by Keith Boykin
They could not accept the idea that their white racist president had been defeated, that the former vice president to America’s first Black president had received a record eighty-one million votes, that a Black and South Asian woman had been elected vice president, and that a Black man had just been elected as a senator from the state of Georgia. This was the darkening America that they had long feared. It represented a diminution of their power and privilege that could not go unchecked, and incited by their leader, they launched one more desperate sprint in the race against time to stop it. “If you don’t fight like hell,” Donald Trump told them that day, “you won’t have a country anymore.”
I imagine every American president has held racist beliefs at some point, but Donald Trump was the first president in our country’s history to willingly stoke a dangerous race war solely for his personal political benefit. His followers were so emboldened by their president and so blinded by their privilege that they attacked their own country in broad daylight, on live television, in what was supposed to be a heavily guarded federal government building. They did so, knowing full well that their white skin, and the white cause for which they fought, would protect them from bullets and tear gas and night sticks that had been deployed against the peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters outside the White House only seven months earlier.
By the end of the attack, after five people had been killed and numerous others injured, after police officers had been beaten and assaulted by “law and order” Trump supporters, after terrorists erected gallows and a noose outside the Capitol, after members of Congress who espoused “American exceptionalism” had been forced to flee from their seats and evacuate the House and Senate chambers, 147 Republicans in the United States Congress still cast their votes that night to overturn the results of the November 2020 election.
Republicans had already determined years earlier that they could not win elections if too many people voted. That was why they concocted voter fraud conspiracy theories, passed restrictive voter ID laws, reduced the number of polling locations, and cut the number of early-voting days. The Pennsylvania Republican House Speaker Mike Turzai flagrantly admitted before the 2012 presidential election that his state’s new voter ID law would “allow Governor Romney to win the state.” Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry signed a law in 2015 that allowed registered voters to present a concealed handgun license as identification to vote but not a valid student ID from one of the state’s own universities. And a federal appeals court in 2016 found that North Carolina’s Republican voter law was used to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
Donald Trump, who would later become the first and only president to lose the popular vote twice, recognized the problem for his party long before the November 2020 election. As Democratic and Republican states geared up to expand mail voting in the midst of the deadly 2020 coronavirus pandemic, Trump complained that easy access to absentee voting would ruin GOP chances to keep the White House. “If you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,” he grumbled.
When Trump’s reelection campaign failed, the party of white racial resentment could see the sands of time slipping through the hourglass more clearly than ever. They had lost the popular vote in the presidential elections of 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020, and they had little hope of winning in the future without drastic change. Losing Georgia’s Senate seats was the last straw, and Georgia Republicans responded by passing legislation to restrict absentee voting; to limit early voting on Sundays, when Black churches coordinate “Souls to the Polls” campaigns; and to prohibit volunteers from providing water, snacks, or chairs for voters waiting in long lines. Republican legislators followed suit in dozens of other states, as well. If they couldn’t win their race against time with numerical superiority against the emerging majority, they could still rely on voter restrictions, gerrymandering, conservative judicial decisions, and a Constitution written by fifty-five white men in 1787 to ensure decades of white rule long into the twenty-first century.
Republicans had been “preparing for this moment for years,” Ari Berman explained in Mother Jones in 2021. Although Joe Biden won the most votes of any candidate in history, “fifty Republican senators will be able to thwart most of his legislative agenda, even though Democratic senators represent forty-one million more Americans,” Berman wrote. And any action that a Democratic president or Congress might take could be reviewed by a hostile Supreme Court, “even though a majority of those justices were appointed by Republican presidents who came to office after losing the popular vote.”
In the midst of this ongoing power grab, Donald Trump became the first president in American history to be impeached twice. But not long afterward, the same whispers of compromise that plagued the country in 1776 and 1820 and 1850 and 1877 could be heard again. Once again, they tried to prioritize peace over justice in the name of unity. “It’s time to move on,” said Republican Ted Cruz. Trump’s actions were “not great,” Republican Nikki Haley admitted, but “give the man a break.” Republicans in the Senate did just that, and forty-three of the fifty GOP senators refused to convict him in the second impeachment trial. The belated and self-serving postinsurrection Republican calls for unity also demonstrated the way that many white Americans instinctively cling to the performance of innocence. But the nation could not unify by erasing its history. “The president of the United States committed an act of incitement of insurrection,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi responded. But it did not matter. On May 28, Senate Republicans brazenly blocked a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6th insurrection.
