Millions of people all over the world, including myself, woke up on Wednesday 9th of November feeling completely taken aback by the election of Donald Trump into the White House.

Many have asked themselves, how could a person who has seemingly had a love affair with the right wing populist demagogy, be elected as the president of the United States? As thousands have marched down the streets in protest of the presidential results, I cannot help but wonder, are they only now discovering the level of racism that exists within the country?

For years minority groups, in particular African-Americans, have been trying to shed light on this serious issue, in vain. I say in vain because even though numerous studies have shown that people of color are disproportionately subjected to discrimination in comparison to other groups, it seems to not have been dealt with as a national concern.

While the media has reported on individual single cases, it seems to have failed to do the same on systematic and institutionalized discrimination. As explained by Tim Wise, an anti-racist activist, in his lecture “White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son” (2007), racism is perceived as being a distress for the minority and not the dominant group, as the latter is the norm by which all minority groups are equated to. In fact, recent polls* reveal that while racism is considered to be a problem in the United State, white Americans are less inclined to see it as a major or very serious national problem, in comparison to black Americans. Perhaps this is why an often heard counter-argument to racism has been “but we have a black president now, there is no racism anymore”.

Yet, here we are, in 2016, appalled by the vivid examples that racism is alive and well on the American soil. Along with a great many people, I am worried about what repercussions this election might have globally, but then again, history has a tendency to repeat itself.

Will we learn this time?

* YouGov/Huffington Post survey https://today.yougov.com/news/2015/06/29/poll-results-race/

– Espérance Bo