US President-elect Joe Biden may have promised a “return to normalcy,” but the truth is that there is no going back. The world is changing in fundamental ways, and the actions the world takes in the next few years will be critical to lay the groundwork for a sustainable, secure, and prosperous future.
For more than 25 years, Project Syndicate has been guided by a simple credo: All people deserve access to a broad range of views by the world’s foremost leaders and thinkers on the issues, events, and forces shaping their lives. At a time of unprecedented uncertainty, that mission is more important than ever – and we remain committed to fulfilling it.
But there is no doubt that we, like so many other media organizations nowadays, are under growing strain. If you are in a position to support us, please subscribe now.
As a subscriber, you will enjoy unlimited access to our On Point suite of long reads and book reviews, Say More contributor interviews, The Year Ahead magazine, the full PS archive, and much more. You will also directly support our mission of delivering the highest-quality commentary on the world's most pressing issues to as wide an audience as possible.
By helping us to build a truly open world of ideas, every PS subscriber makes a real difference. Thank you.
NEW YORK – The ferocity of the 2020 presidential election in the United States is not about Donald Trump per se, but about what he represents: the racist structures of power that have persisted in America for centuries, though sometimes in mutated form. The long history of America’s state-sponsored racism will draw to an end in the coming generation, which is why Trump is so strikingly reactionary in his attempts to prolong it. Yet the damage that Trump’s brand of white nationalism could still cause to the US and the world if he wins a second term makes the election easily the most important in modern American history.
Racism was hard-wired into the US from the founding of the American colonies, with their economies built on the enslavement of Africans and the slaughter and dispossession of Native Americans. Slavery became so deeply enmeshed in American society that only a bloody civil war ended it, in contrast to most other countries, where the African slave trade and slave holding ended peacefully.
When the US Civil War ended, a brief period of African-American emancipation during the Reconstruction era (1865-76) gave way to a renewed system of racist repression so encompassing and systematic that it was, in effect, an American apartheid system. The legal racism of Jim Crow in the US South is well known, but the repression and segregation in the North and West, including segregated housing, flagrant job discrimination, poor or no schooling, and systemic failures of justice, were similarly noxious.
We hope you're enjoying Project Syndicate.
To continue reading, subscribe now.
Subscribe
orRegister for FREE to access two premium articles per month.
Register
Already have an account? Log in