by Keith Boykin
It was 1988, in the early days of the presidential campaign between Bush and Dukakis, and frustrated Democrats could not understand how the incumbent president had weathered so many scandals and controversies. Black conservative writer Shelby Steele offered an explanation in a piece called “I’m Black, You’re White, Who’s Innocent?” in Harper’s Magazine. “I’m convinced that the secret of Reagan’s ‘teflon’ coating, his personal popularity apart from his policies and actions, has been his ability to offer mainstream America a vision of itself as innocent and entitled (unlike Jimmy Carter, who seemed to offer only guilt and obligation),” Steele wrote.
Needless to say, as a Democrat I profoundly disagreed with Steele’s analysis of Carter, and much of the rest of his essay, for that matter. But I could not disagree with his analysis of Reagan. If there was one thing that the Hollywood actor-turned president did well, it was to make white people feel good about themselves. After they had absorbed the shocks of the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the LGBTQ movement, the Watergate scandal, and the failed Vietnam War, Reagan offered ordinary white Americans absolution from their guilt. Under his leadership, they could feel proud of themselves again and did not have to apologize for racism, sexism, homophobia, public corruption, xenophobia, or American imperialism. It was the same mentality that led Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to dismiss Black calls for reparations. “We tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a Civil War, by passing landmark civil rights legislation, elected an African American president,” McConnell said. “I don’t think we should be trying to figure out how to compensate for it.” The Civil War, the Civil Rights Act, and the election of President Obama were all significant milestones in American history, but they did absolutely nothing to compensate Black people for hundreds of years of slavery and segregation. The election of one Black president cannot serve as reparations for forty-three million African Americans. The claim is especially insulting because the majority of white voters did not support President Obama in either of his two elections. They did, however, support his successor, who spent four years trying to undermine almost everything Obama accomplished.
From Reagan to Trump, the most successful white Republican politicians understood at least one important principle—white people don’t want to feel guilty about the past. In fact, the denial of racism and white supremacy in the twenty-first century flows directly from the unwillingness to accept guilt from the legacy of the past centuries. As a result, some white Americans have become more likely to identify Black people as racist than to accept that truth about themselves or their white counterparts. In fact, I have been called “racist” repeatedly by white critics on social media any time I simply mention race or point out a factual racial disparity. But the same critics rarely, if ever, chastise the racist actions of white political leaders that actually damage Black communities.
Not long after the November 2020 election, I found myself back in Texas for a few weeks visiting my mom. I had spent three months living with her after she lost her husband during the coronavirus lockdown in the spring, and this was my first visit back in nearly six months. One Friday morning, as I read the New York Times, I was alarmed to discover that the federal Justice Department had executed yet another inmate overnight. After almost two decades with no federal executions, suddenly they were being scheduled with startling frequency. I had been a lifelong opponent of the death penalty. It’s racially discriminatory; it’s an ineffective deterrent; it’s not cost-effective; and, most important, I believe it’s morally wrong. I had not followed the issue closely in recent years, but whenever I read about a new execution, I would make a point to express my opposition publicly once again to capital punishment. I was also accustomed to being criticized for this opinion.
I learned long ago that friends and family members, Republicans and Democrats, and people of all races supported capital punishment, and they were not shy about telling me they disagreed with my view, especially when it came to difficult cases. When white supremacist Dylann Roof was sentenced to death in 2017 for the Charleston church massacre, I condemned the decision. “Dylann Roof is an unrepentant racist murderer who deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison,” I wrote on Twitter. But, I added, “I remain opposed to the death penalty.” And when white supremacist Daniel Lewis Lee was executed by the Trump administration in the summer of 2020, I spoke out again. “For the record, I continue to remain 100 percent opposed to capital punishment in all circumstances,” I tweeted. “Even for murderers with Nazi tattoos. Even for white racists who shoot up churches. Even in the event of my own death. Abolish the death penalty.” So, when I tweeted about the execution of a Black inmate in November 2020, I expected to generate the same sort of polite mixed response that I had gotten in the past. But I was seriously mistaken.
“Orlando Hall was executed last night,” I wrote. “Hall was a Black man convicted by an all-white jury. He is the eighth person executed this year by the Trump administration. There were no federal executions under Pres. Obama, and Biden plans to end them as well.” That was the tweet. Four sentences. All statements of fact taken directly from the New York Times article I attached. I could not fit all my points within Twitter’s 280-character limit, so I even abbreviated the word “president” in my tweet, even though I generally hate title abbreviations. Then, something happened. That tweet quickly became the most criticized statement I had ever posted on Twitter. More than fourteen thousand people commented. “You are a disgrace,” one person responded to me. “Good riddance,” said many others. You left out the part about how he kidnapped, raped, and murdered a sixteen-year-old Black girl, many critics added. You’re defending a rapist and a pedophile, dozens chimed in.
