Race Against Time

by Keith Boykin

  When an existing social order begins to unravel, it inevitably creates friction for those who most depended on it for stability. Political scientists like Diana Mutz describe this tension as “dominant group status threat,” and author Isabel Wilkerson has connected it to research showing an unusual rise in death rates for middle-aged white Americans starting in the late 1990s and continuing into the Obama administration. “The people dying of despair could be said to be dying of the end of an illusion,” Wilkerson writes in her book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. “They had relied on this illusion, perhaps beyond the realm of consciousness and perhaps needed it more than any other group,” she writes.

  It was precisely because of that illusion of perpetual white dominance that far too many working-class white Americans had been conditioned throughout history to position themselves as the bulwark in defense of an inequitable economic system and an unjust social order. Because of that illusion, they would rather allow hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens to die of a deadly disease than to wear a mask or provide health care for all Americans. Because of that illusion, they would rather enable an imbalanced plutocratic economy than protect fundamental labor rights for ordinary workers like themselves. Because of that illusion, they would rather empower a racially biased police state than resolve the nation’s deep-seated socioeconomic challenges. And because of that illusion, they would rather suspend democracy itself than share their political power with a new emerging majority.

  It’s important to understand that the fear of a darkening America did not begin with the presidency of Donald Trump. These trends have been growing in our country for decades. The sad reality is that America has never reconciled its racial history with its lofty founding promises, and until it does, we are destined to repeat our patterns of crisis and division. In the decades since the civil rights era, our stunning racial progress has yet to eliminate the most staggering racial disparities. Under Democratic and Republican presidents, Black Americans have seen no major structural changes since the 1960s. A few Blacks may have become billionaires, but millions more have no jobs at all. Some have soared to the heights of elected office, while millions of others have been disenfranchised. Two have become attorney general, while hundreds of thousands remain incarcerated. As Black Americans progressed over the decades, white America’s progress offset any potential gains, seemingly freezing the status quo in perpetuity. These disparities contribute to festering resentments among African Americans at the same time that Black advancement generates backlash and rage among white Americans. The result is to create the conditions for dangerous and explosive outbursts of energy from both communities.

  Every approach we have tried in the past has failed to stop these periodic racial crises, and the most common current proposals under discussion will likely fail as well. That’s because most of the approaches are not designed to resolve America’s fundamental race problem. They are designed only to avoid conflict and respond to the crisis of the moment rather than resolve the structural injustice of the system. But any society that consistently prioritizes peace over justice will soon find itself with neither. Which is why I believe there is still a way out.

  If we’ve learned anything from American history, it is that no simple panacea can remedy hundreds of years of oppression. The way forward will require a long-term national commitment beyond the lifetime of any of us alive today. It will require Americans of all races to work both separately and together. And it will require a reaffirmation of the founding principles of our nation.

  Moving beyond our unrelenting race crisis will involve, at least, three distinct and difficult interventions by the white community, the Black community, and the nation at large. First, white America must atone for a legacy of slavery and racism that still persists today. This cannot be accomplished with mere apologies; it requires compensatory action. Second, Black America must hold the dominant political parties and our leaders accountable. This does not mean shifting the burden to Black people to solve white racism; it means we must unapologetically demand that all of our elected leaders, public officials, and those in positions of responsibility serve our needs. Third, America, as a country, must embrace a goal of equality that is race-based, historically informed, and results-oriented. This does not mean everyone should be treated equally without regard to historical inequities; it means our goal must be equal outcomes, not just equal access or opportunities.

  After four hundred years of racial oppression, after nearly 250 years of slavery, after a century of Jim Crow segregation, and after six decades of white resistance to modern civil rights laws, we should know better than to perpetuate the fantasy that equal opportunity, alone, will lead to racial equality. It will not.

  “If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress,” Malcolm X once explained. “If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress,” he added. “The progress is healing the wound that the blow made,” but as Malcolm X reminded us, many white Americans “haven’t even begun to pull the knife out, much less try to heal the wound. They won’t even admit that the knife is there.”

  To make African Americans whole in the country that enslaved and segregated us—that robbed us of our history, our land, our families, our bodies, and our names—the nation can’t just pull the knife out that stabbed us and expect to move on in a newly professed spirit of unity. Instead, we must find a way not just to make Black lives matter, but to make them equal.

  PART ONE

  THE HOPE THAT THE PRESENT HAS BROUGHT US

  “Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.”

  —James Weldon Johnson,

  Lift Every Voice and Sing

  1

  FROM TRAYVON MARTIN TO GEORGE FLOYD

  Three years after I signed up, I still hadn’t figured out how to make good use of an app called Twitter. Although I used it regularly, I felt like I was talking to myself, and nobody was really listening to what I had to say. I was starting to question the utility of this social media outlet until I discovered that it could actually serve as a valuable platform to learn about news that had been unreported or underreported in the mainstream media.

