The Daily Beast Podcast - Why's Matt Gaetz and Co. Pushing ‘White Replacement Theory’ So Hard?

Episode Date: October 3, 2021

Keith Boykin, author of Race Against Time: The Politics of a Darkening America and one of the journalists thrown in jail by the NYPD during the 2020 George Floyd protests, argues that the biggest boogeyman to Americans is race, and how that fear of Black people is driving the right, and lots of white people, to do everything in their power to, keep the status quo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to another special bonus episode of The New Abnormal. And we thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with Keith Boykin, the author of Race Against Time, The Politics of a Darkening America. Welcome to the New Abnormal, Keith. Thank you. Thank you for having me. We're so happy to have you. So talk to me about this book.

The book is called Race Against Time, The Politics of a Darking America. And the title is a reflection of the fact that we are literally living in a point where we people are in a race against time to stop the changing of America, to stop blackening and browning of America in particular. It's a book that is a reflection of where we are as a country right now and how divided we have been as a country, especially for the past five years. And it starts in 2020. In the very first second of 2020,

I find myself in a former women's prison in Mexico City. And that was sort of the understanding. unexpected beginning point for the, for the story that I tell in the book. And I didn't know exactly how to interpret that at the time, but in hindsight, it appeared to have been an omen that warned me that I would soon find myself in jail. And by the middle of 2020, a few days after George Floyd was murdered, I was covering a protest in New York City and found myself lock up, arrested by the NYPD and placed in jail for six hours. simply for doing my job covering a protest. And it was, I think, another reflection of just how divided our country is, how racially suspect, basic requests for social justice have become in our country, and the need for us to have some sort of process of atonement of healing in order for our country to move forward. Wow. Jail is one thing. Jail in New York. I mean, can you explain to us what happened? Because I think that's really important. And it's, and

it is a really big problem in New York that people don't talk about as much. Yeah, well, in this particular case, I had been living in Texas for three months with my mom during the COVID pandemic shutdown. A few days before the official shutdown, my stepdad passed away. And I was with my mom when this happened. And I expected I would stay for the funeral services and then try to help her sort some things out and moved back, but I didn't have a chance to go back because I didn't want to leave my mom there by herself as a widow in the midst of this pandemic where she couldn't go anywhere or do anything.

So I stayed in Texas with her. And I didn't get back to New York until the day after Memorial Day, which was a day after George Floyd was killed. And I heard a protest outside my window in my apartment in Harlem and went outside to find out what was going on. And I saw Black Lives Matter activists marching through the street. streets of New York City. And I grabbed my, my bicycle, went back to my apartment, grabbed my bicycle, and went out and started following the march route, seeing where they were going all throughout the

city. I ended up on the west side highway, which is one of the major thoroughfares in New York, and took over the highway, marching down the street, marching down the highway. Yeah, I saw that. Yeah, I saw the police coming, and I was concerned what was going to happen next. So I stood on the side of the road between the police and the protesters to document it. And the police came and they arrested me. And didn't give me a chance to explain. I said I was with the press. They said it doesn't matter.

They're going to jail anyway. And they locked me up in a hot police van for about an hour, took me to a police bus, and then took me to jail. Locked me up with 35 other inmates who were also incarcerated for the, mostly, I think, also incarcerated for the protests that they were at that. day. And it was a time where I was really concerned about COVID. And I'm here in this crowded jail cell with 3,000 people. What did you learn writing this book? It does seem, the central premise of it does seem absolutely true. And I'm shocked that we don't talk about it more, this idea, because we see that the right has lost its mind. And this is really the only explanation. Yeah. I think lost its mind might be

a generalization, but I think it's clear that people have become obsessed with fighting against things that seemed basic and acceptable just a few years ago. We can't agree on anything. We can't agree on whether to wear a mask or not. We can't agree on whether to be vaccinated or not. We can't agree on whether the president in the United States won the election or not, even though it was certified as the safest election in history by the previous administration. We can't agree on basic facts. We can't agree on science. How do you have a society that is this divided when one group of people, this right-wing faction, refuses to accept not only the truth of the present, but the possibility of the future?

