by Keith Boykin
It is also for this reason that I believe that some Black people should join the Republican Party. I say this fully aware that it may be too late to salvage the Republican brand, and Black conservatives might be better off joining or starting a new nonracist political party. But for too long, the absence of credible Black voices in the GOP has allowed the party to ignore the concerns of the African American community. To be clear, I am a lifelong Democrat who has no intention of ever becoming a Republican. My great-great grandfather, John H. Dickerson, was the chairman of the 1912 Florida State Republican Convention. He would likely be ashamed of how his party has transitioned. I do not trust today’s modern Republican Party, and I believe it to be fundamentally racist to its core. But I know that not every Republican shares these racist beliefs. The problem is that the Black people who have identified with the Republican Party in recent years are exactly the wrong people to change it. They are the people who enabled and excused the racism of Donald Trump and failed to speak up about the racism of the party’s elected officials from the local school board to the exalted halls of Congress.
In a chilling appearance on the PBS show Frontline in 2016, Omarosa Manigault Newman, the Trump campaign’s director of African American outreach, described Trump’s election as “the ultimate revenge,” in which he would become the most powerful man in the universe. “Every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to President Trump,” she boasted. I’m not even sure Omarosa was ever a Republican. I don’t recall meeting her in the 1990s, but I’m told she worked with me in the Clinton White House. By the time she left the Trump White House in 2017, she finally admitted that Trump was, in fact, a “racist,” just as the rest of us knew all along. Her willingness to play along with Trump’s dangerous politics, however, reflected the shameful and transactional opportunism of the Black Republicans who supported him and continue to support the GOP.
The problem was not limited to Trump staff members, as was sadly demonstrated by Black Republican senator Tim Scott of South Carolina. “Woke supremacy is as bad as white supremacy,” Scott told Fox News in March of 2021. “We need to take that seriously,” he said. Scott’s remarks came in response to comments made by MSNBC host Joy Reid, who said that the sole Black Republican in the Senate stood behind his white counterparts at a press conference as part of an effort to provide “the patina of diversity” to the Republican campaign against raising the minimum wage. No one was violently dragged from their home and lynched because of Reid’s gentle political critique, but Scott claimed to be so offended that he actually likened her mild rebuke to the worst evils of “white supremacy.” White supremacy remains a very real threat in America. We saw it from the deadly protests in Charlottesville to the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol. But “woke supremacy” is not a thing. Scott’s new terminology ranks along with the overused conservative complaints about “cancel culture,” according to Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart. “The purpose of both phrases is to shield folks from criticism when they are called out for their actions or their deeply ignorant musings that peddle in racism, xenophobia, or misogyny,” Capehart writes.
Tim Scott’s remarks were also reminiscent of Black Republican Ben Carson, who complained in 2013 that “Obamacare is really, I think, the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.” In Carson’s twisted vision of American history, providing health care to millions of Americans like myself was worse than the lynchings, voter suppression, assassinations, church bombings, police shootings, and mass-incarceration policies that had hurt and killed Black people since the end of the Civil War.
Years ago, a Black friend from law school revealed to me that he was thinking of becoming a Republican, not because he agreed with the party, but because, he said, “the line is shorter” than in the Democratic Party for ambitious young Black people who want to rise to the top in politics. When I say we need Black Republicans, I don’t mean Black Republicans like the ones I’ve just mentioned. Instead, I’m thinking of a line that I once heard in a speech from openly gay Representative Barney Frank. The problem with these gay Republicans, Frank said, is that they spend all their time selling the idea of the Republican Party to gay people instead of selling the idea of gay people to the Republican Party. This, too, is the problem with so many of today’s Black Republicans. Instead of trying to convince Black people to support Republicans, they should start spending their time convincing Republicans to support Black people.
This is why I believe that when Black people gain access to power, we should not be afraid to use it to advance our community’s interests, and we should not be concerned when white people inevitably accuse us of being biased for doing so. This holds true for Black Republicans in Congress as well as a Black Democratic president in the White House.
Years ago, when I was deeply involved in the diversity campaign at Harvard Law School, I remember learning that Black businessman Reginald F. Lewis, the CEO of TLC Beatrice, planned to make a significant financial contribution to the school. I suggested to the Black Law Students Association that we ask him to use his leverage to extract a promise for greater faculty diversity. I don’t know if the message ever reached Lewis, but I do know that the campus diversity controversy was national news at that time. I also know that there was no immediate change in the diversity of the faculty around the time of Lewis’s gift. That would come years later. The year after I graduated, however, there was one change on campus. The building where I had once been photographed chasing the dean of the law school across the campus during my first diversity protest now had a new name. It was the Reginald F. Lewis International Law Center. It was, I believe, the only building on campus named after an African American, and it was an impressive accomplishment for the Black Harvard graduate. But for me, it did not feel sufficient. I’ll never know for sure if Lewis understood what we were doing, but his generous gift seemed like a missed opportunity to use Black power to hold a traditionally white institution accountable.