  All this first dawned on me in the early days of March 2012, when I kept seeing the same name mentioned by several people I followed on Twitter. An unarmed Black teenager was killed in Sanford, Florida, by a man who had stalked and chased him. The police knew the identity of the killer, but he had not been arrested.

  The gravity of the story did not register for me at first, but by the time I saw it again, I had become more curious. I wondered why I had not seen this story in the press. There’s no way a man on the street could shoot and kill an unarmed teenager, admit to the shooting, and not be arrested, I thought to myself. That would be a huge scandal. It would be all over the news. A teenager covering his head with a hoodie to protect himself from the rain in his own gated community being gunned down by a vigilante while walking home from a convenience store holding nothing but a can of Arizona Iced Tea and a bag of Skittles? How could that be true and not provoke national outrage?

  Not long afterward, I heard the name again from several other Black people I trusted and followed on Twitter. At this point, the story became impossible to ignore, even if the national news media chose to do so. I started seeing more Twitter posts about the case, and although I wasn’t quite sure what impact it would have, I began liking and retweeting them on my feed.

  One day, a Twitter user I followed posted the exact number of days it had been since the shooting, and yet the killer had not been arrested. The next day, the same user posted the information again with the updated number of days. At that point, I had no special knowledge of the case or new information, so I had no idea what I could add to the conversation. But on March 15, I posted my first tweet about the tragedy. It simply read: “Trayvon Martin Shooter Still Not Arrested.” Only four people retweeted my post. The next day I posted again. “I�
�m still outraged that the publicly known killer of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin has not been arrested,” I wrote. This time nine people retweeted the post.

  I wasn’t having much of an impact, but I decided I would continue tweeting about Trayvon Martin every day until his killer was arrested. Almost everyone else seemed to have the same idea at the same time. An unprecedented national pressure campaign developed overnight. The story blew up, and on March 23, even President Barack Obama weighed in. “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” he said. The same day, NBA star LeBron James tweeted a photo of his Miami Heat teammates wearing hoodies in honor of Trayvon. Finally, on April 11, 2012, George Zimmerman was arrested for the murder of Trayvon Martin, forty-six days after he killed him. A jury that included five white women and one mixed-race woman acquitted Zimmerman the following year, and three Black women—Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi—responded by forming Black Lives Matter.

  A year after Zimmerman’s trial, I read an interview with NBA star Kobe Bryant in The New Yorker. It turned out that Bryant was uncomfortable with the hoodie photograph the Miami Heat released in honor of Trayvon Martin. “I won’t react to something just because I’m supposed to because I’m an African-American,” Bryant explained. I was disturbed and disappointed, and I immediately wrote a column for BET.com critiquing Bryant’s comments. “Kobe, you should sit and listen to the facts before you speak about controversial topics,” I wrote. “But the facts in this case have been known for quite some time, and I can’t find a single public statement you’ve made about it until now.” Not surprisingly, my column met with mixed reactions. Some applauded it, while others attacked me for bringing down one of our Black heroes.

  That same day, Bryant posted a statement on Twitter. “Trayvon Martin was wronged,” he wrote. “The system did not work.” The next morning, he sent me a direct message. He told me that he had posted a comment on Instagram on July 15, 2013, two days after Zimmerman was acquitted. I checked. What he actually posted was an oblique quotation about justice from abolitionist Frederick Douglass, but he never mentioned Trayvon Martin or George Zimmerman by name. I tweeted a copy of his Instagram post and let it go. I had made my point, and I had no desire to spark a public battle with him.

  That was the one and only time I ever had any direct contact with Kobe Bryant, and it was not an entirely pleasant experience for either of us, I’m sure. Which is why I was a bit surprised by the dramatic clutch of emotions I felt when I received a message one Sunday afternoon, six years later.

  It was late January 2020, and I had finally recovered from my mysterious illness. I had just finished texting a close friend about a small party he was hosting for the Grammys that night. I stepped away from the phone for a few minutes, and when I returned, I could not believe what I saw on my screen. He had sent me a news article from TMZ.com with the shocking headline: “Kobe Bryant Dead, Dies in Helicopter Crash.”

  I didn’t believe it at first, but TMZ had a reputation for breaking the news of celebrity deaths. I quickly read the article, then looked on Twitter for more information. The story was already trending, and everyone seemed to be either in shock or denial. I turned on the TV and saw the Breaking News banner. Despite all the information before me, the story did not compute. Kobe Bryant was younger than me. He was not supposed to die. He had so much life ahead of him, I thought.

  I remembered the sadness I had felt when Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, and Prince had died, but, for some reason, those deaths did not surprise me as much as Kobe Bryant’s did. As I sat on the edge of the sofa watching the news and scrolling through my Twitter feed, it finally hit me that this was real, and in that moment, I took off my glasses and cried.

  This was not the way 2020 was supposed to begin. This was supposed to be a good year, when we finally rid ourselves of the menace in the White House, either by impeachment or electoral defeat. If a prominent life had to be sacrificed for the good fortune that 2020 would inevitably bring, why did it have to be a Black prince? And why his young daughter, too? Later that night, as I sat at the Grammy party, I quickly realized the promised escapism of the ceremony would not provide answers to my questions or refuge from my sadness. Alicia Keys, the host for the evening, began the program with a special a cappella musical tribute to Kobe, joined by the R&B group Boyz II Men. “It’s so hard to say goodbye to yesterday,” they sang.

