by Keith Boykin
“Members of Congress,” the president says, “The state of our union is strong.”
If it seems absurd to imagine women holding the positions of president, vice president, and Speaker of the House, and the majority of the Supreme Court all at the same time, remember that this is precisely how America has operated, with white men in those positions for more than two hundred years. The first woman vice president only took office in 2021. The first woman Speaker of the House took control of the gavel in 2007. And the first woman on the Supreme Court began serving in 1981. For two hundred years before that time, every president, vice president, Speaker of the House, Senate majority leader, and member of the Supreme Court was a white man, even though white men today make up less than a third of the nation’s population. The real absurdity is not the possibility of empowering women and people of color; it is perpetuating an unfair and unsustainable two-hundred-year oligarchy for a powerful minority.
The choice we face now is between fear and love. Fear encourages a scarcity mentality that excludes those most easily marginalized. Love teaches an abundance mentality that embraces the vulnerable along with everyone else. For those of us who are fortunate enough to live in the richest country in the world, a country that has never lived up to its promise of “justice for all,” we have a duty to embrace love and treat all those on our soil with dignity and respect.
In my most hopeful dreams for America’s future, I see a loving, diverse, inclusive, and equitable nation striving to make real the promises of the republic. But in my most discouraging nightmares of the future, I see a dangerous, divided land, rife with fear and violence. Neither of these outcomes is guaranteed. The future of America is not inscribed in stone. It is, instead, what we choose to make it. It is our actions today that will define the world we live in tomorrow.
I’ve watched the world change for the better and the worse during my life. I graduated from college at a time when a concrete wall still separated East and West Berlin and Black South Africa was ruled by a white racist apartheid regime. And when I took my first job after college, the very thought of gay marriage or a Black president was only a distant fantasy for wide-eyed optimists. On the other hand, even during my most pessimistic college moments during the Reagan administration, I never imagined that America would elect an incompetent game show host as president or that he would incite a racist white mob to attack the Capitol.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a Black man in America, it is that time does not heal all wounds. I’ve seen how the unhealed wounds of slavery, segregation, racism, and white supremacy still continue to divide our country, and I know that this pattern will persist unless we change. It is for this reason that Dr. King warned that “time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively.” King cautioned us in 1963 to avoid the “strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills.”
Despite the enormous racial strides we’ve made since Dr. King’s time, America remains just as broken as it was all those years ago. Every day that our pain lingers unaddressed, every day the psychic wounds of war fester unhealed, every day we deceive ourselves to believe that future generations will peacefully resolve the tension, we continue drifting toward dissolution. The changing complexion of America does not ensure a welcoming multicultural and multiracial future. It threatens as much as it inspires.
This has brought on our new cold civil war—a daily series of conflicts and confrontations, big and small, between competing interests and individuals struggling to win control of the future. If a cold war is a state of political hostility between countries without direct warfare, then a cold civil war is a state of hostility between people of one nation without direct combat. Unlike the Cold War of the twentieth century, this cold civil war is not a battle between superpowers but rather a clash among the people of one nation. And unlike the US Civil War of the nineteenth century, it is not a crusade of horses and canons and gunfire but a proxy war of policymakers and citizens acting as satellites in a larger struggle. What connects this cold civil war to America’s bloodiest war is that it is still a war about skin color. And this is the sad reality of modern America. More than a century and a half after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union Commander Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, the thorny issue of racism and white supremacy in America has yet to be resolved.
Now we’ve reached a critical juncture, testing whether we will continue to repeat the mistakes of the past or move forward into a bright new future. As I’ve tried to document in the previous two sections of this book, every approach we have tried in the past has failed to stop our intermittent 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 respond to the crisis of the moment. Which is why I believe there is still a way out.
The lessons from the past teach us that we will not solve America’s race problem in one presidential administration. 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.
As I indicated at the beginning, there is no panacea or magic elixir to solve racism in America. However, I still believe we can move in the right direction if we each take responsibility with constructive steps toward healing and progress. These, again, are the steps: First, white America must atone for a legacy of racism and slavery that still persists today. Second, Black America must hold the dominant political parties and our own leaders accountable to the needs of our community without exception. Third, America, as a country, must embrace a new approach to racial equality that is based on equal outcomes and not just equal access.
Now that we know the challenges, let us begin with atonement.
10
ATONEMENT
Tony was still unconscious when I arrived at Houston Methodist Sugar Land Hospital on a winter Monday afternoon. His heart, lungs, and kidneys had all failed, and although he was only sixty-three years old, the doctors told us he had virtually no chance of survival. He had been in critical condition for nearly a week, and the medical staff asked my mother if she was ready to remove him from life support. She asked for more time, called the pastor of her church to visit the hospital, and consulted with me and my sister. The next day, after hours of prayer, she reluctantly agreed to take a small first step—to remove him from a dialysis machine. Less than an hour later, Tony passed away. The retired Army sergeant had served his country in South Korea and Germany, worked as a correctional officer in a Texas prison, and trained boxers at a local gym, but this was a fight he could not win.