Many years later, when I was working as a commentator for the business network CNBC, I appeared on a show talking about the controversial Troubled Asset Relief Program, known colloquially as “the bank bailout” that bolstered America’s financial institutions during the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009. I made what I thought was an uncontroversial statement that the banking system would have collapsed without government’s support. Not long after the show, while I was riding home that night, I received a call on my cell phone from an unfamiliar phone number. I answered. It was Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase Bank.
I have never met Jamie Dimon and have never given him my phone number. As far as I know, we’ve never even been in the same circle. I know nothing about the man. But he found my number and called me up to yell at me for implying that his bank was insufficiently capitalized. I explained to him that my analysis was the same one that President Obama’s economic adviser Larry Summers had made. “Larry doesn’t know what he’s talking about either,” Dimon shot back. We talked for a few minutes, he hung up, and I never spoke to him again.
I don’t know if Jamie Dimon was trying to intimidate me or educate me. I was never a business reporter, so his tirade had little impact on my subsequent commentary. But it did teach me something about the way that entitled white men exercise their power. It was the way George W. Bush and Donald Trump each lost the national popular vote but governed like they had a mandate from God and the American people. It was the way Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell demanded a power-sharing agreement with his Democratic counterpart to protect the racist-tainted filibuster immediately after the Republican Party lost control of the US Senate in January 2021. And it was that way that hundreds of angry white people stormed the United States Capitol and demanded that members of Congress overturn a free and fair democratic election after their candidate lost by seven million votes.
If white men, who are only 29 percent of the nation’s population but have controlled more than 90 percent of the nation’s power
for four hundred years, can act with such entitlement and privilege, then Black people, after everything we have suffered through at the hands of this nation, should feel no shame in demanding justice for our own community and holding anyone and everyone accountable along the way. That includes the white media executives, like CBS CEO Les Moonves, who knowingly enabled a racist president when he quipped about Trump, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” This is also why I refused repeated requests from Fox News producers to appear on that network after host Bill O’Reilly cut off my mic in the middle of an October 2015 debate because he didn’t like my answer about Black Lives Matter.
As long as white men remain disproportionately overrepresented in positions of power in America, Black people have every right to hold those white men accountable who call themselves allies. And as long as all white people continue to hold white privilege, then we should insist that they use it for good—to eradicate white privilege itself. It is partly for this reason that Michael Eric Dyson argued in 2015 that Hillary Clinton had the potential to do more for Black people than President Obama did. Secretary Clinton could deliver “a presidency built on racial transparency and honesty, one that doesn’t lecture Black people about what they should do to get themselves together, but instead thrives on principled engagement with Black suffering,” Dyson wrote in The New Republic.
I know from personal experience that accountability works. I’ve been held accountable when I’ve done wrong in my life. This public and personal accountability has led me to reconsider my own actions, apologize, make amends, and be a better person. I’ve also watched it work with other people. And perhaps no example is better than my own grandmother. Years after she defended Clarence Thomas and accused Anita Hill of lying, my grandmother took her own step forward. Inspired by the example of younger women in government, my eighty-year-old grandmother ran for office and was elected to the city council of Berkeley, Missouri, a St. Louis County suburb next to Ferguson. And years after we argued about my sexual orientation, my grandmother surprised me again. When I published my first book and visited St. Louis on a book tour, she showed up at the bookstore with several members of her Baptist church. They sat quietly in the front rows as I spoke, and after the event was over, they approached me. I asked them why they came, and they told me that my grandmother, unbeknownst to me, printed up invitations to the book signing, handed them out at her traditional Black church, and asked the church announcer to read the invitation in the announcements the Sunday before I came to town. All this from a religious Black grandmother in the 1990s for a book that was indiscreetly titled One More River to Cross: Black and Gay in America.
I learned from those experiences that when we have the courage to be open and honest about who we are and what we believe, people may not always accept us, but they will respect us more. I learned another important lesson as well. There are no shortcuts on the road to justice. Only when we hold each other accountable will we reach our ultimate goal—equality.
12
EQUALITY
It was well after midnight, and I was in desperate need of sleep. It was almost exactly one year since the day I returned home from Mexico and struggled with that mysterious illness in January 2020. In the subsequent twelve months, every country in the world had been impacted by the spread of the coronavirus. America had erupted into racial conflict. The economy was limping hesitantly into the new year. Nearly four hundred thousand Americans had died from COVID-related complications. And the nation was still gripped by the news of a brazen and unprecedented presidential attempt to overturn the election from two months earlier.
