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Race Against Time
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Copyright © 2021 by Keith Boykin
Cover design by Pete Garceau
Cover photograph © Leandro Crespi / Stocksy
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First Edition: September 2021
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Boykin, Keith, author.
Title: Race against time : the politics of a darkening America / Keith Boykin.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : PublicAffairs ; New York, NY : Bold Type Books, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021006571 | ISBN 9781645037262 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781645037293 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Racism—United States—History. | African Americans—Politics and government—21st century. | African Americans—Social conditions—21st century. | United States—Race relations—21st century. | United States—Politics and government—21st century.
Classification: LCC E184.A1 B695 2021 | DDC 305.800973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006571
ISBNs: 978-1-64503-726-2 (hardcover), 978-1-64503-729-3 (ebook)
E3-20210813-JV-NF-ORI
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction: Our Weary Year
PART ONE
THE HOPE THAT THE PRESENT HAS BROUGHT US 1 From Trayvon Martin to George Floyd
2 Reckoning
PART TWO
THE FAITH THAT THE DARK PAST HAS TAUGHT US 3 The Never-Ending Civil War
4 George H. W. Bush’s Kinder, Gentler Racism
5 Bill Clinton’s Calculated Triangulation
6 George W. Bush’s “Soft Bigotry”
7 Barack Obama’s Unreciprocated Optimism
8 Donald Trump’s White Nationalism
PART THREE
LET US MARCH ON 9 Till Victory Is Won
10 Atonement
11 Accountability
12 Equality
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
Praise for Race Against Time
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Introduction
OUR WEARY YEAR
The year began in a cold, dreary vestibule of a former women’s prison in Mexico City. A few minutes past midnight in the first hour of 2020, I walked through an open cage, past a row of locked jail cells and into the unusual venue of the New Year’s Eve party to which I had been invited. I watched young people in jeans and T-shirts dancing to house music and nonbinary stage performers gyrating their bodies on pedestals. This was not the Mexico of the American-tourist stereotypes of mariachi bands and wide-brimmed sombreros. Nor was it the Mexico that America’s current president had described when he first launched his campaign. It was a country that was evolving with modern times, much like ours, and it reminded me just how much that change frightened so many people in my own country.
I had not expected to start the new year in this space, but like so much of what would happen in 2020, things did not work out as planned. Twelve months of covering an unwieldy Democratic presidential campaign and a pre-Christmas presidential impeachment left me racing to catch my breath in the final days of December 2019. As a reward to myself, I booked a trip to Mexico to relax and prepare for the year to come. I was eager to try a nontraditional celebration venue as a symbol of my openness to the possibilities of a new year, and as I walked from one dark caged room to another, I interpreted my New Year’s Eve adventure as a sign that the year ahead might also be filled with exhilarating new experiences. But, perhaps, I considered later, it was actually an omen that I would soon find myself in jail.
Some time after I woke up from my hangover on New Year’s Day, my travel partners convinced me to take an Uber to the Lindavista neighborhood for yet another unusual activity. This involved a Mexican shaman who cleansed my body with burning sage and instructed me to kneel in front of an igloo-shaped heat lodge and ask Ōmeteōtl, the god of duality, for permission to enter the temazcal. I had never heard of any of these things before, but I gamely went along, crawling shirtless into the cramped space of the igloo until the tiny doors were closed, and I found myself suffocating from the hot, stifling steam of the volcanic rock in the pitch-black chamber.
A few minutes into the ceremony, I panicked and demanded to leave. The shaman tried to calm my nerves, but I was too frightened to relax. I clumsily stepped over the four other people in the temazcal, crawled my way out the door, and exhaled when I finally stood alone in the daylight. When the shaman came out to check on me later, I explained that I have claustrophobia and could not return for the remainder of the forty-minute ceremony. We had a brief discussion and negotiated a compromise. I agreed to return, but only if I could sit closest to the exit with my hand on the door. That simple technique allowed me to relax and survive the remainder of the ordeal. I had no idea at the time, but this experience would also serve as a valuable lesson for the calm I would need to call upon to face the challenges of 2020.