I made the mistake of telling my mom about the controversy that I had unintentionally generated, and she urged me to post another tweet to explain and contextualize what I meant. I resisted. After years of public exposure, I had learned not to engage these types of rabid detractors, and I felt that responding would only embolden them. But my mom persisted, warning me that I was endangering my life after she saw some of the more violent threats directed at me. Finally, I reluctantly agreed to post a follow-up tweet to clarify my views. “My previous tweet expressed no opinion on the facts of this case, but for the record, I remain opposed to the death penalty under all circumstances—no matter the crime, the victim or the perpetrator. Period.”
Just as I suspected, it only made matters worse. Thousands more tweets came flooding in to castigate me. Soon, the attacks spilled over to my other social media pages. Dozens of people who didn’t follow me started posting disturbing comments on unrelated posts. I reported many of them and deleted the rest. Quite a few others went to the trouble of finding my contact information on my website and sent threatening emails. They called me every dirty name you could imagine. All because I expressed an unpopular opinion—mercy.
The personal threats I received shocked me, but the bloodthirsty demands for vengeance against Orlando Hall worried me even more. Clearly, the crime for which he was convicted was horrific. An innocent Black girl, Lisa Rene, lost her life in a senseless murder, and I grieve for her family and loved ones. Yet, I still believe that a modern, civilized society should deploy other nonlethal mechanisms to avenge the victims and punish the guilty. In the context of capital cases, life in prison, itself, already punishes the convicted with a permanent deprivation of liberty. But it was always easier to build a consensus against the death penalty in the cases where the facts were murky, the crime was questionable, the process was flawed, or the accused was sympathetic. That was never my approach. It seems to me the hard cases are the ones that really test us as a people, and what I learned from my experience questioning the execution of Orlando Hall deeply troubled me about our nation.
As I scrolled through the profiles of the people who posted the most vicious attacks against me, I noticed a clear trend. Many were self-described Christians. Others proudly boasted that “Al
l lives matter.” A lot of them were Trump supporters. But nearly all of them were white, an unusual demographic selection for a commentator whose social media audience skews disproportionately Black. Many of the death penalty supporters who lectured me against ignoring the pain and suffering of a young Black female murder victim were the same people who casually justified the Louisville Police Department’s killing of Breonna Taylor in her own home. They were the same people who called themselves “pro-life.” And, I discovered, they were the same people who believed that killing a Black person in response to the murder of a Black person made them, in their minds, civil rights heroes, and made me a racist.
Aside from the death threats, what was most exasperating during this discussion was the gaslighting commentary that diminished the significance of racism in the criminal justice system and in every other sphere of life for African Americans. It was part of an unmistakable pattern from recent decades. White leaders have devoted prodigious energy to the task of convincing themselves that the social, economic, and legal mechanisms they created that disproportionately impact Black people are not racist because these mechanisms are supposedly race-neutral in their construction. This has been a clever distraction. Policymakers clearly understand that any so-called race-neutral policy or law can be designed or implemented in a race-specific manner. They also know that any purported race-neutral law that freezes in place an existing racist status quo effectively serves a racist purpose. But this rhetorical pretense is designed to force us to debate the presence or absence of racism in every instance. This is a trap that should be avoided.
As author Toni Morrison explained in a 1975 speech,
The very serious function of racism… is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, and so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms, and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
This is also the larger problem for America. These fruitless racial conversations not only trap Black people, they trap white people as well. We squander our time and energy when we engage in these counterproductive debates. We all know that racism exists, and we all know that white Americans benefit from it. Even the white Americans who most adamantly deny the existence of racism against Black people, surely understand this, rendering our debates a performance designed to divert our attention from the need to dismantle white supremacy. Black feminist writer Audre Lorde described it as “an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns.”
It’s time to stop the deflection. White Americans must understand that the process of atonement—the statement of confession, the expression of contrition, the performance of a service for restoration, and the request for absolution—is not merely to mend the victim; it is to heal the soul of the perpetrator. “At the root of the American Negro problem,” James Baldwin wrote, “is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.”
11
ACCOUNTABILITY
I was watching television one afternoon in my grandmother’s family room, riveted by the theater happening in front of me. It was not a soap opera that stole my attention, although I imagined my grandmother was watching one on the TV in her bedroom. It was October 1991, and I was watching a congressional hearing.
I was a third-year law student, visiting St. Louis for a few days to see my family. One of my law professors, Charles Ogletree, was on television. He had only a supporting role that day, but I was excited to see him. He sat behind a distinguished-looking law professor from Oklahoma, whom I had recently come to know from the news. The law professor stood up, raised her right hand, and swore an oath to tell the truth. At that moment, I did not have a positive opinion about the person who administered the oath. He was a senator from Delaware named Joe Biden, and all I knew about him at the time was that one of my coworkers in the Dukakis campaign had been responsible for making an “attack video” that forced him out of the 1988 presidential race. Biden was the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee that presided over the hearing that day, and he took his seat between Senator Ted Kennedy on his left and Senator Strom Thurmond on his right. Every person on the committee was a white man.
