pretense that it was merely defending a culture, as if the culture in question had not been built on the forced labor of enslaved human beings.

What Obama’s presidency did was confirm their fears and sharpen their fury. The rocks had always been there. He simply had the historical distinction or misfortune, depending on one’s perspective of being the kind of man whose very existence compelled certain other men to show you what lived underneath them.

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And then came 2016. And then came something qualitatively different.

If Obama’s presidency was the flashlight, Donald Trump’s campaign and election represented something the movement had not enjoyed since the Second Klan’s heyday: the sense that the mainstream had moved toward them, rather than requiring them to operate in its shadows. One need not attribute to Trump a sophisticated ideological commitment to white supremacy the man’s intellectual commitments of any kind are difficult to locate with any confidence. But what he demonstrated, with the unerring instinct of the demagogue for the appetites of his audience, was that there was a constituency for a performance that cast immigrants as invaders, that spoke of Mexican rapists and Muslim bans, that found, at Charlottesville, a moral equivalence between a young woman murdered by a fascist and the fascists who put him there.

The movement understood this immediately, and responded accordingly. Following Trump’s 2016 victory, members of the so-called alt-right, a rebranding exercise of which George Orwell would have taken appreciative note exulted with public cries of “Hail Trump” and Nazi salutes. The Klan planned a victory parade in North Carolina. What had been conducted in the shadows was now being conducted, with some confidence, in the open air.

And the organizations multiplied. Patriot Front, a white supremacist and neo-fascist group founded in August 2017, in the immediate wake of Charlottesville, by Thomas Rousseau spread nationally. The Base, an international neo-Nazi paramilitary network, was formed in 2018, eventually earning terrorist designations from Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and the European Union. NSC-131, a New England neo-Nazi group, began staging demonstrations. The Hate Club which, to its credit, does not bother with euphemism sent armed members into predominantly Black communities to shout slurs and white supremacist slogans.

And then there are the Active Clubs, perhaps the most instructive development of all, because they represent the movement’s adaptation to a new era. U.S. chapters grew from 49 in 2023 to 78 by 2025, operating across as many as 34 states. They recruit on Telegram and TikTok. They target boys as young as fifteen. They have understood, with the cunning that ideological desperation tends to produce, that the formal organization is a liability that a fitness club with certain beliefs is harder to prosecute and easier to join than a group that announces itself as what it is. The Anti-Defamation League documented 282 white supremacist events in 2023 alone, a 63 percent increase in a single year.

Trump has, for the record, consistently and officially rejected these endorsements. He does not like hate groups, he has said. He is, by his own repeated account, the least racist person one is ever likely to meet. His White House has stated that hate has no place in America. These disavowals are noted, filed, and weighed against the observable fact that white extremists accounted for nearly 80 percent of all extremist-related demonstrations and acts of political violence tracked in 2024, up from 13 percent in 2020. One is entitled to one’s conclusions.

But let us not be too hasty in filing those disavowals away, because they deserve a rather more rigorous examination than they typically receive. A man’s words, particularly a man of Trump’s demonstrable relationship with words as instruments of performance rather than precision, must be measured not against his stated intentions but against his actions and the actions, in this case, are rather eloquent.

Consider the specific and well-documented record. When pressed in a 2016 CNN interview to disavow David Duke and the Klan explicitly, Trump claimed implausibly, for a man who had spoken Duke’s name publicly in prior years not to know who David Duke was, and said he would need to “look into” whether disavowing white supremacist support was something he wished to do. He eventually disavowed, after a delay of several days and what appeared to be considerable reluctance. The movement took careful note of the hesitation.

Consider Charlottesville in August 2017, when neo-Nazis and white nationalists marched through the streets of a Virginia college town with torches, chanting that Jews would not replace them, and one of their number drove a car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer. Trump’s response that there were “very fine people on both sides” was not a slip of the tongue or a failure of communication. It was a considered statement, repeated and defended, that placed peaceful protesters and torch-carrying white nationalists in the same moral category. The movement did not miss the implication.

Consider that when asked, during a 2020 presidential debate, to condemn white supremacists clearly and without qualification, Trump told the Proud Boys, a group the Southern Poverty Law Center designates as a hate group, and whose members would go on to lead the assault on the United States Capitol to “stand back and stand by.” The Proud Boys, who were watching, celebrated this in their Telegram channels within minutes. Stand back and stand by is not a condemnation. It is, if one retains the use of the English language, closer to its opposite.

