by Keith Boykin
I felt a similar sense of disappointment when many of my African American friends and family members cheered the acquittal of O. J. Simpson in his celebrated 1995 murder trial. Their excitement was not based in their belief that O. J. was innocent; many of them thought he was guilty. They were excited simply because a Black man had beaten the white man at his own game. The fact that he had beaten the system with an articulate Black lawyer made the acquittal even more impactful. White men had been raping and killing Black women since the days of slavery, and O. J.’s acquittal felt like a vindication for many people in the Black community. I understood the mentality, but I did not agree with the celebration. I had no special insight into O. J.’s innocence or guilt, but I had no reason to celebrate O. J. Simpson, the man. In my opinion, he had abandoned the Black community years before as he tried to whitewash himself with his career and personal life, and he only reluctantly returned to us when he needed our help to spring him from jail.
Time and time again, we would support prominent Black men, even when they had turned their backs on others in our own community. I saw the same trend with Bill Cosby, who had, inarguably, contributed more positive images of Black culture than almost anyone for at least three decades. Cosby had created TV shows with Black actors, donated to Black colleges, and supported Black causes in a way that earned him his rightful place as a hero in the pantheon of Black celebrities. But how could that history overcome the horrifying allegations that he had drugged and raped Black women? Like Clarence Thomas, Bill Cosby seemed to have become more conservative over the years, and, like Thomas, he cloaked his conservatism in language that invoked the best interest of the Black community. The incarcerated “are not political criminals,” Cosby said in his famous 2004 “pound cake” speech. His remarks were delivered in the same venue where Bill Clinton had staged his “Sister Soulja” moment in 1992 and where George W. Bush delivered his “soft bigotry” speech in 2000. In each instance, they spoke at the NAACP’s annual convention, and in each instance, they saw an opportunity to reach an audience that might be receptive to their messages.
I am not sure if Clinton, Bush, and Cosby knew this consciously, but at some level, each man must have understood a fundamental contradiction about African Americans. Despite the reputation that we are overwhelmingly liberal, the truth is more complicated. In reality, I have found that Black people tend to be politically progressive but socially conservative. You can hear the paradoxical overtones in Black churches, beauty salons, barbershops, and fraternal organizations, where we fiercely defend radical visions of equality and social reorganization but still traffic in the conservative Christian politics of respectability.
In the research for my first book in the 1990s, I came across another example of the paradox. I discovered in multiple public opinion surveys that Black people were as supportive or more supportive than white people of equal rights for LGBTQ Americans, despite the stereotype of Black homophobia. But there was a catch. On one major issue, Black Americans were far less supportive of LGBTQ equality than white Americans—the issue of same-sex marriage. When it came to notions of social justice and discrimination, we got it. But when it came to our vision of morality, we didn’t.
In numerous other examples, Black people could not be pigeonholed into simplistic categories. We could rap along to the lyrics of NWA’s “Fuck Tha Police” but still complain when the cops failed to show up in our neighborhoods. We could complain about harsh prison sentences but still support the death penalty. We could denounce Republican attacks on welfare and still shame people in our own communities for living in the projects. So, it was not surprising that Bill Cosby might find support for his message at the NAACP. It was, after all, not substantially different from the same judgmental message I had heard at a number of progressive Black churches throughout the 1990s.
Cosby’s 2004 speech imagined a scenario in which a Black person was shot in the head simply for stealing a piece of pound cake. “Then we all run out and are outraged,” Cosby complained. But “what the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?” It was a troubling statement, posed in the form of humor. The idea that police officers might be justified in killing a Black person simply because he or she stole a piece of pound cake was inherently problematic and contributed to the view that state violence should be used to resolve deep-seated American socioeconomic problems that Cosby, himself, had been warning about for years. Cosby’s twenty-first-century respectability politics blamed Black people for our own condition without holding white America accountable for their failure to dismantle a racially discriminatory criminal justice system. “We cannot blame white people,” Cosby said in that speech. It was a message he would not apply to himself. Years later, when Cosby was convicted of rape, his first instinct was to blame white people. “This has been the most racist and sexist trial in the history of the United States,” Cosby’s publicist announced, without a hint of irony.
Cosby’s “racism” defense exposed a fracture within the Black community. I’ve encountered quite a few African Americans who think Cosby may be guilty but don’t care because he’s Bill Cosby, and just as many others who don’t want to know if he’s guilty because, again, he’s Bill Cosby. Still others are absolutely certain he’s innocent if for no other reason than because, as I said before, he’s Bill Cosby. A similar community fracture could be seen after broadcast journalist Gayle King’s famous 2019 interview with R&B star R. Kelly. Some attacked her for bringing down a successful Black man, while others focused on Kelly’s long history of questionable behavior.
Black unity does not oblige us to deliver our unconditional support to all prominent or successful African Americans, especially when they do wrong or harm our community. Nor should our pride be reserved to center or elevate cisgender heterosexual Black men above all others. Instead, meaningful Black accountability requires an egalitarian willingness to embrace the most vulnerable among us and to address sexism, misogyny, patriarchy, xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia within our own communities. As law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote in her groundbreaking 1989 article on intersectionality, “If any real efforts are to be made to free Black people of the constraints and conditions that characterize racial subordination, then theories and strategies purporting to reflect the Black community’s needs must include an analysis of sexism and patriarchy.”
