by Keith Boykin
The earliest experience I remember with this evanescent wokeness was in 1984, in the same year I made my first trip to New York City with my college track team. That October, NYPD officers burst into the apartment of a sixty-six-year-old Black woman named Eleanor Bumpurs. She had a history of mental illness and was being forcibly evicted from her apartment in a Bronx public housing project because she was four months behind on her monthly rent of $98.65. When she refused to leave and pulled out a kitchen knife, police officer Stephen Sullivan blasted her with two fatal bullets from a twelve-gauge single-barrel shotgun.
Then, two months later, just days before Christmas, a thirty-seven-year-old white man boarded a downtown Number 2 train at the 14th Street Station in Manhattan and shot four Black teenagers with an illegal .38 caliber handgun. The shooter, Bernhard Goetz, claimed he was acting in self-defense, but he admitted that he shot one of the victims, eighteen-year-old Darrell Cabey, a second time after their initial interaction. “You seem to be all right,” Goetz told Cabey. “Here’s another.” That second shot severed Cabey’s spinal cord and left him paralyzed, yet a New York criminal court jury acquitted Goetz on charges of attempted murder and first-degree assault and only convicted him on a minor gun-possession charge.
Year after year, there came a new outrage, a new short-lived period of public alarm and another failure to follow through with substantive change. It did not matter if a Democrat or a Republican sat in the mayor’s office, the governor’s mansion, or the White House. It did not matter if the nation’s political leaders were Black or white. Nor, unfortunately, did it matter if the police chiefs or the officers in many of these incidents were Black, Hispanic, or white. Black lives were routinely devalued everywhere, and episodes of outrage and consciousness began happening with greater frequency as the years passed.
It happened in 1985, when police dropped a bomb on a residential building occupied by members of a Black organization called MOVE and destroyed sixty-one homes in a West Philadelphia neighborhood. It happened in 1989 when officials wrongly accused and convicted five Black and brown teenagers of a rape in New York City’s Central Park. It happened in 1991 when police were caught on camera beating unarmed motorist Rodney King in Los Angeles. It happened in 1997 when officers sodomized a young Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima in New York. It happened in 1999 when police fired forty-one shots at unarmed Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo in New York. It happened in 2006 when the same police department fired fifty shots at a car in Queens and killed Sean Bell the morning before his wedding. It happened in 2012 when an overzealous neighborhood watchman racially profiled seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, and killed him. It happened in 2014 when police in Ferguson, Missouri, killed eighteen-year-old Michael Brown and again when officers in Cleveland, Ohio, killed twelve-year-old Tamir Rice. In happened in 2015 when Sandra Bland died in police custody in Waller County, Texas, and Freddie Gray was killed in police custody in Baltimore, and, most notoriously, when a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist killed nine African Americans during a Bible study at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina. It happened in 2016 when police killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop in Minnesota while his partner and his four-year-old daughter watched in horror. It happened in 2017, when tiki-torch–bearing white supremacists marched through the streets of Charlottesville. And it happened again and again until 2020, when Breonna Taylor was shot and killed by officers in Louisville and unarmed George Floyd was slowly and publicly executed in broad daylight by Minneapolis police officers.
At various points of crisis, when all other options had been exhausted, the nation would consume itself with yet another “reckoning” on race. Pontificating politicians would proclaim that this is not who we are as a nation, but in the eyes of many Black Americans, this was exactly who we were. It is who we have been since the beginning. The obligatory moments of racial reconciliation were the exception, not the rule. When white America observed us going about our lives without expressions of visible rage, we were simply wearing Paul Laurence Dunbar’s mask that “grins and lies.”
In many progressive spaces, it has become almost an article of faith that America’s original sin was slavery. I do not entirely disagree with this analysis, but I wonder if it oversimplifies a larger truth. I suspect that racism, or, more specifically, white supremacy, was the nation’s original sin. This is not to negate Ibram X. Kendi’s myth-busting research that racist policies preceded racist ideas. Rather, I suggest a broader observation that those racist policies were more expansive than the institution of slavery.
The European colonizers who settled in America did not invent the social construct of race, and they were not the first to hold racist beliefs, but the practice of white supremacy has been a primary feature of colonized America since its inception. From the removal and genocidal extermination of Indigenous people, one can trace a direct line to the importation, enslavement, and segregation of African Americans, the exclusion of Chinese immigrants, the internment of Japanese Americans, and the construction of an impractical wall on the southern border to keep out Latin Americans.
