“Black Vote, Black Power,” a collaboration between Keith Boykin and Word In Black,
examines the issues, the candidates, and what’s at stake for Black America in the 2024 presidential election.
Three Black men have dominated the news in recent days for different reasons: Eric Adams, Marcellus Williams, and Mark Robinson. Their stories don’t have much in common, but they reveal much about our country and our politics.
First, Adams, mayor of New York City, was indicted Wednesday on bribery and corruption charges. Three years ago, when I was still living in New York, I refused to vote for him. Even after he was elected, I was still not a fan but gave him four years to prove me wrong.
He did not prove me wrong.
Last year, Adams refused to condemn a white man who choked a Black man to death on a subway train. In January, he vetoed a ban on solitary confinement in city jails and killed a plan to document police stops. Just as I expected, Adams brought back the racially biased stop-and-frisk policing that was ruled unconstitutional a decade ago. And in the past few months, his administration has been engulfed in scandals and resignations.
Adams is exactly who I thought he would be, and many of us tried to warn New Yorkers. But I remember talking to Black men in Harlem who supported him over a talented Black woman named Maya Wiley, in part because he’s a Black man. For all the lies about Vice President Kamala Harris — that “Kamala is a cop” — Adams actually was a cop, and a former Republican. But many Black men were still willing to support him.
Second is Williams, a 55-year-old Black man from St. Louis, my hometown. The state of Missouri executed him this week after the Supreme Court refused to stop his execution, even though the prosecutor said the case against Williams was flimsy and tainted. The NAACP appropriately called the execution a “lynching.”
A 6-3 Supreme Court decision split along party lines: the six conservatives approved his execution, while the three liberals voted to stop it. Donald Trump appointed three of the six conservatives; therefore, if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016 Williams would more than likely still be alive.
Still, some people on social media tried to blame President Joe Biden and V.P. Harris for Williams’s death. That’s a damn lie. Missouri’s Republican governor, Mike Parson, and Missouri’s Republican Supreme Court approved the execution. It was the Democratic prosecutor in St. Louis County, and the Democratic appointees on the U.S. Supreme Court, who tried to stop it.
No legal authority gives Biden the power to intervene or pardon Williams in a state murder case. So, if you’re going to criticize Democrats, at least understand how our system of government works.
I’ve been a lifelong opponent of the death penalty in all cases, so for anyone who is upset about Williams’s execution, don’t ever tell me it doesn’t matter who wins elections. This is literally life or death. Elections have consequences.
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Third, Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s lieutenant governor, has been outed as a self-hating, hypocritically porn-obsessed, Black Nazi who wants to bring back slavery and join the Ku Klux Klan. After all that, Trump and running mate JD Vance refuse to disavow him. This proves the point I’ve made many times that Republicans love Black people…who hate Black people.
I get why white people support Robinson, but how the hell can any self-respecting Black person be associated with a party like this? Just this week, Louisiana Republican Clay Higgins called Haitian Americans “wild,” nasty, “vudu”-loving, pet-eating “thugs” who should get “their ass out of our country.” And even then, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson refused to condemn his racist rhetoric.
“Clay Higgins is a dear friend of mine and…a very frank and outspoken person. He’s also a very principled man,” Johnson said.
First of all, Clay Higgins admitted years ago that he voted for Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke for governor of Louisiana, so why is he a dear friend of Johnson?
Second, Johnson claimed that Higgins deleted the post after “he prayed about it.” Turns out that the “very principled man” only did so only after the Congressional Black Caucus brought up a resolution to censure him.
“But, you know, we move forward,” said Johnson. “We believe in redemption around here.”
Redemption?
These people are not the least bit remorseful about their bigotry.
No, sir. There can be no redemption without contrition. So, tell me: when will Trump, Vance, Higgins, and Elon Musk apologize to the Haitian Americans whose lives they’ve endangered in the most overtly racist major-party presidential campaign in 60 years?
These people are not the least bit remorseful about their bigotry unless it blows up in their faces. And just like Robinson, they all had a long history of racist, sexist, and inflammatory rhetoric before these scandals erupted.
And that’s the problem. Too many Americans don’t pay attention to their government until it’s time for a presidential election every four years. But Adams, Williams, and Robinson show what happens when we don’t.
Our ignorance makes us susceptible to the clickbaiters, cynics, opportunists, hoteps, bots, and opps who spread misinformation for clout and pay. I’ve worked in local, state, and federal government, and I know that governing is complicated. The system is designed to make it easy for the powerful to maintain their power but difficult for the powerless to fight back.
So stop listening to the clout-chasing clowns who don’t know anything about government or politics who try to get you not to vote or to throw away your vote. Stop listening to cynics peddling unrealistic expectations of what can happen in a single term in office and then weaponize your disappointment.
The truth is we can’t win if we don’t participate, and we can’t participate effectively if we don’t know the rules.
Keith Boykin is a New York Times–bestselling author, TV and film producer, and former CNN political commentator. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, Keith served in the White House, cofounded the National Black Justice Coalition, cohosted the BET talk show My Two Cents, and taught at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University in New York. He’s a Lambda Literary Award-winning author and editor of seven books. He lives in Los Angeles.
The post The Tragedies of Eric Adams, Marcellus Williams, and Mark Robinson appeared first on Word In Black.