by Keith Boykin
One day in late 2007, I took a train from New York to Washington, DC, and caught a cab from Union Station to my destination. The cab driver, an older Black man, struck up a conversation with me. I rarely see Black American cab drivers where I live in New York City, so I was particularly interested to hear what he had to say. He told me that most of the cab drivers in the nation’s capital were not Black Americans. As a longtime DC resident, he described himself as part of a dying breed. We talked about our respective cities and chatted about trivial things. And then the subject of politics came up. He told me he supported Hillary Clinton for president. I did not disclose my own choice. I was a TV commentator and had not publicly stated my preference at the time, although I knew which candidate I supported. I had met Clinton and Obama, and I liked them both. As a forty-two-year-old Black man, however, I felt more connected to the forty-six-year-old Black senator. I planned to vote for him, but I would have been satisfied if either candidate had won.
I also knew who I did not want to win. After forty-three consecutive white men as president, I did not want to elect another white man. White men were just 29 percent of the nation’s population but 100 percent of all our presidents. I had even contributed to that trend by supporting Dukakis over Jackson in 1988. But in the two decades that had passed since that campaign, America had changed, and it was hard for me to see how we could continue electing white guys over and over again in a country that was becoming increasingly diverse.
“And what do you think about Barack Obama?” I asked the cab driver. “I wish he would take his marbles and go home,” he responded. His comment stunned me even though I knew that Hillary Clinton enjoyed strong support among Black voters. As late as October 2007, Hillary Clinton held a twenty-four-point lead over Barack Obama among Black Democrats in a CNN poll. But I did not expect the driver to be so dismissive of the candidacy of a Black man who was running a viable campaign and raising a significant amount of money.
Many Black voters admired Obama for his accomplishments but felt the young senator should “wait his turn.” Some wanted to support him but thought white America would never vote for a Black man for president. Others imagined he would be better suited as Clinton’s vice president. And almost every Black person I knew feared for Obama’s safety, worried that an assassin might end his candidacy or his presidency if he advanced too far. Considering America’s troubled racial history, even the most optimistic of Obama’s Black supporters surely must have harbored some doubts as to whether this impossible dream might become a reality.
Having watched his rise from Harvard to the United States Senate, I had confidence in Obama’s abilities to win the support of liberal white voters. But Clinton impressed me too with her grit and tenacity. I saw her as a fighter, and after years of Democrats who seemed afraid to fight for what they believed in, I liked the idea of electing someone who was not afraid of conflict, and at that time, no one had more battle scars than Hillary Clinton. Even when it became clear that Clinton would not win her party’s nomination in the late spring of 2008, she continued to fight on in a way that both impressed and infuriated me. It infuriated me because I felt she might divide the party on the eve of Obama’s nominating convention, but it impressed me because it was exactly the kind of determination that I had wanted to see from Al Gore and Democrats during the lost battle over the disputed 2000 election. The persistence with which Hillary Clinton fought to the end in 2008 is the way I imagine she would have fought against George W. Bush, his brother Jeb Bush, and the five-member majority of the Supreme Court in 2000. Even though I strongly disagreed with her Senate vote to authorize the war with Iraq, I would have gladly supported her if she had won the nomination in 2008.
Obama was different. His recent arrival on the national political stage served as an asset that left him unburdened by decades of baggage that Clinton brought to the campaign. My concern about him was that a candidate with his professorial instincts might be steamrolled in the rough and dirty world of national politics. Then one day during the primary season, I made a comment on television criticizing something he said. Not long afterward, I received an ominous phone call from a law school friend and Obama associate who warned me to be “on the right side of history.” I doubt that Obama knew anything about the call, and I was not intimidated by the message, but in a strange way I felt reassured that there were at least some people in Obama’s corner who understood the gravity of the challenge he faced. Just four years earlier, Republicans had deployed a massive disinformation campaign to portray Senator John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam War veteran and 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, as a traitor to his country. Even though Kerry’s opponent had avoided the draft with educational deferments, this did not stop Republicans from deploying a group of “swift boat veterans” from Vietnam to attack Kerry’s character. If Republicans could “swift boat” a rich, established white guy like Kerry, I could only imagine how they would try to destroy a Black newcomer like Obama.
It was only after Obama won Iowa in early January 2008 that many African Americans first believed he could win. After the Iowa caucuses, Clinton’s twenty-four-point lead among Black voters evaporated, and by mid-January, Black voters in the CNN poll supported Obama by twenty-eight points. Despite the argument that I and others had been making for years to replace the Iowa caucuses with a more representative state, a Black presidential candidate had just won a crucial victory in one of the whitest states in the country.
