“I think it’s clear that people have become obsessed with fighting against things that seemed basic and acceptable just a few years ago,” Keith Boykin, author of Race Against Time: The Politics of a Darkening America, tells Molly Jong-Fast on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal.
The people who he is referring to are white people. In fact, his whole book is about the idea that all of this divisiveness in our country and the rise of white supremacy movements happening in and out of politics all comes down to one thing: race.
The book starts by first zeroing in on 2020, the year he himself was thrown in jail by the NYPD for doing his job as a journalist during a George Floyd protest that summer.
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“People are afraid of race,” he says, and he shares a few examples.
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“They’re afraid of the fact that we had a Black president for eight years. The fact that we have a Black woman vice president, we have narrowed equality in all 50 states, and the Latino population is expanding to the point where they will now be the majority in at least three to five states.”
Boykin believes this fear is what’s driving the ring-wing faction and their insane detachment from reality. And they, including Matt Gaetz, are trying to pull out all the stops to fight against it. Lately, it’s been “White Replacement Theory,” which says exactly what it is.
“All of this is about protecting whiteness, protecting white people from a changing and darkening America. And the language is so obviously clear that it’s a sad state of affairs that people aren’t willing to admit it,” he says. “Just look at the people who were there at the insurrection, January 6, [was] overwhelming. The majority of them were white men.”
It’s not just Republicans, either, according to Boykin. He says even so-called Democrats and progressives, even those in the Black community, can do a better job in holding their leaders accountable—and understanding their biases.
“Rather than investing in making the lives of Black and Brown people more equitable, and [creating a] system with more social justice, they’d rather invest in protecting themselves from us,” he says.
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