"Racism Was Almost Non-Existent by the End of
the 90s. It Rose 100x After Obama." — The
Data Says the Opposite
The 1990s marked a genuine turning point where America seemed to be moving past race as a defining fault line. Color-blind policies, economic opportunity, and a shared national culture had brought real progress, with interracial friendships, marriages, and neighborhoods on the rise. Racism felt like a fading relic rather than a daily obsession.
Then came Obama’s presidency, and everything reversed. Suddenly, every incident was national news, every disagreement framed as systemic bigotry, and division became the currency of power. What should have been a moment of unity was twisted into grievance and identity politics that pitted Americans against each other.
This wasn’t accidental. It was engineered to keep one side perpetually angry and the other perpetually guilty, ensuring votes and control. True healing requires rejecting those who profit from our fractures and recommitting to judging individuals by character, not skin color.
The Republican Army post makes a clean, emotional claim: America solved racism, then Barack Obama brought it back on purpose.
It's a powerful story because many people remember the late 1990s as calm. But every major dataset on racial attitudes, hate crimes, and lived experience shows the premise is false. Racism did not disappear in the 90s, and it did not increase 100-fold after 2009. What changed was visibility, not prevalence — and Obama's election both revealed and polarized existing attitudes.
Here is what the record shows.
1. Was racism "almost non-existent" in the late 90s?No. The 1990s were not post-racial; they were post-Rodney King.
1992: Los Angeles riots after four LAPD officers were acquitted of beating Rodney King on video. 63 people died.1994-2010: University of Wisconsin data documents a steady wave of Black protests against police violence, including the Million Man March (1995), the Cincinnati unrest after Timothy Thomas was killed (2001), and dozens of campaigns against Confederate symbols.Hate crimes: FBI data shows 7,876 hate-crime incidents in 1996, with 5,396 motivated by race. In 1999, James Byrd Jr. was dragged to death in Texas — a lynching-style murder that led to federal hate-crime law.Polling: In 1997 Gallup, 68% of Black Americans said they experienced discrimination in the past year; 45% of white Americans said racism was a "very serious problem." It was not seen as solved.What felt different was media fragmentation. There was no Twitter, no smartphone video. A police stop in Ferguson in 1999 stayed local. By 2014, it went global.
2. Did racism rise "100x" after Obama took office?There is no metric that shows a 100-fold increase. The claim confuses three separate trends:
A. White racial resentment actually fell — for most people.Gallup's long-running "racial resentment" scale found that among white Americans overall, resentment decreased significantly during Obama's presidency compared to pre-2009. The decline was driven by Democrats and independents. White Republicans showed no change — which widened the partisan gap, making race feel more political, not more common.
B. Perceptions of discrimination dropped at first, then rebounded.A 2011 University of Michigan study found that right after Obama's election, the share of Americans who thought discrimination was widespread fell from 61% to 50%. Conservatives' perception fell sharply; liberals' rose slightly. By 2013-2014, after Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, and the rise of Black Lives Matter, perceptions rose again — not because racism was new, but because cameras made it undeniable.
C. Hate crimes did not multiply by 100.FBI data: 6,604 race-based hate crimes in 2009; 5,493 in 2016 (Obama's last year). That's a decrease, not a surge. The spike came later — 8,167 in 2020, and 9,947 in 2022 — driven by reporting changes and post-2020 polarization, not by Obama-era policy.
Pew Research in 2019 found 51% of Americans said race relations were generally bad — up from 39% in 2009. That's a significant worsening of perception, not a 100x rise in racist acts.