Although Obama argues in his memoir that he never avoided race in his 2008 campaign, he clearly never tried to engage on that topic until he was forced to do so. The common consensus, he acknowledges in A Promised Land, was that “too much focus on civil rights, police misconduct, or other issues considered specific to Black people risked triggering suspicion, if not a backlash, from the broader electorate.” In order to make a difference on those issues, he explains, he first had to win the election. “I needed to use language that spoke to all Americans and propose policies that touched everyone,” he writes.
One consequence of that approach was that it contributed to the very postracial narrative that Obama despised. When he won the South Carolina primary in late January 2008, Obama walked onto the stage in an auditorium in Columbia and heard the crowd chanting, “Race doesn’t matter! Race doesn’t matter! Race doesn’t matter!” It was a moment of pure elation, Obama remembers in his memoir. “They deserved a victory lap,” he writes, “which is why, even as I quieted the crowd and dove into my speech, I didn’t have the heart to correct those well-meaning chanters—to remind them that, in the year 2008, with the Confederate flag, and all it stood for, still hanging in a state capitol just a few blocks away, race still mattered plenty, as much as they might want to believe otherwise.”
A few months later, we would all be reminded just how much race really mattered. I was live on television, sitting in a flash-cam studio on the MSNBC set in New York’s Rockefeller Center one day when I was told of a video that had just been released. The video showed a clip of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright delivering a sermon denouncing American racism and imperialism. That, by itself, was not news. What made it significant was that Wright was the pastor at Barack Obama’s Chicago church, and now his words had finally forced the conversation that many people had been avoiding. I did not know Reverend Wright personally, but I had previously attended services at his Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. For some reason, it did not occur to me when we were on the air that this was the same church and pastor. The network anchor played two video clips. In one clip, Wright said “God Damn America.” In the other, he said: “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye.”
After the video played, the camera turned to me, and I was asked for my reaction. I knew the video would not be helpful to Obama’s campaign, but I completely misjudged the gravity of the controversy. Except for the “God damn America” line, I didn’t find anything
Wright said to be particularly controversial or unusual. He’s right, I said. The United States did bomb Hiroshima. We did bomb Nagasaki. We are the only country in the history of the world to use nuclear weapons on civilians. I had only seen a short, edited clip of the sermon at the time when I was asked to give an opinion, but even after I saw the rest of the sermon, I failed to grasp the significance. Wright had identified a series of America’s sins and commented about them honestly: “When it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains.”
I heard nothing in Jeremiah Wright’s sermon that I had not heard in dozens of other sermons at Black churches over the years. It was the same litany I had heard in hundreds of conversations of Black people throughout my life. My Black aunts and uncles, cousins, and grandparents in St. Louis, Missouri, would often chastise the country for the racism deeply embedded in it or complain about the racist white people they encountered in their lives. I had an uncle, who worked for a major defense contractor, who told stories of how white people had committed genocide against African Americans. I had an aunt, who worked for the public school system, who frequently called in to a local Black radio show to complain about racist white people. I had a grandmother who spent her entire career working for the federal government but never trusted white people. And I had a great grandfather who was a lifelong St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan, who would sit back in his La-Z-Boy recliner with his chewing tobacco and tell stories of the white people he had encountered as a child in racist Mississippi in the early 1900s or as an adult in segregated St. Louis. Even my own mother, who spent her entire career working for the Department of Defense, had story after story to share of how her white coworkers had often been treated better than the Black employees.
What were we supposed to say? Were we supposed to deny the horrific history and ugly reality of racism to make white people feel more comfortable with their privilege? Our criticism of our country made us no less patriotic. In fact, it made me proud to know that my ancestors, in the face of white supremacist opposition, had been fighting for generations to make America live up to its promise. They had fought against tyranny in our nation’s wars abroad only to return home to a country that treated them as second-class citizens. They had pledged allegiance to a flag that represented a republic that purposefully excluded them from the vast resources built from their own toil. They sang a national anthem that celebrated a battle for a country that enslaved them. And after all the indignities and injustice that they had witnessed and experienced, America should have been grateful that they only wanted equality and not revenge.
Black people knew all too well from personal experience that the sacred founders and heroes of the nation were deeply flawed men, tainted with the stain of slavery, segregation, and racism that they allowed to persist at our expense. And yet the fragile shell of white supremacy depended on our collective historical amnesia, asking us to ignore the genocide of Indigenous people, the enslavement of Black people, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, and the bombing of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Japanese cities. I suppose it is easy to ignore or downplay that history when your people are the perpetrators and beneficiaries of such crimes, but it is much more difficult to do so for people of color who have been the victims of white supremacy and anti-blackness. For white America to ask us to move on and stop talking about the past is like a serial killer asking his victims’ surviving families to stop talking about the people he murdered.