I was tired. Nearly every day there was a shocking news alert waking me up in the morning or interrupting my dinner. I had yet to recover from the first week of November, when I survived an entire week of all-nighters, sitting on my couch flipping between CNN and MSNBC, waiting for projections and election results in obscure counties that I had never visited. For two months, I had paid close attention to electoral college news, manual recounts, court challenges, state certification deadlines, and even county canvassing board meetings, none of which I’d ever bothered to follow in any previous election I’d covered.
This, I told myself, will be my last sleepless night. I waited nervously for an official projection from the results in Georgia, unwilling to accept the confident prediction of the New York Times election needle that seemed to defy historical precedent.
In my mind, I knew it was possible. But deep in my heart, I still feared the worst. With a Black population of 33 percent and an empowered Black community in its capital city, Georgia had real potential to elect Democratic senators, but it hadn’t happened in nearly two decades, as the state trended Republican along with the rest of the South. Even in its Democratic years, Georgia had always been conservative. It was the state where I had once warily eyed old white customers that I served at the Gap clothing store in the Cumberland Mall in Smyrna. It was the state where my family had once lived down the street from former segregationist governor Lester Maddox in Marietta. And it was the only state where I had ever seen a Ku Klux Klan rally in person.
I remained glued to the television, still waiting, until CNN anchor Chris Cuomo walked across the studio and made the announcement: “CNN will now project that Democrat Raphael Warnock is elected to the US Senate.”
I jumped out of my seat. A Black man, who served as the pastor of Dr. King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, had become the first African American Democrat from the South to be elected to the US Senate. He would become only the eleventh Black person in all of American history to serve in the Senate, and all but two of those senators had served in my lifetime. I rejoiced. It was the work of Black women like Stacey Abrams and Natasha Rothwell and many others who had helped turned Georgia blue in the presidential election, and now it was clear that it was not a fluke. If the results in the other Georgia Senate runoff race held up that day, Georgia would become the only state in the Deep South with two Democratic senators—one a fifty-one-year-old Black man and the other a thirty-three-year-old Jewish man. As social media commentators bluntly described it, in the span of two months, the state of Georgia voted for a Black, a Jew, a woman, and a Catholic. All in the land of the old Confederacy.
This will be a historic day, I told myself. Now I can finally turn off the television and go to sleep. It was just after two in the morning on January 6, 2021, and I had no idea what was about to happen next.
I woke up in the morning with a smile on my face. I checked my phone to see if the other Senate race had been called yet and then turned on the news again to see what I had missed overnight. The second runoff looked promising. At any moment, Jon Ossoff was poised to become the youngest member of the United States Senate.
Later that day, Congress met to certify the electoral college results from November. I caught glimpses of the news as I walked past the television in my living room, but I had little interest in watching Republicans make fools of themselves in a futile effort in service of Donald Trump’s delusions. I laughed when I noticed that his protest rally only merited a small mute “picture-in-picture” box on the lower corner of the cable news screen. The spectacle was so outrageous that I couldn’t believe anyone was still dumb enough to have faith in this well-known con artist. Two more weeks, and he’s gone. I ate lunch, took a break and walked to the gym.
The first news alert interrupted Beyonce’s Homecoming album on my headphones. I stared at the words on my phone with incredulity for a moment. Then I opened the TV app and watched the news as I worked out. This can’t be real, I thought. It looked like hundreds of people were trying to break into the US Capitol building. That was impossible, my brain said to my eyes. I lived in Washington for years, and I knew the building was well-guarded and secure. I turned to another channel and the images were even more dramatic. It left me transfixed, sitting on the workout machine, unintentionally preventing anyone else from using the equipment for several minutes. Finally,
I forced myself up, gathered my belongings from the locker room, and ran back home to catch the news. Like millions of other Americans, I would spend the rest of the day in horror as I watched a bloody, violent, and deadly mob of domestic terrorists attempt a coup d’état on live national television.
Like so many other Black people, I had always known this type of mob violence was possible. It had happened many times before in history. In the angry faces of the people storming the Capitol, I could see the images of those who assassinated Dr. King in 1968, who bombed four Black girls in Birmingham in 1963, who lynched Emmett Till in 1955, who massacred Blacks in Tulsa in 1921, who burned down East St. Louis in 1917, who overthrew the government of Wilmington in 1898, and who fled the union in 1861. In my view, the Capitol insurrectionists were the spiritual descendants of the very people who lynched thousands of African Americans when federal troops withdrew from the South.