And that's the dangerous point that we find ourselves in right now. And my argument in the book is that this is all motivated by race. People are afraid of race. 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, The fact that we had a woman who won more votes than the women who became president from the previous sub-presidency. We have narrowed equality in all 50 states, the Latino population, which is expanding to the point where they will now be the majority in at least three to five states in the next three decades. We have an Asian-American population, which is growing more rapidly than any other population in the country.

We also have a country where people don't know how to process all these things. They don't know how to process the fact that immigrants are coming from the southern border, and they are treating them differently from immigrants who are coming in from the northern border. All of this is about a fear of race, a fear of a changing America, the loss of white supremacy and white privilege. What really surprised you when you were working on this? I don't know that I was surprised by anything. That's a sad part. I should have been surprised, but there's not a lot that is surprising to me.

except for the fact that so many people are unwilling to believe this. I've worked for CNN, and I've been on air for the past several years of talking about some of these issues, and I've gotten a lot of pushback from people. Whenever I talk about race, people deny that race has any impact at all on anything that's going on in our country. I suppose that there's something that surprises me. I'm surprised that that argument still carries weight in 2021, after we've seen everything that the Trump administration put us through, and after everything that happened.

happened sense and 74 million people voted for them. It's surprising to me, I suppose, that people still don't still don't believe that race is a fundamental core value or element of what's going on in the division in our country. Yeah, why do you think that is? Is it just because they're in denial? Well, I think some people are invested, particularly in the right. I think some people are invested in pretending that that is not the case. That can't possibly be that way so they want to sweep under the rug, all the racial history of our country and the racial animosity that exists today, and they want to create some sort of race-neutral explanation for what's going on. But I've also seen it on the left as well.

And I think there's a tendency sometimes in the left, from a totally different perspective, to assume that we can just appeal to white middle America with economic arguments, white middle America that doesn't vote for Democrats, from particular, with economic arguments, and that somehow that's going to overcome the racial bias and bigotry that exists in the country. And I think that's a myth as well. There's no evidence of that. And since Lyndon Johnson, Democrat president, signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. No Democratic candidate for president has won the white vote, not one.

Yeah. It seems so obvious, but somehow they fight against it. So it's really an interesting and very problematic situation. I think that there's actually really interesting evidence that has come out in this recent week as we're now starting to see elected officials like Matt Gates start talking about white replacement theory because they think it's going to motivate votes. What have you been seeing there? Well, yeah, I'm using Tucker Carlson and Matt Gates and others. I mean, I think that's what motivated Donald Trump.

You just look at the evolution of the Republican Party from the Party of Lincoln from the 1860s to the party of Barry Goldwater who voted against the Civil Rights Act in 1964 to the party of Reagan, who led this sort of attack on what he called welfare queens, all the way to the party of Donald Trump. And Donald Trump has this sordid racial history. His first introduction of politics is with the Central Park Five who were all exonerated. He's never apologized for that. Then we move into the Obama administration and becomes political again. Actually, there's another period before that he ran on the Reform Party ticket. I tried to run on the Reform Party ticket 2000 didn't make it. But then we move into the Obama administration.

In that 2011, he begins this five-and-a-half-year campaign about Obama's birth certificate. Then you move to 2014 and the Ebola crisis hits. And here Trump is leading the effort to not only shut, down all flights from West Africa, but to remove Obama for president because of a pandemic that didn't have anywhere near as devastating impact there was the coronavirus pandemic. And didn't even get here. And really, it barely even got here. Only a handful of cases here. And then you move into his campaign itself.