But as the nation grew and evolved, the federal government that authorized many of these racist policies maintained an uneven record of atonement for the atrocities committed in its name. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, for example, formally apologized to Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated in internment camps from 1942 to 1945 and compensated more than sixty thousand survivors and their heirs with monetary reparations. One year after Congress passed that law, US Representative John Conyers of Michigan introduced a similar but far more modest bill simply to establish a commission to study and develop reparations proposals for African Americans. The bill went nowhere. He introduced it again in the next legislative session. Again, it went nowhere. He tried a third time in the following session. It, too, failed to win passage. Congressman Conyers continued to introduce his reparations bill in every legislative session between 1989 and 2017, when he left office. The bill never passed. It did not pass when Democrats controlled Congress or when Republicans held power. Nor did it pass when the first Black president took office, nor at any point during his terms.
In roughly the same period of time from when the Civil Liberties Act was first passed by the House of Representatives in the summer of 1987 to the last time Conyers introduced his own reparations bill in 2017, I worked for Democratic candidates for president, served in a Democratic White House, and advocated for Democratic policies as a strategist on cable television. My beliefs on race, civil rights, and social policy were almost always more progressive than the candidates I supported, and I convinced myself the party would gradually evolve over time. But after decades of waiting for substantive racial progress, I grew impatient not only with the resistance of my country, but with the timidity of my party. In my youth, I believed the country that twice elected Ronald Reagan was not quite ready to accept my radical indictment of centuries of American white supremacy and Western imperialism. As I grew older, I started to appreciate exactly why that indictment was so critical. Try as it may, America will never fully embrace the future until it comes to terms with its past.
This is a responsibility specifically and exclusively for white America.
Back in 2015, on the 150th anniversary of Juneteenth, New York Times columnist Timothy Egan wrote a provocative piece urging President Obama to apologize for slavery. “The first Black man to live in the White House, long hesitant about doing anything bold on the color divide, could make one of the most simple and dramatic moves of his presidency: apologize for the land of the free being, at one time, the largest slaveholding nation on earth.” There was, of course, a seductive and poetic symmetry in the well-intentioned proposal for a Black head of state to lead the nation in apologizing for slavery. But with all due respect, it was not Barack Obama’s place to do so. American slavery was a white institution created by white people for the benefit of white people. It was George Washington, not
Barack Obama, who held more than three hundred kidnapped Black people in captivity and literally took the teeth from some of the enslaved people on his Mount Vernon plantation. No words are strong enough to communicate the countless crimes of slavery, and no Black person should ever bear the burden to apologize for this evil. Even today, the inherited wealth of white America rests on the bloody, buried plunder of Black bodies.
Egan’s argument misses this critical point. Atonement is an act of personal responsibility for white people and white people alone. It must be performed both individually and collectively as a community. And it cannot be delegated to outside representatives.
The concept of making amends for the past is something that most of us were taught in our childhood. If you did something to hurt your brother or your sister, you should apologize. If you took something that belonged to them, you should give it back. It was basic human ethics. But what do you do when someone won’t apologize? How do you respond when they won’t return what was taken? And what if someone else committed the offense long before the beneficiary was even born? If your father stole a bicycle from my father when they were children, isn’t he still obligated to return it, no matter how much time has passed? And if you’re still riding that bicycle that was taken from my family, don’t you bear responsibility as well?
It was not until my adulthood that I realized that the answers to the vexing questions of race in America could have been resolved with elementary school logic. They could have, but they weren’t because a substantial percentage of white American adults would not bind themselves to the basic rules of decorum that they expected from schoolchildren. It was easier for many white adults to deny their privilege than to discard it, and they calculated that it was safer to maintain the status quo than to eliminate it. But this calculation was based on the mistaken belief that disrupting the imbalanced social order posed more of a threat than maintaining it. The truth is that preserving an inequitable status quo to benefit white people actually sustains the conditions for Black and brown hostility and ensures more conflict to follow. Just as dangerously, it also deprives white America of its own opportunity, responsibility, and necessity to atone and make peace with its past.
I started thinking about these ideas around the time I worked for President Clinton and attended church regularly for the first time in my adult life. As a child in St. Louis, I had always enjoyed church, but I had fallen out of the habit in the busy years of high school, college, and law school. Once I settled into my new life in Washington, DC, I was eager to find an inspiring and welcoming place of worship, and my best friend introduced me to his church. Admittedly, the most appealing idea about the church was its proximity to my apartment building near Malcolm X Park. The church was just across the street from me. The major drawback was the faith. I was a lifelong Baptist, and the church was Catholic. I knew very little about Catholicism at the time. I remembered that my younger sister wore a plaid-skirt uniform every day to her Catholic elementary school, and our family would sometimes buy takeout fish and spaghetti at the school’s Friday fish fry. Later in life, I attended Catholic mass with a college roommate once or twice, but I found the service dull and monotonous. Because of these experiences, I was never intrigued by Catholicism until I discovered St. Augustine’s Catholic Church in Washington, DC.
