Race Against Time

by Keith Boykin

  Years earlier, when I was still a student in college, I spent a summer working at a clothing store in a predominantly white area of Georgia. It was just two decades removed from the era of segregated water fountains, and every time I had to serve an old white person, I felt a sense of rage in my body as I wondered if they were the same people who had called my parents and grandparents “niggers.” Over time, my animosity toward old white Southerners evolved into mere annoyance, but in recent years it had developed into something new. I instinctively assumed that the white woman in the Texas cemetery was one of the 47 to 52 percent of white women who had willingly elected a bankrupt, blustering game show host over an accomplished woman with decades of knowledge and experience.

  My visceral reaction and suspicion grew out of a long history of psychological priming. For centuries, white women had repeatedly scapegoated, threatened, and endangered Black lives in service of the white supremacist fantasy that depicted Black males as sexual deviants in lustful pursuit of the white female body. It was two white women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, who lied and helped to wrongfully convict a group of Black teenagers who would come to be known as the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama in 1931. And it was a white woman named Carolyn Bryant whose lie about a fourteen-year-old Black boy named Emmett Till caused him to be brutally lynched in Mississippi in 1955.

  The intuition I felt in the graveyard was not locked in the Jim Crow era. In my lifetime, I remembered how a white woman named Susan Smith had murdered her own children in South Carolina in 1994 and then blamed a Black carjacker for killing them. And in May of 2020, a white woman named Patricia Ripley drowned her autistic nine-year-old son in a canal in Miami and blamed Black men for her crime.

  After years of living in the North, I also knew that this type of racism was not limited to the South. In “progressive” New York City, Linda Fairstein and Elizabeth Lederer prosecuted Black and brown teenagers in the infamous 1989 “Central Park Five” case despite the absence of any witnesses or physical evidence connecting the teens to a rape that they clearly did not commit. The notoriety of that case helps explain why it was so easy for a white man named Charles Stuart to blame a Black carjacker after he killed his own wife in Boston later that same year. Even white men had learned to weaponize white women’s pain.

  On the very same day I encountered the woman in the cemetery, yet another white woman in New York was blaming a Black man for a crime he did not commit. When Amy Cooper went for a morning walk with her cocker spaniel in Central Park, she came across a fifty-seven-year-old Black man who was bird-watching. He asked her to leash her dog. Instead of complying with his request and the park rules, she called the police and filed a false report of “an African American man threatening my life.” Moments later, the 911 dispatcher called back, and the woman elevated the threat level by falsely claiming that the bird-watcher tried to “assault” her. The seemingly casual ease with which Amy Cooper quickly and instinctively lied about Christian Cooper and endangered his life dredged up all that painful history for African Americans of white women scapegoating us for their own transgressions.

  When I realized that many white women have historically identified with their race over their gender, it also helped explain why Hillary Clinton had not been elected president and why no woman had broken that glass ceiling in the century that passed since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in a country where women constitute a majority of the population. Although women and Blacks both remain oppressed in America, white women could escape some of that oppression by aligning with their oppressor in maintaining white patriarchal hegemony. For white women to elect even one of their own to high office would require them to “make common cause” with other outsiders in society, as feminist and civil rights activist Audre Lorde suggested in her book Sister Outsider. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Lorde wrote. “And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

  My mom had never been one of those women who depended on “the master’s house” as her source of support. In her twenties and thirties, she had been a student of the work of Black activist Angela Davis, and eventually she fled her hometown of St. Louis to seek a new life in California. As time passed, I inherited her rebellious instincts and distrust of white Americans and moved to Harlem, while she married a military man and settled into a slower life in the conservative and predominantly white suburbs of Texas.

  Throughout these various chapters in her life, one thing remained consistent—my mom loved to cook for me. She hadn’t cooked as much since she retired, but when she did, it was an expression of her love for those around her. That day was no exception. After the cemetery, we drove back to her house to eat a traditional Memorial Day feast of barbecue, baked beans, and corn on the cob that she had been asking me about for several days. “Do you prefer beef ribs or pork ribs?” she queried. I was never the type to plan my meals days in advance, but I indulged her in the conversation anyway. It was the first indicator in months that normalcy might one day return to our lives. Easter had come and gone with no celebration, and I had not been to a gym, on a plane, or in the studio at the network where I worked since March.

  After three months off the air, I was hopeful that I would be able to work again once I returned to New York. But on the same day I was enjoying the last few hours of downtime with my mom, the nation’s president was posting a gratuitous and racially inflammatory tweet about what he called the “China Virus,” and a set of racial encounters in different parts of the country were about to change the course of the year.

  At the exact same moment that I was scrubbing the barbecue sauce off my plate in Texas, a former Houston resident was sitting in the driver’s seat of a blue Mercedes-Benz SUV at the intersection of Chicago Avenue and East 38th Street in Minneapolis. Employees at a nearby convenience store had just called police to report that the forty-six-year-old Black man had allegedly used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill to buy cigarettes. Yet the man continued peacefully sitting in his car across the street from the store. Minutes later, the police arrived, and Officer Thomas Lane yanked the man out of his car and handcuffed him. Officer Alex Kueng then walked the man to a nearby wall and asked him a preliminary question. “All right, what’s your name?” he said. His name was George Floyd.