I thought about what Crenshaw called the “conceptual limitations of the single-issue analyses” when I participated in the Million Man March in 1995. I joined with Black AIDS Institute founder Phill Wilson, former Cambridge (Massachusetts) mayor Kenneth Reeves, Reverend Rainey Cheeks, Dr. Dennis Holmes, Dr. Maurice Franklin, Steve Walker, Gary Daffin, and hundreds of other Black gay men and a handful of Black women and allies. We marched through the streets of Washington, DC, chanting, “We’re Black! We’re gay! We wouldn’t have it any other way!” Even my heterosexual former law professor Derrick Bell spoke at our rally as an ally. It was a difficult decision to participate because the march was organized by Minister Louis Farrakhan, the controversial leader of the Nation of Islam, who had a disturbing history of sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. Still, I felt that our presence in an openly gay contingent that day sent an unsolicited but powerful and positive message of inclusion. Ten years later, in the summer of 2005, Minister Farrakhan called me up one day to talk about another march. At the time, I was the board president of the National Black Justice Coalition, and he was preparing a tenth-anniversary march to commemorate the first event. But this time, he wanted to recruit Black LGBTQ participants to join.
Needless to say, I was shocked. I had only met Farrakhan once before, and I never expected him to reach out to me, an openly gay man. Still, I followed up on his phone call, and my colleagues Donna Payne, Alexander Robinson, and I met with Minister Farrakhan at a hotel conference room in Washington, DC. We had a contentious meeting. Farrakhan remained calm, but his deputy—a homophobic pastor named Reverend Willie Wilson, the organizer of the march—launch
ed into a bizarre tirade attacking the Black LGBTQ community. At one point, Wilson pulled out a candy G-string from a bag and hurled it on the table and ranted nonsensically about Black lesbian women allegedly using these edibles to lure young Black girls into homosexuality. I stared at him in stunned disbelief, struggling to wrap my head around the surrealism of the experience in which I had found myself.
When the theatrics ended, Farrakhan still insisted that he wanted LGBTQ people at his march and asked me to speak at the event. I had little interest in doing so, and our organization suggested a list of other Black speakers. I had been a Black gay activist for several years at this point, and I was ready to retire from activism and return to politics. But several people in the community encouraged me to accept the offer and use the platform to educate the participants. That never happened. At the last minute, Reverend Wilson pulled the plug on my participation and refused to allow me to speak on stage. Minister Farrakhan was nowhere to be found.
The entire ordeal wiped me out, and it hastened my transition from activism back to politics. But even in failure, it reminded me why it was so important that we hold our Black leaders accountable. Minister Farrakhan had made important contributions to inspire Black people in America, yet his words and his actions still hurt other Black people. For years, he had practiced the same single-issue analysis that Professor Crenshaw warned against, and the effect was to harm his own people who did not fit into his vision of Black patriarchy. It served as a stark contrast to the principle articulated by Dr. King that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
My purpose in raising these examples is not to assess blame but rather to address our own capacity and willingness to hold our community leaders accountable. To be clear, accountability does not necessarily require eternal condemnation. After all, Black people have a long history of forgiveness. I lived in Washington, DC, when the Black community forgave former mayor Marion Barry after he was convicted and released from prison and then reelected him to the same office. But accountability does require a willingness to investigate troubling credible allegations, all with the same presumption of innocence to which any other American is entitled. Most important, if those allegations prove true, accountability requires sincere repentance and atonement from the responsible party. Finally, accountability demands that we practice a prefigurative politics that is inclusive of the most vulnerable people in our communities.
But why is accountability important for African Americans in a discussion about a four-hundred-year history of white supremacy and systemic racism? Doesn’t that put the onus on Black people?
First, if we don’t practice accountability, we will likely repeat the tragic mistakes of the past. We’ve seen how politicians of both parties have failed our communities when we tied our fortunes too closely to theirs. We can’t continue to do this without reward. Lack of accountability will allow charismatic leaders to beguile us again and again, only to wake up four years, eight years, or ten or twenty years later with no substantive progress.
Second, if we don’t practice the politics of inclusion for the most marginalized people in our own communities, it is more difficult to demand that non-Black communities include us. Accountability requires us to represent the interests of those who are most vulnerable, not just those who are most presentable.
Third, when I talk about accountability, I’m not proposing a new iteration of Black respectability politics or the adjustment of Black behavior to satisfy the white gaze. Nor am I suggesting any sort of false equivalence between white atonement and Black accountability. What I am arguing is that we can’t let anyone take advantage of our community and exploit us, either from the inside or the outside. Whether it’s Clarence Thomas denouncing his confirmation hearings as “a high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks,” Donald Trump asking us “What the hell do you have to lose?” or Lil Wayne hawking Trump’s two-page “Platinum Plan” for Black America, we have to be sophisticated consumers of the messages and messengers that surround us. This holds true for people who are Black and those who are not, for those we love and those we despise.
