by Keith Boykin
If we accept the premise of our founding that all Americans are created equal, then we must conclude that persistent inequalities among racial groups—in employment, wealth, health, education, housing, crime, incarceration, life expectancy, success, and achievement—exist solely because of racial barriers and not because of racial differences in talent or capacity. “When you truly believe that the racial groups are equal,” Ibram X. Kendi writes in Stamped from the Beginning, “then you also believe that racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination.” To accept America’s enduring racial imbalance as the natural order of things is, itself, a form of racism. Thus, the new goal of our society must be to eradicate these racial disparities.
We can only eliminate these inequities if we act purposely to do so. This will require a race-based, historically informed, results-oriented fundamental restructuring of the nation’s existing policies to make equality the goal. That means we cannot simply enact new laws and adopt new policies to make life marginally better for African Americans. Instead, we must make Black lives equal with white lives. And we have to maintain these new standards in place indefinitely until the goals are achieved.
This new society cannot be colorblind. It must be color conscious in order to observe, understand, and eliminate glaring and persistent disparities in racial and ethnic groups. In every instance and in every industry where we find inequities, we must ask ourselves difficult questions about the obstacles and barriers that contribute to these differences and then take decisive action to eliminate the disparities. It will not be easy, but neither is the alternative of permanent racial unrest.
It cannot be sufficient to lower Black unemployment or to increase Black household income as long as Black unemployment remains significantly higher than white unemployment and Black household incomes pale in comparison to white incomes. The goal, in every example, must be to put Black and white people in relatively equal positions.
To understand this further, consider the history of Black economic inequality. The Black unemployment rate has never been anywhere near as low as the white unemployment rate at any time since the Labor Department began collecting that data in the 1970s. To put this in perspective, the highest white unemployment rate ever recorded was 9.7 percent in 1982. In that same month, the Black unemployment rate was more than twice as high, at 20.9 percent. In fact, the Federal Reserve estimates the normal unemployment rate for the US economy as between 3.75 percent and 4.50 percent. The white unemployment rate has reached this target in every decade since the 1950s. Yet, in the entire history of Federal Reserve data, the Black unemployment rate has never reached this “normal” level. Even when the Black unemployment rate dropped to a record low of 5.2 percent in 2019, it still remained nearly 53 percent higher than the white unemployment rate at 3.4 percent. This is one of the clearest indicators that structural racial economic inequality has persisted for decades and that it is unlikely to be resolved without race-specific economic remedies.
Similar patterns appear in other areas of social policy. After eight states and the District of Columbia legalized marijuana from 2012 to 2018, the Drug Policy Alliance studied the effects on arrests. Not surprisingly, the number of marijuana arrests dropped in each jurisdiction, but what did not disappear were the racial disparities in enforcement. In Colorado, for example, in the first years after legalization, marijuana arrests for white people dropped by 51 percent, but only decreased by 25 percent for Black people. And in Washington, DC, even after legalization, a Black person was still eleven times more likely than a white person to be arrested for public consumption of marijuana.
Other well-intentioned progressive policies have also failed to resolve long-term racial inequalities, at the same time that those policies largely succeeded in their primary objectives. The juvenile justice movement, for example, has successfully pushed to reduce the number of young people who are incarcerated. Between 2003 and 2013, the rate of youth committed to juvenile facilities after an adjudication of delinquency fell by 47 percent, according to the Sentencing Project. Every state in the union witnessed a drop in its commitment rate. Despite what the group calls a “remarkable achievement,” it points out that the racial disparities in the system did not improve during those years. In fact, the racial gap between Black and white youth in secure commitment actually increased by 15 percent.
Examples can be found again and again throughout American history. Popular race-neutral policies for a forty-hour workweek, the minimum wage, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, unemployment insurance, affordable housing, and public assistance contributed to the reduction of poverty, disease, homelessness, and unemployment in twentieth-century America. What those policies did not accomplish, however, was to eliminate the racial disparities between Blacks and whites in any of these areas. In fact, in many instances, progressive economic policies were accompanied by the perpetuation of racial exclusion.
When President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862, the post–Civil War United States government gave away 246 million acres of land—roughly the size of California, Florida, New York, Illinois, and Ohio combined—to more than a million mostly white families, at the same time it refused to provide the proverbial “forty acres and a mule” to nearly four million former Black slaves.
When Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor advocated for workers’ rights in the early 1900s, the group clarified that it “does not necessarily proclaim that the social barriers which exist between the whites and the Blacks could be or should be obliterated.”