For African Americans, our rage was also complicated by our reality. Because we live in a white-dominated society, many Black people have learned not to communicate our true thoughts on racism in the company of most white Americans. For the purposes of survival, we have trained ourselves not to express our fury in public to our white bosses and managers, to our white coworkers and colleagues, to white police officers and judges, and to others who may have power over us. We talk about these things in safe spaces in private, at family reunions and cookouts, at dominoes and spades games, at barber shops and beauty salons, at Black colleges and universities, in Black fraternities and sororities, in heartfelt conversations with our loved ones, and in our Black churches.
Obama himself acknowledged the existence of these conversations when, in the midst of his presidential campaign, he was finally compelled to deliver a speech on race to address his pastor’s remarks. Speaking to an audience at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Obama delicately and compassionately explained both sides of the race discussion in a way that only he could. “The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour of American life occurs on Sunday morning,” Obama told the audience. He acknowledged that the anger expressed in Black communities is “real” and “powerful,” but in his words, it was “not always productive.” In a flourish that would prove to be characteristic of Obama’s racial equipoise during his presidency, he balanced his condemnation of racism with a recognition that “a similar anger exists within segments of the white community,” where he said “most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race.”
I applauded the seriousness and sensitivity with which Obama approached his speech that day, but I disagreed with what appeared to be an assignation of moral equivalency to the ordeals experienced by the two communities. His careful analysis seemed to discount the reality that, although Black Americans experience the same angst that struggling white Americans do, Black suffering is compounded by the unique and additional burden of racism.
I have to admit that I also had a uniquely personal experience that informed my perspective on his speech that day. Obama stood on the same stage where I had stood just four years earlier as a participant in the Showtime reality television series American Candidate. I was one of ten candidates who traveled the country, giving speeches, holding rallies, answering questions at press conferences, and participating in debates as part of a simulated presidential campaign contest. When my campaign recorded a TV commercial in Washington, DC, I chose the Lincoln Memorial as the location for my spot. It was a special location for me because it was where Dr. King had delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, and I was born on the same day, exactly two years later. But when I mentioned this fact in my commercial, some members of the focus group that reviewed my ad attacked me for “exploiting” my race. Just by mentioning Dr. King’s dream, I was somehow being racially divisive. “If America is truly to be color blind, then we shouldn’t even be considering his race,” a white man complained. “America won’t be color blind for the next 100 years,” a Black man shot back. He was right, and I was pissed. I wanted to argue with the white people who challenged me, but I could not. I was doing very well on the show and had won several of the campaign contests in previous episodes, but that focus group felt like a turning point. Just days after the incident, I stood on the stage at the National Constitution Center for one of the final debates of the show, and by the end of the episode, I was voted off.
What Obama did not acknowledge in his 2008 Philadelphia speech, although he did discuss it in his 2020 memoir, is that white Americans are more often permitted to express their disapproval or outright condemnation of the country without being questioned or policed about their patriotism. When a white person criticizes the country, mainstream white society rarely interprets that critique as a threat to the structure of its existence. I thought Obama might make that point in his race speech when he acknowledged that he already knew that Reverend Wright had been a “fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy.” From there, however, Obama compared his church experience to that of other religious Americans who often disagre
e with their faith leaders. “I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed,” he said. But then Obama tried to separate Wright’s latest statements from his past controversial sermons. The latest remarks, according to Obama, “weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice.” Instead, Reverend Wright “expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country—a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America,” he said. Needless to say, I disagreed.
Obama’s sense of optimism about America’s potential to overcome its problems had become standard political rhetoric for twentieth-century presidents. From Franklin Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, politicians were always pushing the fantasy that there was nothing wrong with America that could not be fixed by what is right with America. It was also, conveniently, the language deployed by Dr. King in his “I Have a Dream” speech, when he called the nation to “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” Democrats had once embodied this sense of political optimism, but by the 1980s, they had become increasingly sensitive to charges that they were unpatriotic and took great offense when former United Nations ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick delivered a speech at the 1984 Republican National Convention alleging that Democrats always “blame America first.”
Conventional wisdom dictated that successful presidential candidates must not disparage America, and, surely, this sense of political reality is part of what motivated Obama to disavow his own pastor. But this rule would not apply to a white man in 2016, when Donald Trump would run an entire presidential campaign denouncing America. While Barack and Michelle Obama were repeatedly required to prove their loyalty and patriotism to their country, Trump and his immigrant wife, Melania, were not. Obama was forced to denounce a pastor not associated with his campaign for saying “God damn America,” while Trump was able to be elected president while using language attacking America that Obama never could. In February 2017, when Fox News host Bill O’Reilly interviewed Trump and complained that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “a killer,” Trump continued to defend the Russian autocrat. “There are a lot of killers,” Trump responded. “You think our country’s so innocent?”