  At that moment, I wondered if I might have been wrong about the year to come. From its very first week, 2020 was no ordinary year. Just three days into the new year, the United States brazenly assassinated an Iranian military general, raising the specter of war. By mid-January, Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial showed no signs of persuading Republicans, who were determined to prevent even a single witness from testifying.

  February defied expectations in a host of different ways, as the impeachment trial concluded with an unwarranted acquittal, an openly gay man won the Democrats’ Iowa caucuses, a self-described socialist won the New Hampshire primary, and a New York billionaire seemed poised to buy his way to the Democratic nomination. All the while, the mainstream establishment candidate for president seemed to be losing everywhere. It was not until the very last day of the month that African American voters in South Carolina rescued the former vice president’s campaign and put him on the path to the presidency. On that very same date of February 29, Leap Year Day, the United States reported its first death from the novel coronavirus.

  The sobering prospect of an impending pandemic seemed to support Senator Bernie Sanders’s argument for universal health care, and I expected the story would become an issue in what was shaping up to be a hard-fought, months-long campaign with former vice president Joe Biden. My assumptions would prove completely wrong. Within a matter of days, the entire presidential primary season would come to an abrupt halt, and within a month, it would become an afterthought.

  It had been fourteen months since Elizabeth Warren launched the 2020 presidential campaign in the midst of a federal government shutdown with a video announcing her candidacy on New Year’s Eve in 2018. Since that time, dozens of people had been killed and injured in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas; Jeffrey Epstein had reportedly died by suicide in his cell; the Mueller Report had been released and downplayed; Donald Trump had tried to pressure a foreign government to manufacture dirt on his chief rival; Britain’s prime minister had resigned; and our own president had been impeached.

  The primary campaign had begun way too early—more than a year before the first ballots were cast in the first caucus—and the seemingly endless procession of unwieldy debates did not inspire confidence. What made 2020 different from past campaign seasons, however, was its diversity of talent. Six women, four African Americans, three Asian Americans, one Latino, and one openly gay man competed for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Yet, despite the growing diversity of the party, two of the whitest states in the country—Iowa and New Hampshire—continued to exercise disproportionate influence as the first to judge the candidates. The overemphasis on these two unrepresentative states forced candidates of color to drop out of the race and misrepresented the political sentiment of a party that had become increasingly dependent on Black voters.

  South Carolina was the first contest in which Black voters made up more than half of the electorate, but by the time voters in that state went to the polls on the last Saturday in February, all four Black candidates had already withdrawn from the race. The candidate who emerged victorious was the man who had served as vice president to the nation’s first Black president. After two prior failed presidential campaigns spanning more than three decades and three consecutive primary losses in his new campaign, Joe Biden finally won the first presidential primary of his life on the last day of Black History Month in 2020 thanks to African American voters in the South.

  When the sun rose on the first day of March, few people could have predicted how dramatically the nation was about to change. While the political world turned its attent
ion to the upcoming Super Tuesday primaries, the World Health Organization was on the verge of declaring a pandemic and a reluctant American president was about to declare a national emergency and shut down the country. On March 1, only a few dozen isolated coronavirus cases had been reported across the nation. By the end of the month, nearly two hundred thousand Americans had been infected. By the end of the year, the number had grown to twenty million.

  The shutdown changed everything. The presidential campaign ground to a halt, and the candidate who lost the first three contests swept to victory on Super Tuesday, suddenly emerging as the de facto nominee. Within days, the public health crisis swelled into an economic catastrophe. Tens of millions of workers lost their jobs. Thousands of businesses shut down. Stock markets crashed. Entire cities emptied out. And the president of the United States, who refused to follow the directives of his own public health officials to wear a mask, took no responsibility for any of it, even as he continued to spread false hope and misinformation from the official podium of the White House.

  By the end of May, as a number of states gradually began to reopen, more than one hundred thousand Americans had already perished over a period of three months, and a weary nation cautiously looked forward to Memorial Day. Yet even as the country hoped the coming summer would turn the page to a better chapter, a new crisis was about to emerge.

  I observed Memorial Day by visiting the Houston National Cemetery with my mom to place flowers on my stepfather’s grave. It was just a plot of dirt the last time I visited, but now it was covered with lush spring grass. As we opened the doors of the car, a maskless middle-aged woman called out to us. My instinct was to dismiss her interruption of our pilgrimage, but my mother carelessly walked over to talk to her, and I followed with a small bottle of hand sanitizer for protection. The woman offered my mom an American flag to place on her husband’s grave and a pair of scissors to cut the flowers we had brought with us. It was an act of generosity I had not expected from a white woman at a military cemetery in Texas, and it forced me to question if I had been too judgmental of other white people in the South.