When President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Wagner Act in 1935, he gave workers the right to organize but also allowed labor unions to discriminate against African Americans. When he signed the Social Security Act of 1935, the law excluded agricultural and domestic workers, two groups in which African Americans were disproportionately represented. And when he signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act—often referred to as “the G.I. Bill”—the government gave returning World War II veterans assistance to go to college or buy a home, but it still allowed racist state officials to discriminate against Black veterans.
Later, when President Truman signed the Hill-Burton Act in 1946, he enabled the construction of thousands of new hospitals in underserved communities but at the same time provided grants to racially segregated facilities. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the US government was giving away land and money almost exclusively to white people, neither party centered its political platform on complaints about welfare and dependency. That would come later, and the historical inconsistency suggested to me that America might be a socialist worker’s paradise were it not for the presence of Black people. Even if there had been no racial bias, the history of progressive legislation revealed little evidence that ambitious race-neutral policies could ever eliminate persistent race-specific disparities.
This is a fundamental challenge facing progressives in the twenty-first century. It is perfectly appropriate to pursue social justice policies and economic policies that make life fairer for everyone. But until we address the lingering racial inequality in America, these policies will not depose the existing racial hierarchy. A rising tide may lift all boats, but it will not turn a canoe into a cruise ship. For Black Americans, we have survived for centuries in the functional equivalent of canoes while white America has sailed relatively smoothly, even in sometimes stormy weather, in the comparative comfort of a cruise ship.
When lawmakers have chosen to address racial disparities directly with race-specific policies, they have often faced resistance, from the Freedman’s Bureau during Reconstruction to the debate over reparations and racial equity today. But there need be no inconsistency in embracing broad and inclusive economic policies while also adopting race-specific policies to eradicate persistent disparities.
All of this will require some discomfort, but as Ibram X. Kendi explains in How to Be an Antiracist, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,
” and “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” We can no longer pretend that treating everyone equally will magically lead to equality as long as one group in society continues to benefit from hundreds of years of racial entitlement denied to all others.
President Lyndon Johnson delivered this message to the graduates of Howard University at the commencement exercises in 1965: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
When I speak of equality, I understand that, for many, the term “equity” better explains the principle I am articulating. But I have chosen to embrace the term “equality” because it is the language of our founding document. The equality I speak of is an equality of outcomes, not just opportunities. Equality cannot continue to serve as a convenient excuse to avoid distinctions between racist discrimination and antiracist discrimination. It cannot simply be the act of treating everyone equally today and ignoring the inequality of yesterday. And it cannot be a subterfuge to perpetuate long-standing racial privilege. In short, equality can no longer remain an unattainable ideal; it must become the actual result.
I am under no illusion that the current white majority in America, goaded by desperate demagogues who exploit white racial resentment, will voluntarily surrender what it perceives to be its dominant birthright. “Power concedes nothing without a demand,” Frederick Douglass observed in 1857. But he also understood that “the limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
For centuries, white America has been able to cling to power while safe in the knowledge that Black America remained powerless to challenge it. Yet now, as the information age has exposed irrational fears and beliefs of the past, an emerging multiracial and intergenerational coalition has begun to dismantle outdated shibboleths from our old way of life. The tired, racist messaging that focused on crime, welfare, socialism, atheism, and political radicalism has lost its ferocity for a new generation that finds itself more endangered by police brutality, income inequality, unfettered capitalism, white evangelicalism, and political incrementalism.
What’s happening in America right now is not “cancel culture”; it’s accountability. People who have long been privileged because of their race, their gender, their sexual orientation, their occupation, their religion, their economic status, or their political party are suddenly finding themselves challenged by people who previously had no major platform from which they could object. White people are being held accountable for their daily casual racism. Men are being held accountable for their sexual misconduct in the workplace. Cisgender straight people are being held accountable for their homophobia and transphobia. Police officers are being held accountable for their brutality. Christians are being held accountable for their failure to live up to their principles. The wealthy are being held accountable for their failure to contribute their fair share to the nation. And Republicans are being held accountable for perpetuating an antidemocratic system of government that distorts the will of the new emerging majority of the American people. In their complaints about “cancel culture” and the alleged deprivation of their freedom, many of the people in privileged positions refuse to acknowledge the first fundamental rule of freedom—that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences of your speech.