America had reached yet another crossroad, forcing us to choose what type of country we hope to become. It was a choice illustrated in the image of a man walking inside the US Capitol, as he came upon the portraits of Southern slave owner John C. Calhoun on the left and Northern abolitionist Charles Sumner on the right and approached a bust of the “Southern strategy” president, Richard Nixon. In antebellum America, Calhoun represented the nation’s immoral embrace of slavery. In the Reconstruction era, Sumner represented the failure of early white liberals to follow through on their commitment to newly freed African Americans. In the post–civil rights era, Nixon represented the willingness of the Party of Lincoln to exploit Black pain for white political benefit. But here was this man named Kevin Seefried, from President-elect Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware, carrying a Confederate flag, and implicitly asking the country if we would continue repeating the mistakes of the past or finally learn from them and change.
It was the first time in American history that the Confederate flag had flown in the United States Capitol—it was yet another battle in our never-ending civil war.
Years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. posed a question for America in the title of a book. It was called, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? It was a question uniquely suited for the country after the passage of two historic laws—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but it also feels appropriate for the changing America of the twenty-first century. Will America choose the chaos represented by the insurrection in Washington on Wednesday, January 6 or the community represented by the election held in Georgia on Tuesday, January 5?
In King’s book, and in a speech he gave about it in Atlanta, he took stock of what the civil rights movement had accomplished in recent years and what was left to do. “We still have a long, long way to go before we reach the promised land of freedom,” King acknowledged. Harkening back to the three-fifths compromise in the original US Constitution, King wrote that this “strange formula” declared that “the Negro was 60 percent of a person.” But he noticed that another “curious formula” had also emerged. This one, he said, declared that a Black American was only “50 percent of a person,” he wrote in his book.
“Of the good things in life, the Negro has approximately one half those of whites. Of the bad things of life, he has twice those o
f whites. Thus, half of all Negroes live in substandard housing. And Negroes have half the income of whites. When we turn to the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double share: There are twice as many unemployed; the rate of infant mortality among Negroes is double that of whites; and there are twice as many Negroes dying in Vietnam as whites in proportion to their size in the population,” King said in Atlanta.
African Americans understand these racial disparities even today. During the 2020 economic crisis, we were reminded of the old adage that we are “the last hired and first fired.” And during the coronavirus pandemic, we remembered the old Negro proverb, “When white America catches a cold, Black America gets pneumonia.” All these years after Dr. King wrote that book and delivered that speech, one thing has not changed. The “curious formula” of racial inequality still exists. Black Americans remain behind white Americans on nearly every socioeconomic indicator. For the average Black American, this racial disparity begins even before birth and continues well after death.
Before a child is born, Black women are less likely to receive prenatal care in the first trimester of their pregnancy.
At the point of birth, Black babies are twice as likely to die when delivered by white doctors instead of by Black doctors.
Even after birth, Black children are more than twice as likely as white children to die before their first birthday.
By the time they arrive in preschool, Black students are nearly four times more likely than white students to be suspended.
Throughout grade school, junior high, and high school, Black students remain nearly four times as likely as white students to receive out-of-school suspensions.
During those high school years, Black teens are less likely than white teens to find employment, even though white families often have more economic resources to support their children than black families.
Black students are also increasingly more likely to attempt suicide in high school.
When the time comes to cross the stage to receive a diploma at commencement, Black students are less likely than white students to graduate.
For those not in school, Black youth are five times more likely than white youth to be incarcerated.
For those who go to college, Black students are more likely to enroll in overcrowded and underfunded open-access colleges.
After starting college, Black students are less likely than whites to receive a bachelor’s degree.
And among all students who score above average on standardized tests, Black and brown students are less likely to attend a selective college.
Back in the workforce, Black students graduate with thousands of dollars more in student loans, on average, than their white peers.
More than a decade out of college, Black women graduates are less likely to have paid off a significant portion of their student loans than white men.
And for households with a bachelor’s degree or higher, the typical white family is sitting on nearly $400,000 of net worth, compared to $68,000 for college-educated Black households, according to the think tank Demos.
But the average Black college graduate still earns less than the average white high school dropout.
Black applicants with no criminal record are less likely to be hired for jobs than white applicants with prior felony criminal convictions.
Perhaps that explains why the Black unemployment rate has stubbornly remained higher than the white unemployment rate for the past five decades.
Blacks are also less likely than whites to own a home and more likely to incur higher debt when they do purchase one.
Black borrowers are more likely to pay a higher amount to purchase homes or refinance mortgages.
Black homeowners are also less likely than whites to achieve this milestone before the age of thirty-five.
As a result of these inequities, the median net worth of Black Bostonians was just $8 in 2017, compared to $247,500 for white Bostonians, according to a report in the Boston Globe. Yes, you read that correctly. “That was no typo,” the Boston Globe headline explained. The median net worth of Black Bostonians was $8. Not $800. Not $8,000. Just $8.
Black and Latinx households are also nearly twice as likely as white households to lack access to indoor plumbing.