The law professor began reading her written testimony. “Mr. Chairman, Senator Thurmond, members of the committee. My name is Anita F. Hill.”
Professor Hill described how she had once worked for Clarence Thomas, who had recently been nominated to the US Supreme Court. She described her working relationship with him as “positive” in the early days and said Thomas “respected my work” and “trusted my judgment.” After a few months, she said, Thomas asked her to go out socially. She declined several times, and that’s when their relationship began to change. In lurid detail, Professor Hill described a disturbing pattern of behavior that she had observed. “After a brief discussion of work, he would turn the conversation to a discussion of sexual matters,” she said. His conversations were “very vivid,” she told the committee, and she explained them in detail.
At some point as I was watching the hearing, I heard the familiar shuffle of slippers coming closer to the family room. Whenever I stayed at my grandmother’s house, she would typically spend most of her time in her bedroom, and every now and then she would walk out to the kitchen or the laundry room. Sometimes she would walk all the way to the family room and stand there for a minute and make small talk. She had been married two or three times, and she operated with the fluidity of someone who knew exactly how to read the patience of a man. But on this particular day she seemed to completely misread my thoughts.
She shuffled into the kitchen, looked into the refrigerator for nothing in particular, and yelled a question into the family room. “Still watching the hearing, huh?” It was obvious that I was, so I shot back a one-word answer. “Yep,” I said, figuring she would retreat to her bedroom after a moment. But she did not. Instead, she walked through the small dining room and to the edge of the family room, where I was seated. She stood for a second as if she wanted to get something off her chest. I didn’t look up or pay attention and kept watching the hearing.
Then she said something I will never forget: “I wish that woman would stop lying about that man.”
I was stunned. I turned to face her. “Why would you assume she’s lying?” I asked.
From my vantage point, Clarence Thomas was the one who had the vested interest in lying. He needed to protect his career against allegations of sexual harassment. Anita Hill, on the other hand, had nothing to gain. She knew she would be vilified by Thomas’s supporters for coming forward, and there was no guarantee that the testimony of a thirty-five-year-old Black woman would have any impact on a group of older white male senators.
My grandmother did not see it that way. Born and raised in segregated St. Louis during the early days of the Great Migration, she had been taught gender roles that centered the “strong Black man” as the defender of the Black community. Although she was a working woman and the primary breadwinner in at least one of her marriages, she still seemed to support the idea that the Black woman’s job was to support the Black man, not only in her own relationship with him but in the community at large. Her support for Thomas was an unexpected expression of what author Kate Manne might call “himpathy,” which she described in the Washington Post in 2018 as “the inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy powerful men often enjoy in cases of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, homicide and other misogynistic behavior.” I supported the concept of Black unity, but I did not subscribe to the view of unquestioning loyalty to Black public figures or of a heteronormative intraracial hierarchy that prioritized cishet Black men above all ot
hers. What made this scenario even more troubling is that the Black man she was defending had a questionable record of defending other Black people, and every indication suggested that he would act against the interests of Black people if confirmed to the Supreme Court. So here we were in an act of role reversal, in which I was the Black man defending the Black woman, and my grandmother was the Black woman defending the Black man.
The very next year, however, when my grandmother attended my law school graduation ceremony, she did not extend the same deference to me. While I sat with my classmates for the ceremony, my grandmother confronted my boyfriend seated with my family and told him that she did not approve of my “lifestyle” and insisted that he give his mother’s telephone number to her so she could have a woman-to-woman conversation about our relationship. When I heard what happened, I confronted my grandmother, we argued again, but she did not budge. It appeared that her values were rooted not so much in deference to Black men but rather in support of the institution of the Black family that she felt was somehow threatened by the recognition of my personal agency.
What concerned me about the conversation with my grandmother, and the conversations I would have with other African Americans in the 1990s, was that we often reflexively defended prominent Black men, even if they had questionable commitments to the Black community. Clarence Thomas, for example, started off as a radical Black nationalist and a cofounder of the Black Student Union at Holy Cross College, which adopted a militant manifesto declaring that “the Black man does not want or need the white woman.” But by 1987, Thomas had evolved into a Black conservative who divorced his Black wife and married a white woman. By the time he was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1991, he had already expressed his opposition to affirmative action and demonstrated his hostility to civil rights laws as the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under President Reagan. Given Thomas’s history, it was tragically foreseeable that the man George H. W. Bush chose to replace Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court would one day cast the deciding vote to invalidate a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.