Two days later, I loaded my bags into a car to the airport, as the trip came to an end. I knew I was returning to political drama in the United States that I had successfully avoided for seven days, but I did not know that I, along with everyone else on the planet, would soon find myself unable to travel to international destinations. As the car drove past Parque México, I said goodbye to my peaceful week in our rental apartment in the quiet neighborhood of La Condesa, and I braced myself for the year to come.
Shortly after I arrived home in New York, I started feeling the effects of a strange illness so serious that it left me contemplating my own mortality. For several days, I left the door of my Harlem apartment locked but unlatched in case a friend with a key needed to rescue and transport me to the hospital. With the aid of the Internet, I self-diagnosed my condition as everything from cancer to Montezuma’s Revenge, but I stubbornly refused to see a doctor because I had forgotten to renew my health insurance on the Affordable Care Act exchange. I would be without coverage until February 1.
I blamed myself for becoming so distracted with the impeachment coverage that I forgot to take care of my own needs. Surely, my self-indulgent vacation was the root cause of my sickness, I thought, and I hoped a quick detox and convalescence would cure me. It took two weeks for my condition to improve, but it would take another two months before I would suspect a more alarming explanation for what had happened—that I might have been afflicted with a strange new virus that the world would soon come to know intimately.
During those days of rest and recovery, I also dreaded the exhaustion the next twelve months would bring. I expected that 2020 would be dominated by two stories—an impeachment trial in January and a presidential election in November—and I knew how demanding both of those experiences could be. Only three US presidents had been impeached in history. I had lived through two of those impeachments, and I remembered how the previous Senate trial consumed the nation for five weeks in the winter of 1999. I also remembered that even the most routine election is a monumental undertaking. Having worked on half a dozen political campaigns as an activist and covered six presidential campaigns as a journalist, I thought I knew exactly what to expect—the caucuses, the primaries, the rallies, the conventions, the debates, and the campaign ads, all conducted at the lightning-fast speed of an unrelenting news cycle. What I did not know was that the country was about to experience a dramatic convulsion.
Four cataclysmic crises were about to converge at once. First, we would be thrust into a deadly public health emergency worse than any outbreak since the Flu Epidemic of 1918. At the same time, we would plunge into an economic crisis more disruptive than any recession since the Great Depression began in 1929. Third, a racial justice movement would emerge larger than any since the protests after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. And, finally, we would end the year in a crisis of democracy unlike anything seen in America since the disputed presidential election of 1876. This was not just a once-in-a-century confluence of events; it was a unique moment in our history. Four gigantic tectonic plates would shift at the same time in America, putting into grave doubt the health of our people, the stability of our economy, the safety of our most vulnerable citizens, and the survival of our democracy. The result would shake the foundation of our nation.
Of course, these crises were not simply the fallout of one epic year. They were the outgrowth of a longer national history of a broken health care system, an unfair economic structure, the failure to remedy centuries-old constitutional flaws, and, most threatening of all, the perpetuation of white supremacy. Yet, at some level, they all had to do with race.
This book examines the politics of our darkening America in three parts. In part one, I discuss the four crises of 2020 and how they led to the capitol insurrection of 2021. In part two, I go back in time to explore America’s racist political history and the realignment of the two dominant political parties from the Reconstruction era to the present. And in part three, I propose ideas to move forward.
I argue that the problem of racism in American politics transcends specific political parties and leaders. From the end of Reconstruction in 1877 until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, both major political parties failed Black people. The Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln reneged on its promise to protect African Americans, while the racist Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson didn’t even bother to try. But as the Democrats slowly began to evolve in the 1960s, one could draw a straight line in the Republican Party from Goldwater’s opposition to civil rights in 1964 to Nixon’s “Law and Order” and “War on Drugs” campaigns in 1968 and 1971 to Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” and “States’ Rights” campaigns in 1976 and 1980 to George H. W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” attacks in 1988 to Pat Buchanan’s “Culture War” speech in 1992 to George W. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to Donald Trump’s birther campaign against President Barack Obama in 2011 and his politics of overt white nationalism through 2021. At the heart of the racism of the old Democratic Party and the devolution of the Republican Party was the same concern—the fear of a changing America and the end of white supremacy.