In his 2021 book, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto, Charles Blow makes a provocative case for African Americans to return to the South, which many families fled in the twentieth century. Blow notes that Hispanics will become the majority populations of Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas and the largest racial group in California in the next thirty years, and he argues that African Americans could create our own regional power base by targeting nine specific Southern states in a strategy that he calls “reverse migration.” I think it’s a clever, workable approach to self-empowerment; Blow persuasively argues that Black people could use his plan to elect senators and governors to wield real political power. But even if we implement Blow’s blueprint, we still must hold our elected officials accountable, and we haven’t always done this. Even in our Black congressional districts, we have sometimes continued to reelect long-standing incumbents long after they’ve served their utility to the community.
One of the most difficult challenges that African Americans faced in the Obama presidency was holding a Black president accountable. Many of us were so elated to have one of our own in the White House that we often gave him a pass when we shouldn’t have. I would sometimes jokingly tell my friends that it seemed the only thing that President Obama could do to lose Black support would be to divorce First Lady Michelle Obama and marry a white woman. That may exaggerate the truth a bit, but many of us were reluctant to speak critically about a Black leader who, even if he wasn’t doing everything we wanted him to do, was doing no worse than all the white presidents before him.
I had trouble with this myself. I disagreed with President Obama on a number of issues—his drone policy, capital punishment, reparations, legalizing marijuana, a public option for the Affordable Care Act, negotiating with Republicans on budgets, and, of course, on gay marriage (before he “evolved”). When I spoke out about these issues on social media or on television, I was criticized for bringing down a strong Black man, despite the fact that I clearly supported the president and unapologetically voted for him twice. It was as if any weakness that a Black person exposed in a Black leader’s armor would somehow give ammunition to white people to attack him. This concerned me for two reasons. First, exposing the weakness could actually help our Black leaders by preparing them for critiques that, surely, we weren’t the only ones to notice. Second, as Black people, we have to learn to critique and question any leader, even those whom we support. That doesn’t mean we have to be rude, dismissive, or disrespectful. It does mean we have to hold one another accountable.
Of course, accountability also means that Black people should hold white leaders accountable. On the surface, this sounds easy and obvious. Black Americans rarely hold back in criticizing white people in positions of power when they do wrong. But we do sometimes create exceptions for people we support. Bill Clinton provides a perfect example of this—not because of the adulterous affair that got him impeached but because of his compromises on the crime bill and welfare reform and policies that had a harmful impact on Black people.
One of the lessons we have to learn is how to be critical of the people we support. Political accountability doesn’t mean we stop voting or withdraw from the democratic process. In fact, we have to vote more, not less. But we can’t just vote in presidential elections once every four years. We have to vote in congressional midterm elections every two years, and in local races for governor, state representative, mayor, city council, school board, judge, and district attorney. We must understand that electoral politics alone is not enough to change America and also use our economic power, our personal power, our moral power, and the power to protest in the streets. And to do all that, we must be informed participants in our democracy.
We must also remind the people we elect that we put them in office and demand that they serve our needs. This was true for Bill Clinton. I worked in his administration a
nd voted for him twice because I believed he was the best available option, but I also understand that he was far from perfect and deserved criticism, scrutiny, and pressure on issues where he failed us. The same held true for Virginia’s Democratic governor Ralph Northam, who confessed in 2019 to having worn blackface in the past. We can’t speak with moral clarity against racism in the Republican Party if we don’t speak about it in the Democratic Party.
The problem is that Republicans have not shown themselves to be as principled. They were quick to call for Northam to resign in Virginia but just as quick to excuse Alabama’s Republican governor Kay Ivey when she admitted to wearing blackface. They have learned to use the language of racism almost exclusively as a cudgel to attack Black people and Democrats but not to examine the Republican Party’s own disturbingly racist behavior. For this reason, many Black Democrats refuse to practice “unilateral disarmament” in the nation’s political battles. If they hold Democrats accountable, they want assurances that Republicans will do the same in their party. This is understandable but misguided. Once you start excusing racism in your own party, it makes it difficult to challenge it in another. Opposition to racism must transcend the tribalism of partisan political identification.
This is not the shallow both-siderism that pretends that Republicans and Democrats are the same. They are not. “We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years,” political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote in 2012. “We have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.” Even recognizing the unique dysfunctionality of the modern Republican Party, Black Americans must still hold both parties accountable. Although the outright racism of the Republican Party is in no way comparable to the racial timidity that too often marks the Democratic Party, neither major party—nor any other party—should ever escape accountability. The long history of outright racism in the Democratic Party from 1828 to 1964 and in the Republican Party from 1964 to the present should remind us that no party can be fully trusted forever. Parties are not static institutions that are resistant to outside forces. They comprise humans, and in this country, those humans have repeatedly shown themselves willing to sacrifice the persistent demands of Black people for justice to pursue the predictable pleas of white people for peace.