3. "This was all by design" — what actually changedObama did not invent racial division; his presidency made it impossible to ignore. Political scientists call this "racialization of partisanship":
Before 2008, both parties had substantial numbers of racially liberal and conservative voters. After 2008, racial attitudes became the strongest predictor of party ID — stronger than economics.A 2016 SSRN paper, "President Obama and the Intensification of Black Threat," found that in counties with larger Black populations, white voters became less likely to vote for Obama in 2012 than in 2008 — especially in poorer areas. The authors argue Obama's presence activated existing racial threat, not created it.At the same time, Obama rarely talked about race in his first term (he mentioned it less than any Democratic president since Carter, per Chronicle of Higher Education analysis). When he did — after Trayvon Martin ("If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon"), after Ferguson — conservatives accused him of dividing the country, liberals accused him of not doing enough.Historian David Roediger summarized it in 2009: "The election of a Black president does not signal a post-racial America... it marks a threshold for addressing racial inequality, but it won't resolve systemic issues." He was right — the system (wealth gap, housing segregation, policing disparities) never closed in the 90s. The Black-white wealth gap in 1998 was 10 to 1; in 2016 it was still 10 to 1.
Why the 90s felt calmThree reasons:
Economic boom. Unemployment for Black Americans fell from 14.2% (1992) to 7.6% (2000) — the lowest on record then. Prosperity masks tension.Crime decline. Violent crime fell 40% from 1991-2000. Fewer police encounters meant fewer flashpoints.Media gatekeepers. Three networks controlled the narrative. Without viral video, most Americans could plausibly believe racism was "almost over."Obama's 2008 campaign coincided with the iPhone, YouTube, and Facebook News Feed. By 2013, a teenager could broadcast a police stop live. Racism didn't rise 100x — documentation did.
Bottom lineThe post tells a story many want to believe: we were united, then one politician divided us. The data tell a messier story:
Racism was not "almost non-existent" in the late 90s. It was lethal, systemic, and widely reported — just less visible nationally.After Obama took office, white racial resentment fell overall, but partisan sorting made race feel louder. Perceptions of worsening race relations rose from 2009 to 2019, driven by increased visibility of police violence and political polarization, not by a 100-fold increase in racist acts.There is no evidence it was "by design." Obama's own strategy was famously race-avoidant early on; the backlash and the activism that followed were reactions to America's unresolved history, amplified by technology.If you remember the 90s as peaceful, you are remembering a media environment, not a reality. If you feel race is more divisive now, you are feeling polarization and exposure, not a conspiracy. The numbers don't support 100x — they support a country that never finished the work, and finally got cameras to prove it.
Then came Obama’s presidency, and everything reversed. Suddenly, every incident was national news, every disagreement framed as systemic bigotry, and division became the currency of power. What should have been a moment of unity was twisted into grievance and identity politics that pitted Americans against each other.
This wasn’t accidental. It was engineered to keep one side perpetually angry and the other perpetually guilty, ensuring votes and control. True healing requires rejecting those who profit from our fractures and recommitting to judging individuals by character, not skin color.
The Republican Army post makes a clean, emotional claim: America solved racism, then Barack Obama brought it back on purpose.
It's a powerful story because many people remember the late 1990s as calm. But every major dataset on racial attitudes, hate crimes, and lived experience shows the premise is false. Racism did not disappear in the 90s, and it did not increase 100-fold after 2009. What changed was visibility, not prevalence — and Obama's election both revealed and polarized existing attitudes.
Here is what the record shows.
1. Was racism "almost non-existent" in the late 90s?No. The 1990s were not post-racial; they were post-Rodney King.
1992: Los Angeles riots after four LAPD officers were acquitted of beating Rodney King on video. 63 people died.1994-2010: University of Wisconsin data documents a steady wave of Black protests against police violence, including the Million Man March (1995), the Cincinnati unrest after Timothy Thomas was killed (2001), and dozens of campaigns against Confederate symbols.Hate crimes: FBI data shows 7,876 hate-crime incidents in 1996, with 5,396 motivated by race. In 1999, James Byrd Jr. was dragged to death in Texas — a lynching-style murder that led to federal hate-crime law.Polling: In 1997 Gallup, 68% of Black Americans said they experienced discrimination in the past year; 45% of white Americans said racism was a "very serious problem." It was not seen as solved.What felt different was media fragmentation. There was no Twitter, no smartphone video. A police stop in Ferguson in 1999 stayed local. By 2014, it went global.