“This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again,” James Baldwin wrote in 1955. Those prescient words from Notes of a Native Son ring truer today than ever before. As America has become blacker and browner, influential forces have tried to turn back the clock to stop the inevitable diversification and potential transformation of the country. From the eighteenth-century founding of the republic to the nineteenth-century Reconstruction era to the twentieth-century civil rights movement, the fear of the collapse of the white state has animated what historian Carol Anderson has appropriately called “white rage.” Throughout a long history of racial upheaval, the trigger for this rage, she wrote, has inevitably been Black advancement. By the time America entered the twenty-first century, each new election cycle and census report left many white citizens so threatened by the nation’s changing demographics that they were willing to enact new restrictive policies to stop the rise of an emerging new majority.
The white rage grew more urgent in 2008 with the election of the first Black president. Although nothing in his proposed platform or his executed policies threatened to restructure race in America, his mere presence signaled a new American future. Those who worried about that future found comfort in his successor, aptly described by author Ta-Nehisi Coates as “America’s first white president.”
In March 2015, three months before Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign, the US Census Bureau projected that America would become a “majority-minority” nation in 2044. And even though white Americans had engineered systems to maintain disproportionate power in the new multiracial democracy, many were still determined to stop this symbolic loss of status. For four years, Donald Trump gave them what they wanted. He governed with the most overt brand of white identity politics of any president in my lifetime, engaging an energetic minority of fearful whites in a last-ditch race against time to stop the progress of newly empowered “minorities” and their allies.
By the end of his final year in office, a cold civil war was well underway.
Fueled by their commander-in-chief, citizen soldiers enlisted in a relentless series of daily skirmishes of microaggressions, racial profiling, shouting matches, and hate crimes, often broadcast on social media and television, and all foreshadowing a larger and more perilous battle looming beyond the horizon.
These are dangerous times.
Despite some signs of progress, America’s story has always been a complicated one, with years of despair and disappointment punctuated by moments of hope and optimism. The same country that enabled state-sanctioned slavery and segregation would one day adopt constitutional amendments and civil rights laws to end those evil institutions. And the same republic that was forged for white men would one day elect a Black man as president and a Black woman as vice president. Nonetheless, each step forward for African Americans threatened to undermine a delicate social order established centuries ago.
When white indentured servants partnered with enslaved Black people in colonial America to resist the socioeconomic hierarchy, planters responded by “luring whiteness away from blackness,” Ibram X. Kendi writes in his book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. By the time Nathaniel Bacon led a rebellion against the ruling elite of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1675, the planter class was so alarmed by his multiracial coalition of rebels that it developed a scheme to co-opt lower-income whites by separating them from African Americans.
Michelle Alexander, in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, has called this scheme a “racial bribe,” which provided “special privileges to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them and Black slaves.” These privileges would eventually give white Americans what legal scholar Derrick Bell has called a “property right in their ‘whiteness.’” As Bell explains, “Even those whites who lack wealth and power are sustained in their sense of racial superiority and thus rendered more willing to accept their lesser share.”
Over time, this “racial bribe” would expand into a broader strategy to invite other racial and ethnic groups to advance “by becoming ‘white,’” Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres write in The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, and Transforming Democracy. But there was a catch. To do so, Guinier and Torres explain, they would have to maintain their “social distance from blackness.”
At the very moment our divided union desperately needed leadership, with four concurrent crises threatening to tear apart the social fabric, we instead got opportunism and demagoguery. Instead of solutions for the health care crisis, we got racist virus blaming, unproven treatments, and antimask messages. Instead of monthly assistance for those struggling through the economic crisis, we got antilockdown protests and attacks on mayors and governors who tried to protect their citizens. Instead of dealing with the racial justice crisis, we got “law and order” tweets, rants about left-wing “terrorist organizations,” and a cynical photo op outside a church near the White House. And instead of dealing with the crisis of democracy, we got a slowdown of mail service, a refusal to accept the election results, and an insurrection at the US Capitol.
Rather than bring us together, America’s president and his enablers used the crises of the moment to exploit the long-standing fears of their majority-white base of voters. Even after Donald Trump had left office, they continued directing their energy to frivolous complaints about “cancel culture” instead of providing serious policy solutions to the crises facing the country. And in one rushed flurry of desperation, they tried to change the rules to stop the new emerging majority. By March 24, 2021, just two months after Donald Trump had skipped town on his successor’s inauguration, 361 bills had been introduced to restrict voting access in forty-seven states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
Race Against Time