KEITH BOYKIN
Always Moving Forward
By Clarence Fluker
In 1686, Isaac Newton introduced the three laws of motion. Those laws fundamentally changed the way people viewed and understood the world. The first law of motion is that an object at rest will remain at rest and that an object in motion will remain in motion at the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an external force. Centuries later, that law could be used to view and understand the life of Keith Boykin. As a child he was often the only Black learner in class, which helped mold his sense of self and empathy for others. By the time he reached law school he was heavily involved in a coalition for civil rights that was the umbrella group for 7 different underrepresented student groups. His participation with the coalition was complemented by his readings of the emerging work of Kimberlé Crenshaw who first coined the term ‘intersectionality’ in 1989. In 1991, Boykin first shared with others that he too was living at the intersection, of being Black and gay in America. Through his activism, academic and personal journey, it was clear to Boykin that full equity had to truly include everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, class, ability, gender, sex or orientation and he set himself in motion using his body and work to make that ideal vision of a world a reality for himself and
others.
When he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1992, he didn’t know where the journey would take him. He knew he was interested in politics, media, and writing. He knew he wanted to use his passion to create purpose and empower people but wasn’t sure how. Boykin was told that he was supposed to be a lawyer to achieve those things, yet he never practiced law. In fact, he quit his job at a law firm before he even started. Instead, he went to work on the presidential campaign of a young charismatic rising star in the democratic party, Bill Clinton. When Clinton won, Boykin took a position in the White House as Special Assistant to the President and Director of Specialty Media. Boykin was the highest ranking openly gay White House staffer and used that position to coordinate the first ever meeting between a sitting US president and leaders of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. Since then, much has changed.
Thinking back to that time, Boykin shares, “It was illegal for gay people to have sex in a lot of places, gays couldn’t serve in the military, and couldn’t get married. There was no HIV prevention, there weren’t prominent Black LGBT celebrities. Now we have Black gay members of congress; a gay man is a member of the president’s cabinet. Things have changed tremendously.” But that is not enough change, and the last five years have made it even more evident, particularly for Black Americans. Because Boykin is always a man in motion, still stretching, still reaching, still pulling others along on his journey to change the world. He paints a picture of where we are as a nation, and a roadmap on how to get to where we ought to be in his newest book The Race Against Time: The Politics of a Darkening America. The book is segmented into three parts, how we got to 2020, the year that was 2020, and what do we do next.
“We’re at a crossroads,” Boykin suggests, as the nation continues to examine and react to the four crises of 2020: the economic downturn, the threat to democracy, the COVID-19 health pandemic and our nation’s most recent reckoning with the lack of racial justice. Boykin has worked in or around American politics his entire career, and to him this moment is dangerous. It is the most divided he’s ever seen the country and he argues that we’re at a place right now where the union could easily dissolve into some civil war, social disruption, or conflict. The damaging impact of the policies, rhetoric and emboldened white supremacist groups during the Trump administration and subsequent acts of his passive and more active enablers have taken a remarkable toll on democracy. “Donald Trump was the first president who didn’t care about the preservation of the union, and that is important because we’ve been held together via stitches for hundreds of years and there is no guarantee that this American experiment has to and will last.”
Boykin points out that Donald Trump is just one person who was defeated in his last election, but 78 million people voted for him and those people and their world view and the destructive policy agendas they want to push are still out there – and their leaders haven’t let up in organizing, agitating, and stoking the flames of bigotry. The voter suppression legislation continuing to be enacted state by state and the outrageous gerrymandering to prevent Congressional seats from being filled in a way that more accurately represents the shifting population demographics of voters is blatant. What is not so immediately apparent is what Boykin and others refer to as our nations current Cold Civil War. The term is reflective of the combination of the cold war, a 50-year war where there wasn’t actual combat between the US and its foreign nemesis, but a war of values, and the American Civil War, the bloodiest war in US history, brutally fought on American soil, that divided the nation. Today, in the Cold Civil War the fighting he argues is via proxy, “on news channels, about mask mandates, questioning what is ‘truth,’ if athletes should kneel, statues. These are the battles in the war of today. People who don’t believe the election is real, that science is real. They are at war with modernity because it threatens their status in society, led by white men who are actually insulated and have others to fight the war for them and their gain.”
He goes on to offer that, “Race is the issue that is most divisive and everything else flows down from that. America is more open minded about many things – except race. If it weren’t for race, America would be a socialist country. America isn’t opposed to public support – just not for Black and brown people getting public support.” To save our union, to create a nation that is equitable, in alignment with Boykin’s North Star, he believes that we must address racism head on. “We keep making the same mistakes. We never deal with the fundamental issue; how do we create a system fair and equitable for all Americans. Health, housing, education, criminal justice. Leaders talk about band-aids never surgery. We don’t deal with the fundamental issue that Black people are second class citizens.”
He has no doubt that until we deconstruct race, we can’t deconstruct all the other things. Boykin emphasizes, “White men who are the minority, have a majority of power and set up systems to keep other people fighting and never fighting them. We can’t focus on single issue analysis. Race is the linchpin.” In his view, there can be no real wrestling with sexual orientation or other places leading to the center of the interconnectedness of all citizens until you wrestle with race.
“America has consistently chosen peace for white people over justice for Black and brown people. At every juncture, America deferred those questions so not to irritate white people – from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution to the Compromises. After the Civil War – America let Black people fend for themselves which led to the KKK, Jim Crow, post-confederacy.” Since the early days of America, honest conversations about racism and reshaping policies, practices, and protocols to effectively dismantle racism have been slow and met with constant resistance. This is currently illustrated by the hot button debate about teaching critical race theory being used as a wedge issue to decide elections, pushback on social spending policies that would redistribute resources more equitably, and a criminal justice system with whom many Americans have whittling trust.
Following 2020 when the damage of hundreds of years of targeted racism against people of African descent in the United States was on display as the pandemic ravaged the health of Black people, and statistic after statistic showed how centuries of racism also contributed to the lack of wealth of Black people, 2021 continued to vividly show the disparities that exist. There was the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol Building and later the November trial of Kyle Rittenhouse in which Rittenhouse was found not guilty of criminal charges brought against him for killing two by gunfire and injuring one other. Despite having a Senate majority, Democrats failed (as of this writing) to pass voting rights legislation because of filibuster by Republicans. It is not ironic, that in 1963 at the historic March on Washington, its chief architect, Black gay activist Bayard Rustin read the list of demands that leaders would take to President John F. Kennedy and the first of which was for civil rights legislation sans compromise and filibuster. Nearly six decades later, the same techniques are being used to stop progress for Black Americans.
Yet, Boykin holds on to hope and believes that collective power and politics can be wielded for good and the advancement of Black and other marginalized people. His intention is for his book to inform and keep the dialogue going that will lead to substantive change. The upcoming 2022 mid-term elections are going to be critical, and Boykin urges in his book and whenever he gets an opportunity to share with others. “Register to vote. Vote. Be engaged in the process, and know that your vote does matter, especially in midterm elections.” But it doesn’t end there. “Black people need to hold all of our leadership more accountable – we are most loyal and there hasn’t been any substantive policy change. Keep pushing our elected officials to do the things we sent them to do. Elected officials need to deliver.”
Boykin just moved to Los Angeles. He has lived in over a dozen cities. In between moments when he is crisscrossing the country on his book tour, appearing on cable networks offering political commentary, and encouraging younger human rights advocates in their work, he’s developing a scripted television series. Always in motion.
IG: @KEITHBOYKIN