And what's the first thing he does with campaign? He talks about Mexico. When Mexico sends his people, they're rapists, their drug dealers, they're not sending their best. Then after that, he goes on to attack Muslims and calls for a complete and total shutdown. of Muslims, all Muslims entering the country, more than a billion people across the planet. He's banning them from it. He wants to ban them from entering the country. So 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 statement of affairs that people

aren't willing to admit it. Just look at the people who were there at the insurrection, January 6th. Overwhelming majority of them were white men. Yeah. so interesting. Where do you get to with this? What is your take on how we can start to heal? That's a great word. Heal. I like that word. I have sort of a proposal for how do we move forward. The book is divided in three parts. The first part is about 2020. The second part is about how we got to 2020. And third part is about how do we move forward from 2020 and how do we heal? I have three parts to that. One is atonement. Two is accountability. And the third is equality. Atonement,

simply means that white America has the responsibility to atone for the past, to acknowledge what happened in the past, and to atone for it so we can move forward. It's important to understand that white America will never be safe until black and brown America feels safe. The reason why the country feels need to spend so much money on law enforcement and policing, why we have to lock so many people up, why people want to buy so many guns, it's because of white Americans, not all, but many of them don't feel safe in this country because of the fact there's so many black and brown people in this country. But rather than investing in making the lives of black and brown people more equitable

and to create a system of more social justice, they'd rather invest in protecting themselves from us. So atonement is a critical first step. The second step is accountability. And here is a responsibility for African Americans that we have to do a better job of holding our leaders accountable, whether they're Democrat or Republican. I worked in the Clinton administration. I went to law school with President Barack Obama before.

he's president, obviously, but I went to law school with Obama. I've seen how difficult it is for those of us who are on the left to even criticize people who are supposedly representing our interests, because sometimes we're accused of being disloyal if we do so. And the reality, especially for African Americans, is that if we don't hold those leaders accountable, we won't get anything out of them. Black voters are the most loyal constituency of the Democratic Party. And yet right now, we have three pieces of legislation that George Floyd Justice and Policing Act, the Emmett Till anti-Linch, Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act sitting in Congress that we can't get through with a Democratic House, the Democratic Senate, the Democratic President.

So we have to push more for our issues of concern as black voters so that we can get those issues on the table. And then thirdly, I talk about equality, that the last step is equality that instead of just having equal opportunities, we have to have equal outcomes. That has to be the goal for our society. So instead of saying, we're going to now say that everybody's equal after 200 years of discrimination and slavery and segregation. We're going to ignore all that and say we're all equal, but Theat, we have to actually take steps to make that equality real. We have to make the goal

that until we eliminate these persistent racial disparities in society, we're never really equal, we're just pretending to be so. So that has to be the new way we think about civil rights and racial justice. So that's really important and interesting. Just tell me, how would you, like, As a listener here, can you give us, I know this is like the worst question, but it's people want to know a concrete thing they could do. Yeah, I can think of a few things they could do. One is to learn more about race and racial justice issues. To read deeply, not just my book, but read other books. Read books like Eremax-Kendi's books, who wrote, for example, stamped for the beginning, the definitive history of racist ideas in America, a white rage by Carol Anderson.

There's a lot of literature out there that deals with race and racism in America and tells the history that we don't often discuss. So that's the first step, just become more knowledgeable in studying these issues. Second, be aware of our implicit biases. A lot of times we don't even acknowledge that we have biases and the reality is that we all do. We live in a racist, sexist, misogynist, classes, homophobic, heterosexual, transphobic society with all these different biases that we're absorbing every day. And we don't even bother oftentimes to interrogate what are the decisions we're making? Why are we making these decisions? Why are we often surrounded by people who look like us, even though we come from or support progressive causes?

And people who don't challenge us ideologically or philosophically or challenge us in terms of representation. So the second really important part is just to be aware of our biases. And the third step is to do something to affirmatively not just acknowledge, but to address those biases to take steps once we are aware of what we're doing once we're aware of how we got there and we have our history take steps in our own community in whatever way in our places of worship and our businesses and our families to address those biases that linger fantastic thank you so much keith this was so great thank you both i appreciate the time in talking to you it's really a wonderful conversation on that note we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal

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