Why Does Everything Have to Be About Race? (Keith Boykin)

Why Does Everything Have to Be About Race?: 25 Arguments That Won't Go Away
Keith Boykin
Bold Type Books
Nonfiction, History/Law/Politics/Sociology
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Slavery's been over for ages - why keep bringing up the past? Isn't "equal opportunity" just reverse racism against whites? Why can't we just ignore race altogether? Don't all lives matter? Every time someone mentions racial discrimination and inequality, these and more arguments inevitably pop up, shutting down discussions and derailing progress and demanding time and energy to answer questions that have quite definitively been answered innumerable times (just not the way that those who benefit from ongoing racial inequality would like). In this book, writer Keith Boykin dissects 25 common arguments that have been used to prevent real progress on issues of race, racism, and equity from history to modern times.

REVIEW: Reading this after the election of November 2024 - when a significant portion of the American public deliberately and definitively rejected progress on race (and pretty much every other front), setting the stage for a near-inevitable rapid race backwards on a scale I doubt I'll see recovered in my lifetime - puts a certain painful spin on this book, which deftly explores America's history of racial injustice and its often haphazard and temporary attempts to correct a problem of its own making. Boykin draws on history, personal experience, and current events to demonstrate how racism infiltrates every aspect of policy and life; the reason "everything has to be about race" is because there's no way for any remotely meaningful discussion on any problems facing the country today to occur without acknowledging how race has skewed America and its ostensible promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness since before the founding documents were drafted. It would be like trying to discuss forestry without talking about all that pesky woody plant life everyone keeps dragging into the conversation. The fact that these policies rooted in historic and ongoing racism also tangibly hurt other demographics makes it all the more urgent that they be addressed, but arguments like the ones presented here are designed to keep the topic muddled and turn those demographics against each other, tiring themselves out with explanations and infighting and semantics.
By turns informative, inspiring, and depressing, it makes for interesting reading, though I sadly can't help but suspect that a nation that hasn't apparently learned a thing in over two hundred years of existence - that apparently would rather slit its own throat and throw itself into the grasp of an avowed and proud traitor and authoritarian, potentially abandoning democracy altogether, in a pivotal election where race was very much a factor - is unlikely to ever actually address the problems of race and racism and systemic inequality without near-complete self immolation first... and maybe not even then.

You Might Also Enjoy:
How to Be an Antiracist (Ibram X. Kendi) - My Review
Born a Crime (Trevor Noah) - My Review
They Called Us Enemy (George Takei) - My Review