At the same time, more than 1,600 miles away, Calvin Bell started feeling sick in his apartment in New York City. He took a cab to the emergency room at Allen Hospital, a small three-story brick-and-glass building that resembled a suburban office complex. The hospital sat in a tranquil setting, at the northernmost point of the island of Manhattan, where a large creek merges with the Harlem River. There he was diagnosed with double pneumonia, a condition that could have been fatal for others, but as a healthy twenty-nine-year-old and a former master gunnery sergeant in the Harlem Youth Marines, he was, by all accounts, a fighter who was expected to recover. Calvin returned home to rest, but barely two weeks later, he passed out and was rushed to St. John’s Medical Center in the Bronx. He died the same day. An autopsy revealed the cause of death as complications from coronavirus.
We buried Tony on the exact same day that Calvin passed away. Our immediate family gathered for a small private service in the hot Texas sun at Houston National Cemetery. Because of newly implemented COVID restrictions, we were not able to hold a funeral, and no outsiders were permitted to attend Tony’s burial. I wore plastic gloves and
kept six feet away from the cemetery staff as they lowered Tony’s remains into the grave. The brief ceremony lacked all the pomp and circumstance I remembered from the day when my father, William Boykin, had been buried at the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery in Elwood, Illinois, just a few years earlier. This time, there was no motorcade to a committal shelter, no seated ceremony, no folding of the flag, no gun salute, no military formality. Just a box being placed deep into the ground.
Far away from Houston, on that same day that Calvin passed away, a successful lawyer named George Valentine was admitted to a hospital in the nation’s capital. While the city remained largely shut down, George was considered an “essential worker,” and he had continued coming into the office during the height of the pandemic. It was that same dedicated work ethic, along with his colorful personality, that had helped George move his way up from Oakwood University in Alabama to Harvard Law School to become deputy director of the Office of Legal Counsel for DC Mayor Muriel Bowser. But just two days after he entered the hospital, as Mayor Bowser was preparing for her Friday-morning coronavirus briefing, she learned the devastating news: George Valentine had died from coronavirus.
Tony Parker, Calvin Bell, and George Valentine were three Black men who died just days apart at the height of America’s first wave in the global coronavirus pandemic. Tony was my stepfather in Houston. Calvin was the brother of a close friend in New York. George was an old friend from Washington, DC. On March 25, 2020, their stories intersected as George entered the hospital; Calvin took his last breath; and Tony settled into his final resting place.
By the middle of spring, it became abundantly clear that Black and brown and Indigenous people would be the primary victims of the novel coronavirus. In St. Louis, Missouri, an eighty-six-year-old woman named Velma Moody, the sister of Representative Maxine Waters, passed away on May 1 at a nursing home just a mile away from the hospital where I was born. She, like every single St. Louisan who died from COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic, was Black, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported in April 2020. That same month, a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated that more than 80 percent of hospitalized COVID patients in Georgia were Black. In Louisiana, 70 percent of the people who died from coronavirus in the first month were Black, according to The Times-Picayune. And in Chicago, Illinois, 70 percent of COVID-related deaths that first month were Black, according to an analysis from Chicago Public Radio station WBEZ. From city to city, Black people were overrepresented in the daily death toll, and the racial disparities convinced some white Americans that the pandemic was no longer a serious concern. It was almost precisely at that point, as America came to terms with the demographics of the pandemic, that the nation’s tolerance for public safety restrictions began to dissipate. Black and brown lives had become collateral damage, mere casualties to be sacrificed at the altar of the economy. Politicians began demanding an end to the lockdown, governors announced plans to reopen, and the president of the United States defied the recommendations of his own task force in calling for his supporters to “liberate” states that followed his own administration’s guidelines. By June, there was a sharp increase in the number of hospital beds in Montgomery, Alabama, with critically ill COVID patients, 90 percent of whom were Black, according to Jackson Hospital pulmonologist William Saliski. But when given a chance to take action to stop the spread of the virus, four of the five white city council members voted against a simple mask ordinance, while all three Black council members who were present supported it.
The haste to reopen businesses belied the oft-repeated cliché that “all lives matter,” and yet the loss of hundreds of thousands of Americans would not shame the conservative apostles of this fiction. What may have been a mere inconvenience for anxious politicians was an end-of-life tragedy for an untold number of Black Americans. And despite the president’s slander that the virus “affects virtually nobody,” each passing week brought more sad news of death in the African American community.
