The election of President Obama in 2008 signaled for millions that the United States was approaching, or had reached, a new era where racism was a relic of the past. Advocates of this mythic worldview, and the attendant ideology of colorblindness, resisted the salience of race and opposed the need for affirmative action to rehabilitate past and present inequity, arguing that any assertions of race or racism were moot. The murder of Trayvon Martin, and the string of deaths of unarmed black men and women killed in the months and years after Martin's death, vanquished the fiction that the United States was postracial.

XREF: Connects to the postracial/colorblind ideology debates and the Black Lives Matter movement context. QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did the postracial narrative shift specifically between 2008 and the Trayvon Martin case?

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 425