  Two more police cars arrived. Officers Derek Chauvin and Tou Thao approached the scene. Minutes later, George Floyd lay face down on the ground virtually motionless. Officer Derek Chauvin brazenly pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck while Officers Lane and Kueng sat on his back and legs. “I can’t breathe,” Floyd pleaded, again and again, at least sixteen times in five minutes. In Floyd’s desperate appeal we could hear the same words spoken by Eric Garner, the Staten Island man who had been choked to death by New York police officers in 2014. George Floyd and Eric Garner were two Black men, both fathers, both in their forties, both killed by white police officers for minor infractions involving cigarettes, and both uttered the same last words—“I can’t breathe.” No three words in the English language could better articulate the suffocation of African Americans living under the burden of white supremacy, and for many of us, Floyd’s death symbolized the ways in which America had repeatedly avoided and ignored our appeals for justice.

  With blood dripping from his mouth, Floyd finally called out to the first person he had ever known. “Mama!” he cried. Moments later, his eyes closed. Then, his body stopped moving. Bystanders who filmed the video of Floyd on the ground urged police to “check his pulse,” but Officer Chauvin relentlessly continued to press his knee into Floyd’s immobilized neck. That knee remained on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, and the disturbing video that circulated on television and social media sent shockwaves across the country and far beyond the shores of the nation.

  Protests erupted almost immediately. The weight of five long months of conflict, controversy, scandal, impeachment, sh
utdowns, layoffs, masks, isolation, and social distancing had already crushed the American spirit. For African Americans, it felt like ancient magma deep in the core of the republic was once again bubbling to the surface to erupt. The knees of the Minneapolis police officers represented the cumulative impact of four centuries of pressure applied to the necks of our Black ancestors, and in a season of unparalleled trauma, years of unreleased energy finally burst into the atmosphere. We had lived through the tragic death of forty-one-year-old Kobe Bryant in California and the murder of twenty-five-year-old Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. And we had experienced the horror of the police shooting in Louisville, Kentucky, of twenty-six-year-old Breonna Taylor, whose death was woefully underreported in March of 2020. And through it all, we watched a deadly virus kill thousands of our sisters and brothers. And now we watched the slow-motion murder of yet another unarmed Black man at the hands of the very people who were sworn to protect us.

  We had already seen a hint of what lay ahead in 2020, when armed white protesters stormed the Michigan State Capitol in late April. Almost every Black person I know immediately understood that the protesters’ act of white defiance was about race, yet a number of well-respected observers in the media seemed reluctant to draw that conclusion.

  The George Floyd story was different. The nine minutes of excruciating video made state-sanctioned torture of Black bodies visible for Americans of all races. This was exactly what Black Lives Matter activists had been protesting since Trayvon Martin was killed. George Floyd’s death was a turning point.

  A few days after he was killed, an autopsy from the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s office revealed that George Floyd had tested positive for coronavirus. We also learned that he had recently lost his job as a bouncer in a restaurant after the pandemic forced businesses to close in Minnesota. This was the moment when the four tectonic plates of 2020 would all collide. George Floyd had been a victim of the nation’s health crisis, its economic crisis, and its racial justice crisis, and in death he would provide the pretext for the president to instigate a new crisis of democracy. In each crisis, the victims were disproportionately Black. And in each case, the common thread was race.

  2

  RECKONING

  The day after George Floyd was killed, I boarded an aircraft for the first time in three months. I wore a cloth mask, a plastic face shield, and disposable gloves on my flight from Houston to Newark Liberty International Airport. I sanitized my seat and tray table with alcohol wipes. I washed my hands repeatedly with soap and water. I kept my distance from other passengers on the plane.

  Despite the steps I took to protect myself from the new threat that plagued us, I knew that at any given time I could still be stopped, accosted, and killed with impunity from the old threat that had never been eradicated. I knew that the federal government’s failure to prevent the deaths of thousands of Black and brown people from coronavirus would not prompt eight congressional investigations, as had the deaths of four white Americans who died in an attack in Benghazi. I knew that the lives of thousands of Black people who had been criminalized during the crack cocaine epidemic in the Reagan-Bush era were more disposable than the lives of white people who were sympathetically eulogized during the opioid crisis in the Trump era. And I knew that no matter how successful I became, no matter how many degrees I obtained, at any given moment, America could remind me that my Black life did not matter.

  Once I arrived, I hesitantly boarded a commuter train from Newark into the city that had become the epicenter of the public health crisis. Anxious to return to my apartment and my normal routine, I soon discovered that my old way of life was impossible. Unlike my mom’s community in Texas that had already begun to reopen, nearly everything remained closed in Manhattan. At first, I was not concerned because I needed time to catch up on work I had been neglecting. But by Saturday, I could hear the voices of outraged protesters chanting outside my window, and I knew I could no longer remain quarantined, sitting behind a keyboard or watching the revolution on a television screen. I left my apartment, ran into the streets, and began documenting the demonstration that spread through Harlem like wildfire.