Consider that upon returning to the White House in January 2025, one of Trump’s first acts was to pardon or commute the sentences of individuals convicted in connection with the January 6th attack men and women who had beaten police officers with flagpoles, smashed windows, and attempted to disrupt the democratic certification of an election. Among those pardoned were individuals with documented ties to the very organizations this essay has been cataloguing. The message delivered to the movement by this act of executive clemency was not subtle, and the movement did not receive it subtly.

Consider, finally, the policy architecture: the Muslim ban, the family separation at the southern border, the characterization of immigrants from Haiti and Africa in terms that multiple people present in the Oval Office meeting confirmed were obscene and explicitly racial, the deployment of the word “invasion” to describe the movement of asylum seekers language borrowed, whether consciously or not, directly from the vocabulary of white nationalist theory, in which the “Great Replacement” of white Americans by non-white immigrants is the organizing fear.

A man is not responsible for every supporter he attracts. That much is true and ought to be acknowledged. But a man is responsible for what he says, what he does, who he pardons, what language he deploys, and what hesitations he displays at the precise moments when clarity would cost him something. By those measures and they are the only measures that history will ultimately apply the disavowals and the actions exist in a state of irreconcilable contradiction. And when words and actions contradict each other so consistently, for so long, across so many documented instances, the honest observer is left with an obligation to decide which of the two constitutes the actual testimony.

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The fabrication worth truly resenting, the one that history will not forgive as easily as certain of our contemporaries seem to expect is the one that asks us to assign equal blame to the man who turned on the light and the one who told the creatures of the dark that their moment had arrived. The Klan was founded in 1865. It survived suppression, reinvented itself twice, and persists today in some thirty-odd active groups spread across thirty-three states, a diminished but by no means extinct expression of an ideology that has never, not once in a hundred and sixty years, accepted the proposition that all Americans are entitled to the full dignity of citizenship.

Barack Obama did not build those organizations. He did not recruit for them, fund them, or provide them their founding mythology. What he did by existing, by succeeding, by winning was demonstrate that the country had moved beyond the world those organizations were founded to preserve. And they reacted as they always have: with rage, with recruitment, and with the comfort of knowing that somewhere in the political landscape, there would eventually be a voice that made them feel, if not exactly welcome, then at least no longer quite so marginal.

That voice arrived in 2015, riding a golden escalator, and the hoods came off.

History does not require our permission to be what it is. And the organisms that have lived in American darkness since 1865 do not require our acknowledgment to continue their work. They require only what they have periodically received throughout that century and a half: the signal, however deniable in its transmission, that the moment belongs to them.

They have received that signal. The results are in the data. The rest is a matter of whether we choose to read it honestly.

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Why It Matters

This isn’t about one presidency, it’s about permanence.

The article dismantles the comforting myth that racism is episodic or reactive. Instead, it reframes it as structural, persistent, and opportunistic—waiting not to be created, but to be revealed.

That distinction matters because:

• You cannot fix what you misdiagnose
• You cannot confront what you insist is new
• And you cannot defend a democracy while misunderstanding the forces that undermine it

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Key Takeaways

• Racism in America is not reactive, it is continuous and adaptive
• Obama’s presidency exposed existing tensions rather than creating them
• Extremist movements respond to perceived loss of dominance not policy shifts
• Political leadership can normalize fringe ideology without formally endorsing it
• Denial is not neutral, it is participation

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key questions for consideration

Q1. What did Obama’s presidency reveal about race in America?

• It exposed pre-existing racial tensions and structural inequalities rather than creating them.

Q2. Did extremist groups emerge because of Obama?

• No. These groups existed long before; his presidency acted as a catalyst for visibility and reaction.

Q3. How do political leaders influence extremist movements?

• Through rhetoric, normalization, and signals—intentional or not—that reduce social and political costs of extremism.

Q4. Why does this pattern repeat historically?

• Because unresolved power structures persist and re-emerge when challenged.

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Some things don’t begin. They continue.

This isn’t new. It’s just visible.

Download the poster. Print it.
Make it impossible to ignore.

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Some things deserve to be seen.