But this is a debate that Republicans now relish. After spending the 2020 campaign warning the country about “radical Democrats” and “socialism,” they discovered that the Democrats’ economic proposals were actually quite popular. A Politico/Morning Consult poll in March 2021 found that 75 percent of Americans approved of the Democrats’ American Rescue Plan to respond to pressures wrought by the COVID pandemic. The law provided direct payment of $1,400, expanded unemployment assistance, and a new monthly child tax credit. As it turns out, Bill Clinton was wrong when he declared “the era of big government is over.” As I had long believed, Americans have never fully opposed government support. Instead, they opposed other people, whom they considered undeserving, getting government support. The new economic reality poses a challenge for the GOP. Republicans haven’t bothered to develop any serious new economic policies to respond to America’s needs, and so they have little choice but to divert our attention to divisive social issues. They would rather complain about a handful of Dr. Seuss’s books being removed by his estate or about the degendering of Mr. Potato Head because these issues contribute to their false narrative about an oppressive “cancel culture” that victimizes cisgender heterosexual white men, who currently control nearly every lever of power in America.
Years ago, I came across a passage in the writings of John Boswell that forced me to consider what my law professor Derrick Bell called “the permanence of racism.” Boswell quoted German author Moritz Goldstein to explain the difficulty of convincing people to abandon their prejudices: “We can easily reduce our detractors to absurdity and show them their hostility is groundless. But what does this prove? That their hatred is real. When every slander has been rebutted, every misconception cleared up, every false opinion about us overcome, intolerance itself will remain finally irrefutable.” I am not at all convinced that the changing demographics of America will reduce or eliminate racism and prejudice in this country. But I do believe we have an opportunity to create change if we use this time wisely.
We have reached the point where the clichéd threats of the past no longer command electoral majorities or frighten oppressed minorities. Only under these conditions, when white interests finally recognize a threat to the dominant social structure of ignoring the pleas of Black and brown voices, will the powerful even consider concessions. As Derrick Bell argued in his “interest convergence” theory, “the interest of Blacks in achieving racial equality will be accommodated only when it converges with the interests of whites.” But Black liberation need not be dependent on white acceptance, as Charles Blow argues.
And now we find ourselves facing two distinct choices. Will we accept another temporary truce to cease the fire between the warring factions of the nation and restore the existing world order, or will we finally negotiate a new treaty that commits America to its founding goal of equality?
We cannot simply relax and expect that the passage of time and the diversification of the nation will inevitably eliminate the problems of racism in America. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that these changes will exacerbate racial tension in the years to come for those who most fear the change. But we have a duty to create the change we seek in the world, to live it, to be it. As civil rights icon John Lewis reminded us, we have “a moral obligation” to go out and seek justice for all and to “get in good trouble” to build what Dr. King called “the beloved community.”
This work will not be easy. But I find inspiration in the poetry of three Black women. The first, Audre Lorde, reminds me, “When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” The second, June Jordan, tells us, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” The third, Amanda Gorman, shares this truth: “There is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Much of my understanding of race in America is shaped by my personal experience as a Black gay man and by my nontraditional path from St. Louis to Harlem by way of politics, journalism, law, academia, and, ultimately, media. These experiences have taken me from the White House to American University to the National Black Justice Coalition to a Showtime reality TV series to BET, CNN, and the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University.
Additionally, a number of important books have influenced the ideas in this book. These include Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration i
n the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America and How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson, A Promised Land by Barack Obama, The Loneliness of the Black Republican by Leah Wright Rigueur, Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, edited by Essex Hemphill and conceived by Joseph Beam, and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith.
The writings and speeches of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were my earliest life influences, along with the books The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley and The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson. At Dartmouth College, I won an award that enabled me to buy a copy of the comprehensive 1,500-page book The Negro Almanac: A Reference Work on the Afro-American, which I still proudly use. At Harvard Law School, I was influenced by my professors Derrick Bell, Charles Ogletree, Randall Kennedy, Chris Edley, William Rubenstein, Frank Michelman, and Laurence Tribe. It was also there that I was introduced to two hugely influential legal writings. The first was Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma by Derrick Bell. The second was Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics by Kimberlé Crenshaw.
I’ve also been influenced by the work of Reverend Jesse Jackson, whom I first met as a college student at Dartmouth in January 1984, when he was on his way to a presidential primary debate. He came to Harvard Law School to support our protest movement in 1990. He led our delegation to Zimbabwe in 1997. He sat for a public forum with me at Columbia University in 2016. And he even cornered me in January 2019 in Representative Maxine Waters’s office to talk about the importance of recognizing the four-hundred-year anniversary of slavery in America.