The Reed Report

5 Things We Can’t Forget About Our Post-Trump Reality

Dismantling injustice is a marathon, not a sprint

Keith Reed
Momentum
Published in
4 min readJan 29, 2021

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Outgoing president Donald Trump addressing guests from a podium on Jan. 20, 2021.
Photo: Alex Edelman/AFP/Getty Images

Six days into the presidency, Joe Biden made a promise unlike any previous U.S. head of state: Under his administration, every branch of the federal government would work toward achieving racial equity in the country.

Now we all know that promises made don’t always equal promises kept. But even presidents like John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama — whom history has granted kind legacies on race — never explicitly tasked the entire U.S. government with chipping away at systemic racism.

It’s four years too soon to measure the Biden administration’s progress toward undoing centuries of racial inequity, but as he chips away at the problem, here are five things that Black folks, Biden, and the country must always remember:

1. Trumpism didn’t die on January 20.

The open racism and xenophobia of the Trump administration didn’t disappear when he left office and got impeached (again). Consider that Democrats actually lost seats in the House, most GOP senators voted against the impeachment despite a literal insurrection that threatened their safety, and people like this are now in Congress. Biden…

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Keith Reed
Momentum

Keith Reed is a writer, commentator and consultant whose work has appeared in ESPN the Magazine, the Boston Globe, Essence, CNN, MSNBC and elsewhere.