""People I never thought of as racist, people who borrowed money from me -- I've seen things come out of them that I never thought of," says Coleman, who works for a nonprofit in Oklahoma that serves the elderly.
Some black people unfriended white America during Obama's presidency. They would hear a stray remark from a white coworker, argue over something that Obama was facing, and suddenly a close relationship would turn chilly.
Fenise Dunson was a career adviser at an Illinois college in 2008 when some of her white coworkers started warning her about Obama's first presidential run. "We won't let this happen," they said. Or, after he was elected: "He might be president, but you're not in control."
"You don't know where this is coming from," says Dunson, who now teaches at a college in Maryland. She wondered whether "people had been politically correct and they had really been feeling this way for a long time and now they feel like they can be vocal about how they feel?
"It's unsettling. You wonder who you can trust."...
Open displays of racism have become normal again, some say. More Americans are comfortable publicly expressing racially inflammatory rhetoric, according to some political scientists. Some blacks have noticed. They say they feel like they've been caught in a time warp. They're constantly seeing images and hearing racist language that they thought were relics.
"I thought that all of this nastiness had been litigated and fought by my parents and grandparents," says Richardson-Hall, also a food blogger. "Imagine my surprise, looking at this square in the face."
As someone who kind of came up during the Obama Presidency - I mean, this IS the presidency of my adult experience, my experience working for the Federal government, my experience reading news and developing a complex political identity and paying taxes - I have no way to divide Obama's America and the experiences of being a person out in the world.
I used to think that it was college and post-college working life that just exposed me to more people and sort of woke me up to the presence of racism; but now I wonder if it was just that these shifts were happening at the same time.
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