For every new number added to the daily death toll, there was a buddy, a relative, or coworker who lost a friend, a family member, or a colleague. But as the weeks passed, large parts of the country simply became tired of hearing about those stories and tired of hearing about the pandemic. Encouraged by the selfish and insensitive leadership from the White House, Americans began venturing back outside, confident in the belief that only a few tens of thousands—then, later, hundreds of thousands—would die. And as stories of the ailing and confined victims appeared in the news, more Americans also grew confident that large numbers of the hospitalized and eulogized would not be white. By the end of spring, when more than one hundred thousand Americans had perished, the president flew to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to hold the world’s first large indoor event since the beginning of the pandemic. Among those who attended the mask-optional event was a prominent Black business executive and former Republican presidential candidate. Despite our political disagreements—I had debated him on television before—I found him to be a likable person. But just over five weeks after he attended the Tulsa rally, seventy-four-year-old Herman Cain died of coronavirus.
For the Black community, Cain’s death was met with mixed emotions. Some blamed him and other Black Republicans for the folly of attending an indoor rally in the middle of a pandemic without a mask. Others were more sympathetic to the thought of yet another Black life lost to the virus and noted how the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on people of color had changed the public’s response to it. But Cain’s death also underscored a tragic year of loss for Black America. Just two weeks before he died, two civil rights legends—eighty-year-old Representative John Lewis and ninety-five-year-old Reverend C. T. Vivian—passed away on the same day. And just one month after Cain’s death, forty-three-year-old actor Chadwick Boseman, who starred as the inspiring superhero in the film Black Panther, also passed away.
By election week in November, more than a thousand Americans a day were dying from the virus, and the number of new cases soared to record highs unimaginable during the terror of the spring lockdown. But, as many of us knew all along, the suffering had never been evenly distributed. A Washington Post analysis in November found that Black Americans were 37 percent more likely to die than whites, while other research indicated they were more likely to be employed as “essential workers” in jobs where they could not work remotely.
It did not matter that even the president, himself, had been hospitalized with the virus. He was fortunate to be airlifted at taxpayer expense to an elite military facility where he was given access to the nation’s top doctors and the most advanced therapy. Nor did it matter that he, the first lady, the White House chief of staff, the press secretary, and numerous aides and advisers had all tested positive. They collectively decided to pretend it wasn’t happening. Shockingly, even the president’s top adviser on the pandemic, Dr. Scott Atlas, discouraged Americans from using protective masks and urged supporters to “rise up” against new public health restrictions in Michigan, knowing full well that the threat of insurrection endangered the life of the state’s governor, who had recently been targeted in a kidnapping and murder plot.
Taking their cues from the top, whole parts of the country resolved to move on. Governors ignored federal guidelines and flung open the doors of their states to business. Conspiracy theorists posted widely distributed misinformation on social media that downplayed the severity of the crisis. Even hospitalized patients, dying of the very disease they ridiculed, reportedly crept into their death beds in denial. During the lockdown in the spring of 2020, journalists and commentators began using the term “COVID fatigue.” But by the end of the year, the persistent attempt to diminish the pandemic, long after the lockdowns had ended, was more than just fatigue. It was denial. Millions of Americans decided they no longer wanted to hear about it, so they chose to pretend it did not exist.
America confronted the coronavirus pandemic in much the same way it dealt with the chronic disease
of racism. Our limited attention span could not sustain the commitment necessary to overcome the incessant American desire to forget our uncomfortable past. This is why the nation quickly tried to move beyond the “racial reckoning” of 2020. It was in our DNA to forget. From time to time in our history, a spike in cases or a regional outbreak would prompt focused public attention. But then, after a few days, a few weeks, or, in some cases, a few months, the country’s patience would wear thin and the nation simply moved on to other things.
This pattern has repeated numerous times since the twentieth century. Sparked by some flagrant new outrage, Black America would force the nation to think about the uncomfortable topic it most often avoided. For a few days or weeks, the country would be thrown into a compelling national debate or a “conversation on race.” Top Black scholars and commentators would be solicited to speak on television news programs, at corporate conferences and college campuses. Academic reports and blue-ribbon commissions would issue dire warnings. “The treatment of the Negro is America’s greatest and most conspicuous scandal,” Nobel Prize–winning economist Gunnar Myrdal wrote in his 1944 tome, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. “The United States is approaching a new crisis in race relations,” the Moynihan Report observed in 1965. “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” the Kerner Commission warned in 1968. “America is still struggling with the impact of past policies, practices, and attitudes based on racial differences,” Clinton’s race initiative observed in 1998.
Each time, the reports would propose earnest recommendations to heal the wounds that divide us. Each time, politicians and pastors would deliver eloquent speeches and sermons about racial unity and vow to do better in the future. And each time, the moment would end. We would gradually drift back to our favorite television shows and sports teams and travel plans and office drama and all the other day-to-day activities that typically consume our time.