We are living in serious times. Since 2012, the names of the fallen — Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Laquan McDonald, the list never seems to cease — have catalyzed collective outrage and grief. In the waning years of a black presidency, we saw a proliferation of images of black people killed in the streets and the rise of a national justice movement to affirm that black lives matter.

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Young people who grew up exemplars of post-1965 American diversity while attending schools that were dramatically resegregating have taken to the streets and the university quads to march against their own invisibility and demand a renewed attention to questions of equity.

And even the machines of our culture industries, which for the past 20 years have tried to assure us that our rainbow nation is indeed a happy one, have found their gears ground down by popular protests led by people of color against their lack of access, representation, and power.

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In Who We Be, I wrote about visual culture and what I called the paradox of the “post-racial” moment — that while our images depict a nation moving toward desegregation, our indices reveal growing resegregation and inequity. The book was published a month before the announcement of the non-indictment of officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Since then, the idea that there had ever been a post-racial moment has come to seem naive, even desperately so.

Once the embodiment of hope, President Obama leaves office publicly regretting his inability to reconcile the country’s polarization. At the same time, Donald Trump focuses the anxieties loosed by white vulnerability — an inchoate, inescapable sense that the social and economic present and future of whites will only get worse — onto the bodiesof migrants, Muslims, blacks, women, and all those others who do not deserve the gift of America. Like climate change, the culture wars seem to have become an enduring feature of our daily lives, the permanent fog of a country that repeats the spectacle of fire in every generation.

Polls show that more Americans are concerned about race relations now than at any time since 1992, the year of the Los Angeles riots. The previous peak had come in 1965 — the year of the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act, the apex of the civil rights movement, the year of the last national consensus for racial justice.

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1965 was also the year of Malcolm X’s assassination and the Watts riots. It was the beginning of the post-civil rights era, an era that has been defined by a vital culture reshaped under demographic change but a politics mobilized around racial backlash. That historic arc — of an explosion of cultural expression that moved us forward toward mutual recognition amidst a cascade of regressive policies, laws, and political maneuvers that pushed us backward toward inequality and resegregation — was my focus in Who We Be. Over the past two years, it seems even clearer that we as a nation are caught in a bad loop of history — from 1965 to 1992 to right now.

