In this op-ed, writer Kim Reynolds explains the history of "whitelashes" in the United States.

On November 9, 2016, CNN commentator Van Jones described Donald Trump’s nearly solidified victory to become president of the United States as a “whitelash.”

“This was a whitelash against a changing country, it was a whitelash against a black president, in part, and that's the part where the pain comes,” he said.

“Whitelash” is a unique and poignant word: It signifies a definite and determinant action in retaliation for the mobility of blackness that is an assertion of white supremacy. There are clear and distinct racial underpinnings that give voice to some of the reasons behind Trump’s election and also prove that this is not the first example of a whitelash in American history.

If we think about how and why whitelashes happen, we must begin with the invention of white supremacy, an ideology and structure that views white people as a dominant, superior race. This ideology was used to mobilize, justify, and create racialized slavery, which was used in the United States, with origins stemming from European colonizers, including the Portuguese, English, French, and Spanish.

The concept of white supremacy was legitimized during the 18th century through pseudoscience that sought to prove the inherent inferiority of black genetics. And while race is a social construct and pigmentation is genetically insignificant, such scientific “findings” were normalized in the public arena and installed in America.

While the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865 sought to abolish legal slavery, the racist architecture and legacy of slavery could not be wiped clean. One of America's first whitelashes, then, was the Jim Crow period that came in reaction to the period of Reconstruction.

Reconstruction took place from 1865 to 1877 and was marked by prosperity among many African-Americans: 16 African-Americans served in Congress, and over 600 African-Americans were elected to state legislatures. However, the end of Reconstruction was marked by the withdrawal of Union troops from the southern states, and white supremacy took hold again. The Klu Klux Klan resurged, and the 13th Amendment was being regularly exercised to enact convict leasing — a practice of leasing prisoners to do cheap or unpaid labor for private or public organizations, greatly resembling racialized slavery. Lynchings were happening with regularity, and segregation by law and by fact came into being.

The next whitelash came at the onset of the civil rights and black liberation movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when an intense and significant mobilization of black people saw an equally intense backlash. Published in 1975 and 1976, the Senate-commissioned Church Committee reports revealed the extensive surveillance, conspiracy, and sabotage that was carried out by the government, the FBI, and allied powers against domestic antiracist and antiwar activist groups. Programs like COINTELPRO included illegal surveillance that was often manifested in violence against groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, helmed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The reports detail rampant wiretapping, fabrication of evidence, media agenda setting, infiltration via informants, and even assassination, like that of Fred Hampton. So while the civil rights movement is often romantically remembered, the swelling of black agency and political involvement was actively sabotaged and widely condemned.

Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, American legislatures are supposed to guarantee the right to vote for black people. But with the advent of political agency of black people in America came an equal and opposite reaction in the form of gerrymandering, which is the practice of drawing districts by political parties to favor voting outcomes or enforce segregation. Gerrymandering was coupled with institutional housing discrimination, implemented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which was passed during the 1930s in reaction to the Great Depression (and also led to the maintenance of school segregation, which experts say persists to this day).