  The peaceful protesters quickly took control of the main thoroughfares of the neighborhood and marched down 125th Street to the West Side Highway. Because there are only two major highways in all of Manhattan, the protesters’ movement onto that roadway would effectively shut down half of the borough’s high-speed traffic. Undeterred by the prospect of placing their bodies in front of four thousand-pound vehicles racing downtown at sixty miles an hour, hundreds of people proceeded up a ramp onto the southbound highway and forced traffic to a halt. I recorded the event as it happened and posted it online. The demonstrators expanded to the northbound lanes of the highway and shut down all vehicular movement in both directions. I continued recording, posting video and interviewing participants as they proceeded past the celebrated tomb of Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant, past the iconic steeple of the Riverside Church where Dr. King delivered his famous speech against the Vietnam War, and away from the historically Black community of Harlem into the mostly white Upper West Side. That’s when the police arrived.

  The show of force came swiftly. City of New York Police Department (NYPD) vehicles blocked traffic at the 95th Street exit while an intimidating phalanx of officers advanced toward the protesters. I stood near the side of the road in between the police and the protesters to film the inevitable confrontation. When the police approached me, I told them I was with the press. They moved past me but then turned around in a group and advanced on me again. “You’re under arrest,” an officer announced. “I’m with the press,” I repeated. “Doesn’t matter,” an officer said. “You’re going to jail.”

  The police took my cell phone and cuffed me with tight plastic zip ties that bruised my wrists. I learned later that they were actually called “nylon tactical restraints.” Two officers carried me backward to the police blockade, where they removed my mask, photographed me, and stuck me in a sweltering van. I have had several dangerous encounters with the police in the past, but none had ever escalated this quickly. As an editor for my school newspaper, I had once embedded with Black student protesters when they took over the administration building at Dartmouth College in 1986, and as a freelancer, I had been tear-gassed covering protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, but 2020 was the first time in my life I had ever being handcuffed or arrested. My arrest took place just one day after a Black CNN colleague, Omar Jimenez, had been arrested while reporting live on the air from the protests in Minneapolis. He was arrested even though a white CNN reporter, Josh Campbell, was not arrested near the same area. Campbell publicly acknowledged that he had been “treated much differently” than Jimenez, and the televised arrest, along with the disparity in treatment, served as yet another reminder of why the protesters were marching in the first place.

  For some Black men, being arrested had become a grim rite of passage. For me, it was a possibility that I had dreaded for years and a ritual that I had been fortunate to bypass. Since childhood, I have lived with claustrophobia and syncope, and the thought of being locked up and handcuffed has always been particularly terrifying. I did not realize it at the time I was arrested, but George Floyd was also claustrophobic, and he told the police officers about his condition as they tried to lock his handcuffed body in the back of a police car minutes before he was killed. I can easily imagine his horror. I have passed out many times in my life—at my grandfather’s burial, in a crowded Black church with President Clinton, in the middle seat on a transcontinental flight, and in my own home—under less stressful circumstances. As I sat alone in the back of the police van, my mind immediately started to worry about my physical health. I made a point to tell the officers that I could faint at any moment. And when they finally closed the thick metal door, I thought about Freddie Gray, the twenty-five-year-old Black man in Baltimore who died in suspicious circumstances in the back of a police van in 2015.

 
A few minutes later, another unmasked prisoner, a twenty-one-year-old Hispanic man, joined me. We sat only a few feet apart, sweating in the back of the vehicle. No other passengers boarded. The police drove us to East 39th Street, where we were moved to an un-air-conditioned prisoner transport bus and waited for an hour with our hands tied behind our backs as new prisoners were loaded onto the vehicle. Next, the bus drove us to police headquarters downtown, where I was processed, photographed again, and stuck in a jail cell with thirty-four other inmates. After spending time in Texas carefully social distancing and avoiding public spaces, I was now locked up with dozens of unmasked prisoners in the very city that had been hardest hit by the pandemic. I remained in police custody for six hours, uncertain when I would be released or allowed to speak to someone. I was given no food, no phone call, nor any opportunity to contact a lawyer or a loved one throughout the ordeal.

  It was not until 9:30 that evening that my arresting officer finally returned to release me. He gave me two pink sheets of paper—a summons to appear in court for the charge of “disorderly conduct” and another for blocking a highway. The officer escorted me to the door and handed me a property tag to reclaim my bicycle. When I finally stepped outside and took my first breath of freedom, the warm air of the city enveloped me. It had been five months since I had emerged from the confinement of the temazcal in Mexico, and the lesson of serenity I learned from the shaman had served me well. I took my bike and cautiously turned away from the door. Like a newly emancipated slave stepping off the plantation for the first time at his master’s direction, I felt a bit uncertain as I walked to the edge of the station. Only when I exited the gate into the glare of a bright police light and heard the applause of a small crowd of legal observers across the street did I finally relax. I gave my name and contact information to the legal representatives. Then I climbed onto my bike and rode nine miles uptown to Harlem.