Race Against Time: A Review

In less than 25 years from now, white people will become a minority in America. Keith Boykin ’87 connects this fact to what he argues is a latent racism in white Americans that will ignite a racial civil war in Race Against Time: The Politics of a Darkening America, a digestible and at times revelatory but ultimately unconvincing synopsis of the trajectory of race in America.

Boykin puts forth a thesis that America is already undergoing crises on economic, public health, racial justice, and democratic fronts, all of which are attributable to a racist backlash against America’s “darkening.” Highlighting racial disparities in unemployment, COVID-19 outcomes, policing, and voting over the past year, Boykin argues that the racial crises manifesting across American life today are part of a historical trend that the nation has never fully confronted. America has shown “some signs of progress,” Boykin writes, though it has not addressed its racist instincts being exploited in present-day politics.

To this end, “Part Two: The Faith that the Dark Past Has Taught Us” makes up the majority of Race, where Boykin details, through the lens of race, the history of American politics and the presidencies of his adult life—George H.W. Bush through Donald Trump. What is most instructive in this section is Boykin’s narrative element, which provides a unique and first-hand look at race in American politics. Through stories from working on the presidential campaigns of Michael Dukakis and Bill Clinton, sitting in the press room during the Quayle-Bentsen debate,  protesting the lack of faculty diversity with Harvard Law classmate Barack Obama, and working as a CNN commentator during the Trump administration, Boykin artfully weaves his own informed perspective into an illustration of nearly the last thirty years of American policy on race.

What Boykin misses, however, in framing the discussion of race in America, is its truly diverse and multiracial aspect—two words abound in Race. Focusing on a conversation of black versus white, the forward-looking aspect of Boykin’s argument on race is diminished. Today, almost three-in-ten Asian, one-in-four Latino, and one-in-five black marriages in America are with a member of a different race or ethnicity, one-in-nine American babies are born to white and minority parents, and the fastest growing racial demographic in America is mixed race. America is indeed diversifying, but less so in the black-and-white manner Boykin suggests.

As a result, Boykin’s solutions to the evident racial disparities in outcomes, too, are less convincing. Persistent inequality, Boykin writes, “in employment, wealth, health, education, housing, crime, incarceration, life expectancy, success, and achievement [exists] solely because of racial barriers and not because of differences in talent or capacity.” His most substantive call to address this is adopting the goal of “equal outcomes, not just equal access of opportunities,” but he lacks mention of a specific policy proposal or even private-sector change, other than endorsing a “race-based policy.”

Moreover, much of what Boykin envisions in an “equality of outcome” society has no end, especially in an increasingly multiracial, multiethnic America. How do we quantify exactly equal outcomes between African-Americans and other marginalized groups? Immigrants? The disabled? Mixed-race folks? This complex, provocative question is certainly difficult to assess in a comprehensive way, and perhaps unexplainable in a 292-paged assessment. But also unexplained by Boykin’s conclusion on inequality is the fact that Taiwanese, Indian, Turkish, Iranian, Chinese, Lebanese, Japanese, and Korean American women all have a median income above that of white men. Nor is the fact that Americans from Nigeria, the African country which sends the most immigrants to the United States, have a median income above that of white Americans. Again, these facts just demonstrate that the picture of race in America is increasingly complex and merits deeper analysis—perhaps we are further off from making sweeping conclusions than it feels.

Nonetheless, Boykin must be commended for his conviction and consistency. Evidently a political progressive committed to racial justice, Boykin writes, “I supported the concept of black unity, but I did not subscribe to the view of unquestioning loyalty to black public figures,” when criticizing black political figures like Clarence Thomas. Even Barack Obama does not escape Boykin’s progressive criticism. In his chapter on the Obama presidency, Boykin concludes, “[a]t the end of eight years in office, it had become abundantly clear that Barack Obama was never the radical revolutionary racial fighter that progressives dreamed of.” He continues, “[i]f anyone felt that a black president, for whom most white Americans did not vote, could serve as adequate compensation for centuries of racial justice, that notion should have been dismissed long ago.” Importantly, these critiques imply the laudable conclusion that race does not equate to a given policy agenda.

Though commendable here, this line of reasoning is absent in much of the former half of Race. In one instance, Boykin suggests that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election because white women “have historically identified with their race over their gender” and “[align] with their oppressor [men] in maintaining white patriarchal hegemony.” Here, he essentially argues that white women choose to be sexist by voting for white men just to keep black people oppressed. This logic is confusing and its implications are troubling. First, it implies that not voting along individual identity lines makes someone racist, sexist, or otherwise prejudiced against their own identity group. It thus attributes all electoral outcomes to identity characteristics, by suggesting that if a group does not vote for the female candidate, they must be sexist. I think Boykin would agree that Americans are smart enough to vote on policy and vision, not merely race and sex.

Still, Boykin makes many successful attempts in the latter half of Race to highlight the complexity of racial politics. Boykin’s acknowledgement of ideological diversity within the black community is praiseworthy, as it is often missed in our increasingly hyper-partisan, ratings-driven media discourse. “Black people could not be pigeonholed into simplistic categories,” he writes. “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.” His point here is brief, but Boykin is right to comment on the heterogeneity of his own racial demographic—despite what the media would indicate, 20% of black Americans want police to spend more time in their areas, compared to just 17% and 9% for white and Asian Americans respectively, according to Gallup.

These merits of Boykin’s argument, though, are ultimately outweighed by his failure to address several key facts on race and the gaping hole in his policy solutions. That is not to say that the issues he highlights are not worthy of scrutiny. Boykin’s argument is most powerful when he tells his story—of a young boy raised in St. Louis, Missouri, the son and grandson of black folks abused in the South, a black reporter arrested at racial justice protests in New York City, and a prominent commentator and campaign staffer. These experiences he shares are instructive on the development of his own views on race, as he acknowledges in his endnotes. Though his conclusion on equal outcomes falls through, these stories are nonetheless a valuable read.