And Blacks are more likely than whites to suffer from asthma, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, and heart disease, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
In Ferguson, Missouri, researchers found Blacks were more than 3.5 times as likely as whites to be pulled over by police officers at traffic stops.
In New York City, 87 percent of the nearly seven hundred thousand people who were detained by police during the height of the stop-and-frisk policy were Black or Latino, and 88 percent of them were innocent.
Black people are incarcerated in state prisons at more than five times the rate of whites, according to the Sentencing Project.
And prosecutors are more likely to seek, and juries are more likely to deliver, the death penalty for the murder of whites than for the murder of Blacks.
As we age, more than half of Black Americans will not be able to maintain our standard of living in retirement, while most whites will, according to a 2018 study from the Center for Retirement Research.
Even after we die, Black families are less likely to receive an inheritance to pass onto the next generation.
When there is an inheritance, the average amount for Black families is less than a third of the average for white families, according to researchers at Brandeis University.
From cradle to grave—from childhood to adulthood to retirement, and, ultimately, to death—white Americans benefit from structural societal advantages and Black Americans do not.
What explains the persistent racial disparities in America well into the twenty-first century? The answer by now should be self-evident. America has never resolved the issue of racism and white supremacy. White America has never atoned for the country’s original sin of racism, and America’s government has never followed through on any commitment to make African Americans whole.
For centuries, the nation’s leaders have tried to compromise with half-measures, symbolism, and cyclical moments of feigned reconciliation, each time kicking the smoldering can down the road for another generation to clean up. Now, after hundreds of years of ignoring the simmering fires, the country has finally run out of time.
As America has become Blacker and browner, the combination of fearful whites, angry and newly empowered Blacks, and the racial antagonism coming from what was once the Party of Lincoln has created ideal conditions for conflict, from the daily microaggressions broadcast on social media to the deadly insurrection at the Capitol. Even when Trump had left office, after spending his last year implicitly demonizing Asian Americans by referring to COVID as the “China virus” or “Kung Flu,” America continued to suffer the consequences of his corrosive rhetoric. In one dramatic example, a young white man in Georgia killed six Asian women at three different Atlanta-area massage parlors, and even he claimed his actions were not racially motivated.
But the people who are most angry do not necessarily fit our convenient stereotypes. This is why the list of suspects arrested after the Capitol insurrection included a cross section of America. A doctor. A real estate broker. An Olympic gold medalist. The son of a Brooklyn judge. A former US Marine. An occupational therapist. The CEO of a marketing company. An off-duty police officer. A county commissioner. A mayoral candidate. A former Army veteran. A member of the West Virginia House of Delegates. The lead singer for a heavy metal band. And a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. They are our neighbors, our colleagues, our classmates, the woman seated next to you on your flight and the man standing behind you in the grocery store.
The people who want to disenfranchise millions of Black voters and install an unaccountable racist cult leader will easily blend into the crowd. “They will not come clothed in brown, and swastikas, or bearing chest heavy with gleaming crosses,” the poet Pat Parker warned
in her 1978 poem, “Where Will You Be?” “The time and need for ruses are over,” she wrote. As we should have learned from the examples of Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, and the infamous gun-toting couple who threatened protesters outside their St. Louis mansion, there are no income cutoffs for racism.
This helps us understand why white rage has found its voice in official acts by those in positions of authority—gerrymandering congressional districts to dilute Black power, voter suppression to discourage Black votes, felony disenfranchisement to reduce Black voting numbers, census rigging to undercount Black and brown communities, and stacking the courts with judicial appointments to undermine the decisions of future Black and brown majorities. Conservative elected officials also began a desperate race to stop other social changes taking place in America. In Mississippi, Governor Tate Reeves signed a law banning transgender students from participating in girls’ and women’s sporting events. It was one of seventy-three bills pending in early 2021 that directly targeted transgender people, according to the advocacy group Human Rights Campaign. And when President Biden selected Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to become America’s first Native American cabinet secretary, she too became a target of conservatives.
As millions of white Americans continue to resist any attempt to build a more inclusive nation, a new danger arises with Black America as well. The failure to resolve centuries-old racial inequities, especially in criminal justice policy, creates the conditions for conflict. “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible,” President John F. Kennedy warned in 1962, “will make violent revolution inevitable.” This is the reality that threatens to heat America’s cold civil war once again to the boiling point of a full-on conflict.
But there is a way out of our burning race crisis.
The crisis will not be resolved by symbolic gestures of inclusion or by taking down Confederate monuments that should never have been erected. It won’t be resolved by placing our faith in any particular politician or political party. Nor will it end with well-intentioned economic reform that reduces class-based income inequality while freezing racial imbalances in place.