Story highlights Kerra Bolton: The Trump presidency has exposed our nation's festering racial wounds and changed me as a black woman

I'm still hopeful, because the character of the country is more than the man who occupies the Oval Office, she writes

Kerra L. Bolton is the founder of Unmuted Consultancy, a strategic political communications consultancy and online academy that helps individuals, communities and organizations spark and drive change. She is also a freelance writer and former political reporter and analyst in North Carolina. The views expressed in this commentary are her own.

(CNN) Perhaps more than any other President in US history, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln, Donald Trump's presidency so far has been dominated by open expressions of racial division.

President Donald Trump has exposed the nation's open, festering, racial wounds -- whether by defending white supremacists and nationalists as "very fine people" after Charlottesville or denouncing NFL players who kneel during the playing of the National Anthem as "sons of bitches."

Kerra L. Bolton

We used to laugh at characters like Archie Bunker. Now we have one with an active Twitter account and access to nuclear launch codes. The danger of Donald Trump and his administration is not just his saber rattling or even the systematic erosion of President Barack Obama's policies. It is also the intentional denial of historic facts, the appropriation of national symbols for political aims, and the consistent discrediting of black women who oppose him.

Even as an African-American woman who chose to live abroad months before last year's election, I have been profoundly affected by his presidency. Here's what I've taken away from a year of the Trump administration.

I am perpetually gaslit. Donald Trump's chief of staff, John Kelly, the one who moderates said would bring sanity to the White House, Donald Trump's chief of staff, John Kelly, the one who moderates said would bring sanity to the White House, mythologized Robert E. Lee as an "honorable man who gave up his country to fight for his state." Gaslighting isn't just practiced by white members of Trump's administration. Ben Carson, a black man and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said slaves were immigrants. On the bright side, Frederick Douglass -- who died in 1895 -- is "doing an amazing job" and "getting recognized more and more," we learned from the President. Under such factual and logical assaults, one begins to feel like unwilling participant in a disappearing act.

Read More