2. Did racism rise "100x" after Obama took office?There is no metric that shows a 100-fold increase. The claim confuses three separate trends:
A. White racial resentment actually fell — for most people.Gallup's long-running "racial resentment" scale found that among white Americans overall, resentment decreased significantly during Obama's presidency compared to pre-2009. The decline was driven by Democrats and independents. White Republicans showed no change — which widened the partisan gap, making race feel more political, not more common.
B. Perceptions of discrimination dropped at first, then rebounded.A 2011 University of Michigan study found that right after Obama's election, the share of Americans who thought discrimination was widespread fell from 61% to 50%. Conservatives' perception fell sharply; liberals' rose slightly. By 2013-2014, after Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, and the rise of Black Lives Matter, perceptions rose again — not because racism was new, but because cameras made it undeniable.
C. Hate crimes did not multiply by 100.FBI data: 6,604 race-based hate crimes in 2009; 5,493 in 2016 (Obama's last year). That's a decrease, not a surge. The spike came later — 8,167 in 2020, and 9,947 in 2022 — driven by reporting changes and post-2020 polarization, not by Obama-era policy.
Pew Research in 2019 found 51% of Americans said race relations were generally bad — up from 39% in 2009. That's a significant worsening of perception, not a 100x rise in racist acts.
3. "This was all by design" — what actually changedObama did not invent racial division; his presidency made it impossible to ignore. Political scientists call this "racialization of partisanship":
Before 2008, both parties had substantial numbers of racially liberal and conservative voters. After 2008, racial attitudes became the strongest predictor of party ID — stronger than economics.A 2016 SSRN paper, "President Obama and the Intensification of Black Threat," found that in counties with larger Black populations, white voters became less likely to vote for Obama in 2012 than in 2008 — especially in poorer areas. The authors argue Obama's presence activated existing racial threat, not created it.At the same time, Obama rarely talked about race in his first term (he mentioned it less than any Democratic president since Carter, per Chronicle of Higher Education analysis). When he did — after Trayvon Martin ("If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon"), after Ferguson — conservatives accused him of dividing the country, liberals accused him of not doing enough.Historian David Roediger summarized it in 2009: "The election of a Black president does not signal a post-racial America... it marks a threshold for addressing racial inequality, but it won't resolve systemic issues." He was right — the system (wealth gap, housing segregation, policing disparities) never closed in the 90s. The Black-white wealth gap in 1998 was 10 to 1; in 2016 it was still 10 to 1.
Why the 90s felt calmThree reasons:
Economic boom. Unemployment for Black Americans fell from 14.2% (1992) to 7.6% (2000) — the lowest on record then. Prosperity masks tension.Crime decline. Violent crime fell 40% from 1991-2000. Fewer police encounters meant fewer flashpoints.Media gatekeepers. Three networks controlled the narrative. Without viral video, most Americans could plausibly believe racism was "almost over."Obama's 2008 campaign coincided with the iPhone, YouTube, and Facebook News Feed. By 2013, a teenager could broadcast a police stop live. Racism didn't rise 100x — documentation did.
Bottom lineThe post tells a story many want to believe: we were united, then one politician divided us. The data tell a messier story:
Racism was not "almost non-existent" in the late 90s. It was lethal, systemic, and widely reported — just less visible nationally.After Obama took office, white racial resentment fell overall, but partisan sorting made race feel louder. Perceptions of worsening race relations rose from 2009 to 2019, driven by increased visibility of police violence and political polarization, not by a 100-fold increase in racist acts.There is no evidence it was "by design." Obama's own strategy was famously race-avoidant early on; the backlash and the activism that followed were reactions to America's unresolved history, amplified by technology.If you remember the 90s as peaceful, you are remembering a media environment, not a reality. If you feel race is more divisive now, you are feeling polarization and exposure, not a conspiracy. The numbers don't support 100x — they support a country that never finished the work, and finally got cameras to prove it.
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