Racism in the USA had been stable until Obama was elected and many of his policies and statements leading up to and during his second term (esp "If I had a son he'd look like Trayvon") helped unwind years of improved race relations.
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Nah, racist cunts blew a fucking gasket at the thought of a black president. All the ones keeping it quietly in check lost the god damn minds when they were told a black man was their leader. It was very quickly made apparent after he was elected, well before he had a chance to make any sort of meaningful impact on... Anything. It's why the birther movement had so much staying power despite no evidence in favor of it and ample evidence disproving it. They desperately grasped for ANYTHING to invalidate his presidency.
Then, rich oligarchs seized on the opportunity to sow division. The Tea Party movement started just about a month after he was inaugurated, and oligarchs poured millions into it while oligarchical corporate media amplified it, and with its decentralized, loosely defined nature, adherents could ascribe whatever beliefs they wanted to it and use it as a way to oppose the dreaded black President.
Note the dates showing an initial improvement after 2008 and then a decline:
Yes, many believed that a black man being elected president was a strong sign that things were improving. I did and still do think it was exactly that. And I think that American oligarchs refused to allow it to continue unchallenged. They rely heavily on division, and they couldn't stand to lose this ancient classic of a division topic. It took a few years and millions, probably billions, of dollars to really stoke things, but it was worth every second and penny because it worked.
They needed it to work because if we're not artificially divided, we might start to realize we're not nearly as different as they want us to believe. If that happens, we might realize what Luigi Mangione has recently shown us. The rich oligarchs are the ones responsible for so very much of our suffering just so they can have more money than they could spend in a lifetime, but they only get away with it if we let them, and we outnumber them by a million to one.