With a mostly Black congregation, a multiracial gospel choir, and three Black priests, St. Augustine’s fascinated me. Compared to the Baptist churches I knew in St. Louis, the services were brief and the attire was compassionately casual. I learned the liturgy, sang the hymns, and discovered new dimensions to my own faith. And, for the first time in my life, I received Holy Communion, a ritual that did not exist in my hometown church. When the parishioners in my aisle at St. Augustine’s stood up, I meekly followed them to the altar and mimicked their actions. My best friend had to explain to me the concept of transubstantiation, afterward. But the most unusual observance in the church was the practice of confession. I had seen the sliding doors of the confession booths on television shows and in movies, but I did not understand why this seemingly antiquated performative ritual was necessary in the modern world. That’s when my friend told me of the seven sacraments in the Roman Catholic Church and listed them off from memory. One of them was the sacrament of penance, and the concept taught me an important lesson about forgiveness.
I had always believed in forgiveness, but that belief mostly focused on the healing of the victim. Until I learned about the sacrament of penance, it had never occurred to me that there might be some orderly process to be taken for the perpetrator to seek relief as well. One of those steps was the act of confession, and it helped me to understand that there could be no absolution without contrition and no contrition without confession.
When I tried to apply the concept to modern life, I understood why atonement was such a critical component for America’s absolution from its “original sin.” The nation would never move beyond its racial division until it confessed its sins, expressed sincere contrition, and took steps to mend its ways. But the notion of contrition contradicted the myth of “American exceptionalism,” that the framers of this country were uniquely wise and that they created an ideal form of government and a land of opportunity unlike any other. Leaders on the left and the right have embraced various forms of this myth. Ronald Reagan spoke of America as a “shining city on a hill,” while Barack Obama argued that “in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.”
Shortly before Obama accepted his party’s nomination for president in the summer of 2008, the US House of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution by a voice vote that apologized for slavery. The Senate passed a similar symbolic resolution the following year. Most Americans, including most African Americans, probably never heard of either resolution. There was no South African–style Truth and Reconciliation Commission. There were no months of public hearings to document the racist policies the federal government implemented for centuries in America. The votes were historic and unprecedented, but they were only resolutions, each passed with no names attached to the votes. At the dawn of the new Obama era, the resolutions felt like hopeful progress to those who knew about them, but reexamined years later, they were more symbolic than substantive, a continuation of the effort to avoid a deeper and still unwanted conversation.
The compromises that Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner condemned at the end of the Civil War had continued long after Robert E. Lee’s surrender. The Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson compromise established a kinder, gentler rebranding of racism under the legal doctrine of “separate but equal” in 1896. Even the Supreme Court’s historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was followed a year later by a less prominent compromise that allowed white school districts time to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” And when the country finally enacted substantive change with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, cynical white political leaders then spent the next half century devising new methods to undermine those laws and perpetuate their privilege through criminal justice policies that fueled mass incarceration of Black people, economic policies that cut off funding for Black communities, and voter suppression policies that disenfranchised Black people.
Throughout centuries of American history, at various intervals when Black people demanded justice, white leaders responded, instead, with a tenuous, negotiated peace. It was precisely for that reason that Dr. King, in his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” expressed his frustration with “the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
This was the cry of the movement for Black Lives Matter—“No justice! No peace.” It was a simple request. You could not expect all Black Americans to continue to go about their business quietly and peacefully while they witnessed their brothers and sisters murdered with impunity at
the hands of the state. When the well-mannered “respectable Negroes” took to the picket lines to protest the latest injustice, it was often politely applauded in liberal circles and quickly forgotten in the course of political inaction. It was only when the “ill-mannered” and “impolite” Black people rose up that the rest of America finally paid attention and recognized the tenacity and ferocity of Black rage.
I saw this in the summer of 2020 as I covered protests throughout New York City. The disorderly protests that defied police instructions, that violated curfews, that shut down buildings and blocked vehicular traffic quickly gained media attention. But the more civil, respectable protests that followed a predesignated, police-approved parade route would rarely awaken the media’s consciousness, absent a celebrity participant. The ruling class had few qualms about respectable civil actions. Such protests served as a useful safety valve to allow the disempowered to blow off steam without threatening the existing social structure. The destruction of property and the violation of rules, on the other hand, would set a dangerous precedent that had to be quashed with “law and order.” Those protests—some of which were infiltrated by disguised white supremacists hoping to provoke a race war—and demands for revolutionary action were portrayed as un-American by the very same people who worshipped the guerrilla warriors and revolutionary fighters who founded America.
Reprimanding Black protesters for their misbehavior provided a convenient deflection from white guilt. White America was more willing to criminalize Black outrage against state violence than to eliminate the initial violence itself. This approach recentered white victimhood by shifting the public debate away from the suffering of Black people to a conversation on the loss of white property. It was also a transparent power play for innocence, and it reminded me of a controversial article I had read years ago.